A Thought Leadership article we liked from OCSC Silver Sponsor Armanino LLP:

A Deep Dive Into SaaS Sales Funnel Metrics

In the highly competitive SaaS space, your organization’s success hinges upon your ability to understand, analyze and track business performance metrics and make fast business decisions in accordance with those metrics. 

As such, it’s essential to capture SaaS metrics beyond basic GAAP reporting and ensure that you’re properly calculating and interpreting those metrics. However, to get the clearest picture of your business, and learn where you can optimize it to drive profit, you also want to take sales funnel metrics into consideration.

SaaS companies typically think of their sales pipeline as a funnel, visualizing the customer journey from initial brand awareness through conversion to closed deals. Understanding the dynamics of your inbound and outbound sales funnels and their corresponding metrics allows you to analyze each step of your sales process to determine what’s working, what’s not working and what can be adjusted to produce better outcomes. This gives you actionable insights to effectively propel your sales strategies from the top of the funnel all the way through the finish line.

Inbound Sales Funnels

We typically look at two types of funnels that correspond with each respective sales strategy: inbound and outbound. A SaaS inbound sales funnel looks at a customer journey that begins with the prospective client reaching out to your organization about your product or service.

The below graphic shows the structure of an inbound sales funnel:

Marketing Spend → Demand Generated → Demos Requested → New Customer Bookings

At the start of your inbound sales funnel, some amount of marketing spend is devoted to acquiring lead sources that generate demand for your services (e.g., a paid Google ad drives traffic to your website, which is measured in clicks).

Then, some portion of this initial demand converts to prospective customers who request a demo of the product. At this stage, we can calculate our conversion rate, i.e., the percentage of prospective customers who move down the funnel from one stage to the next. Each step of the funnel has its own conversion rate worth tracking:

Conversion Rate (Click-to-Demo) = Prospects Requesting Demos ÷ Ad Clicks

Finally, some portion of these prospects will decide to sign up for the service. At this point, we are left with our new customers whose contracts represent our new customer bookings. Framing this within our growth equation, the sum of the ARR generated from these new customers represents the inbound portion of our total New ARR.

Outbound Sales Funnels

An outbound sales funnel looks at a customer’s journey, starting with outreach from a sales representative. It differs from an inbound funnel in two key ways:

• The source of outbound demand starts with dedicated sales representatives actively seeking prospective customers, rather than...

Read the rest of this article at armaninollp.org...

Thanks for this article excerpt and its graphics to OCSC Silver Sponsor Armanino LLP.

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An article we liked from Thought Leaders David Sacks and Ethan Ruby:

The SaaS Metrics That Matter

Plus now you can easily generate them using our secret sauce SaaSGrid. 

One of the best features of SaaS businesses is how easy they are to measure. Only a handful of metrics really matter. This post breaks down those key performance indicators (KPIs), and provides the benchmarks that we at Craft like to see at the Series A stage in order to lead a new investment. 

We’re also releasing our internal tool, SaaSGrid, which we’ve used to analyze KPIs for hundreds of SaaS companies, as a free publicly-available tool to help founders calculate metrics (anonymously if they wish) for their own startups.

1. Growth

The starting point for understanding a SaaS business is revenue growth – the best proof of product-market fit.

• MRR or ARR: Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the standard for SaaS companies that sell annual subscription contracts, or Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) for those selling monthly subscriptions. If your company sells both, choose the metric that represents the majority of revenue. ARR is always 12 x MRR. Note the requirement that the contract is “recurring” (ongoing); one-time revenue, such as for professional services or pilots, does not count towards MRR or ARR.   

  • For startups seeking a Series A funding round, the old benchmark used to be $1 million in ARR. But recently, the threshold has been around $500k ARR, as rounds get preempted and happen earlier.

• CMGR: What’s the best way to measure growth in MRR? Simply looking at month-over-month growth rates is likely to be very lumpy. To normalize for this, use a CAGR calculator but on a monthly basis (h/t Jason Lemkin). This is called Compound Monthly Growth Rate (CMGR). For example, if you began the year at $100k ARR and ended at $1M ARR, you would enter those starting and ending values over 12 periods, for a CMGR of 21%, an outstanding result. 

  • For startups seeking Series A or B funding, we like to see a CMGR of at least 15% below $1M ARR and 10% above $1M ARR. A CMGR of 10% is about 3x year-over-year growth.

• MRR Components: Breaking down MRR into its key components helps to understand changes in MRR over time. For any given period, we want to understand the contribution of the following: 

  • Retained – MRR retained from existing customers;

  • Expansion – MRR added from existing customers;

  • New Sales – MRR added from new customers; 

  • Resurrected – MRR added from former customers;

  • Contraction – MRR lost from customer downgrades; and  

  • Churned – MRR lost from churned customers.

• Customer Concentration: Is growth being driven by a few big contracts or many small ones? It’s a potential red flag if too much revenue is concentrated in too few large accounts. If one or two customers make up the majority of revenue, that’s a significant risk to the business that needs to be vetted. On the other hand, if the largest customer is less than 10% of revenue, that indicates low customer concentration. 

2. Retention

Retention is analyzed by grouping customers into “cohorts” according to their sign-up period (month, quarter or year), then tracking what percentage of the original cohort remains over time. Understanding retention rates of monthly cohorts, typically at months 12 and 24, is vital to the health of the business, as a fast growth rate in new signups can mask high churn rates in older, smaller cohorts. Only when growth slows down will this “leaky bucket” become obvious. There are two main ways to analyze retention:

• Dollar Retention: Also known as Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Dollar Retention measures how much revenue a cohort is generating in each period relative to its original size. Dollar Retention takes expansion revenue into account, and can be greater than 100% if expansion exceeds churned and contracted revenue. The best SaaS companies have 120%+ Dollar Retention each year. Dollar Retention of less than 100% per year is evidence of a Leaky Bucket and is problematic.

• Logo Retention: Logo Retention measures the percent of customers that stay active (non-churned). Logo Retention can never be higher than...

Read the rest of this article at sacks.substack.com...

Thanks for this article excerpt and its graphics to David Sacks, founder who backs founders through Craft Ventures and previously Founder/CEO of Yammer and founding COO of PayPal, and Ethan Ruby, VP of Analytics at Craft Ventures and creator of saasgrid.com.

Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

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