Metrics and data

No founder has ever created a financial plan and cash flow projections they didn’t like. But what happens when the countless hours spent sifting through data, building models, and pitching your projections don’t go as planned? There is endless content on putting together accurate financial projections and cash flow analysis but the reality is companies are still going to have down quarters, overly optimistic forecasts, and miss your projections one way or another. However, it is something that can be handled immediately with a few quick readjustments. When to Readjust your Cash Flow Projections As we mentioned above, no founder has created a forecast they did not like. There is a fine line between an optimistic and delusional projection. If you’re continuing to miss your forecast, have limited resources, etc. it is probably time to readjust your forecasts. For earlier stage companies, start with your life-blood; cash flow. “Cash flow forecasting is important because if a business runs out of cash and is not able to obtain new finance, it will become insolvent. Cash flow is the life-blood of all businesses—particularly start-ups and small enterprises.” Cash flow can be extremely delicate in the early stages of a company’s life. Being off by just a few weeks or months can make or break moral, investor interest, and the life of the business. As Jason Lemkin puts it after a missed quarter, “If your cash is now going to stretch 12 months instead of 15, you may need to take action now. If you wait — it will be too late to make a difference. Do not wait a quarter here. Do this now.” If revenue is down, chances are you are closer to your zero cash date and need to make sure this is accounted for. You will likely need to re-forecast your cash and financial projections for the year as well. How to Readjust – A Dynamic Forecast A quick and easy way to keep your projection in check? A last three to six month rolling projection simply using your growth rate and burn rate. What exactly is a “Last Three Month” model? You’ll just need to take the average of your last three (to six) month growth rate and roll it forward 12 months. While it may not be as appealing as a forecast you put together on your own it is generally a great indicator of where your business is heading. Example from SaaStr.com As you can see in the example above from SaaStr, the average growth rate over the last 4 months is 14.7% so they use that as their growth rate moving forward. As your new revenue and growth rates continue to change so will your rolling average and forecasts. Chances are this will be the most realistic forward looking growth rates as well. However, you can still pair a “Last Three Month” model with your original forecasts so you have a more realistic and a “stretch” forecast to keep an eye on. Start automating your cash flow projections using our business intelligence layer by signing up for a trial at Visible.vc

What is debt financing? Startups are in a constant competition for 2 resources; capital and talent. When it comes to raising capital for your startup there are quite a few options. Outside of bootstrapping, debt and equity financing are 2 of the most popular options. According to Investopedia, “Debt financing occurs when a firm raises money for working capital or capital expenditures by selling debt instruments to individuals and/or institutional investors. In return for lending the money, the individuals or institutions become creditors and receive a promise that the principal and interest on the debt will be repaid.” On the other hand, there is equity financing. How does debt financing work? A lender is generally evaluating if and when a business can be repaid. A team of lenders will generally evaluate a few things, this generally starts with past performance and future projections. A few keys to understand when approaching a lender or bank for debt financing: Complete financial statements and documents. Poor or incomplete financial statements can put doubt in the mind of a debt-provider. Most debt-providers will look as far back as 2-3 years. For example, Lighter Capital will occasionally make investments with ~6 months of solid financials. Understand your business. Have a deep understanding of where your customers, how you’re acquiring them, and why they are churning. Revenue Growth. You don’t have to be a profitable company to receive funding from Lighter Capital but should have a clear plan and pathway to profitability. Downside Scenarios. As mentioned above, debt-providers are focused on repayment as opposed to extreme upside. Make sure you lay out downside scenarios to show you can navigate down periods. High Gross Margins. Going hand in hand with “downside scenarios” show debt-providers you have high gross margins and can limit the downside as much as possible. Story matches the numbers. If you’re telling a great narrative and the data/financials are not matching up with the story chances are that will cause doubt in the mind of the providers. Plan for New Capital. Show you have a plan in place for how you will allocate your new capital. Allen of Lighter Capital has seen a clear connection between a company coming to them with a solid plan and their future growth. Pros of debt financing Every financing option will come with its own set of pros and cons. Check out a few of the key pros of debt financing below: Maintain ownership — debt financing does not require founders to give up equity or ownership in their business Efficient growth — taking on debt can allow companies to buy the resources and hire the talent they need to fuel growth Tax benefits — As the team at Lightspeed put it, “A strong advantage of debt financing is the tax deductions. Classified as a business expense, the principal and interest payment on that debt may be deducted from your business income taxes.” Cons of debt financing On the flip side, there are cons to debt financing. Check out a few examples below: Repayment — of course, you’ll need to repay the debt. This requires a predictable business model. Collateral — debt also requires collateral. This can be limited to early-stage companies. Types of debt financing There are different types of debt financing that startups can leverage. Check out a few types of debt financing below: Bank Lending — The most traditional form of debt financing requires taking a loan from a traditional bank or institution. Recurring Revenue — There are specific lenders dedicated to recurring revenue business models (SaaS). Family or Friend Lending — Startup founders can also take on debt or loans from family members or friends. What is equity financing? According to Investopedia, “Equity financing is the process of raising capital through the sale of shares. Companies raise money because they might have a short-term need to pay bills or they might have a long-term goal and require funds to invest in their growth. By selling shares, they sell ownership in their company in return for cash, like stock financing.” When thinking of equity financing in terms of startups we generally think of venture capital and angel investors. When a startup goes out to raise a funding round, they are selling shares (AKA equity in the company) for a set amount of capital. How does equity financing work When raising equity financing or venture capital it often follows a process. This involves the founder focusing on the fundraise. Finding the Right Investors To start a fundraise, you first need to understand what investors you should be talking to. A venture fundraise is time intensive so it is important to make sure you’re spending your time with the right people. Check out our investor database to find the right investors for your business here. Related Resource: An Essential Guide on Capital Raising Software Pitching Your Company Once you land a meeting with a potential investor you will need to pitch your business and make it a point for them to invest. As we wrote in our Fundraising Guide, “If you’ve done your research and asked the right questions, you’ll be armed with the information you need to effectively pitch your company. At the end of the day, pitching is storytelling and it is your job to figure out how each potential investor fits into the narrative. If done correctly, you’ll be able to control the conversation and better your chances of setting future meetings.” Due Diligence If you are fortunate enough to gain interest from a venture capitalist they will perform due diligence to confirm what you’ve been pitching is true. This means they will be calling on customers, other investors, and combing through historical data to confirm they’d like to make the investment. Pros of equity financing Like debt financing, equity financing comes with its own set of pros and cons. Check out a few of the pros of equity financing below: No Loan Repayment — With equity financing, the burden of repayment does not fall on the shoulders of a founder. In turn for giving up ownership, they are giving up the burden of repaying debt. Resources — Many equity financers, like venture capitalists, come with resources to help startups grow and scale their operations. Cons of equity financing On the flip side, there are also cons that come with equity financing. Check out a couple of examples of the cons of raising equity financing below: Loss of ownership — Giving up equity means that founders are giving up ownership and potentially decision-making powers. Expectations — When adding on new shareholders, chances are they will have requirements and expectations that may not align with your own. Types of equity financing Equity financing, and the individuals/firms that support it, come in different shapes and sizes. Check out a few examples of equity financing below: Venture Capital — dedicated firms built to invest in high-growth startups Angel Investors — high net worth individuals that use startup investing as a way to diversify their investment portfolio Private Equity — Professional investment firms dedicated to helping operate and scale large startups. Related Resources: How to Find Investors How to Effectively Find + Secure Angel Investors for Your Startup Private Equity vs Venture Capital: Critical Differences Debt vs equity financing for startups When evaluating debt and equity financing there are a few key major differences that a startup and founder have to evaluate. The Cost The major difference when evaluating debt and equity financing is the cost to your business. On one hand, you can take debt financing and will need to pay back the interest rate and principle at a later date. This generally assumes that your business is bringing in some type of predictable revenue. There is a clear cost associated with paying this back. On the flip side, is the cost of equity financing. While there is not a set amount of capital you will need to pay back you will eventually need to pay the cost of the shares at a later date. This can be expensive if the business turns out to be worth a large amount. The Business Model When understanding debt vs. equity financing you need to understand the impact your business model will have on each as well. When raising debt financing, the lender will want your business to have predictable revenue and clear projections so they know that they will be repaid. On the other hand, equity financing allows small businesses to pursue a new market where they may have little to no data. This is because someone buying equity, especially a venture capitalists, are investing in the future value of the company and the ability for the team to execute on the vision. When to seek out debt vs equity financing As we’ve discussed earlier in this post you need to understand the costs associated with both equity and debt financing. Securing Debt Financing For those who aren’t growing at 300% but rather 150% or 200% a good option would be to look into debt financing. While there are countless types of debt financing, Lighter Capital focuses on “revenue-based financing”. There are several factors that Lighter Capital looks into when evaluating a potential investment but as Allen Johnson of Lighter Capital puts it, “At the end of the day they’re assessing the risk to get repaid”. Securing Equity Financing To kick off the webinar, Mike discussed experiences from Visible’s own fundraising efforts and what we’ve seen from our partners and countless companies using Visible for investor relations. The biggest takeaway from raising equity financing? It is very much a process and can be very time consuming. Raising equity financing is essentially a full time job for the CEO or founding team. It is not something that can be done lightly and viewed as a “side project”. You need to build relationships and a pipeline of investors, show momentum, generate inbound interests, etc. Equity financing allows pre-revenue companies with a strong vision and adjustable market an opportunity to secure capital and pursue their vision. Investors are expecting a return and are often in pursuit of an “extreme upside”. As you can see below, Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital breaks down what it takes to raise a Series A in SaaS below: Basic Info and Docs You’ll Need While Raising Venture Capital: As part of the process of raising venture capital, VCs will need to understand your past business performance. Venture capitalists are generally investing in a highly experienced team, intriguing and emerging market, and/or a world class product. Related Reading: Building A Startup Financial Model That Works With that being said, they will generally need a few of the info and docs below to evaluate their investment decision: Legal Docs, Cap Table, Financials, etc. A venture capitalist will want to see who owns the business and how it is structured. They will want to see the cap table to understand this. They will also want to get a look into historical financials to understand how the business is burning cash and handling their finances. In the wake of recent VC failures, it is especially important to have cash burn and financing under control. Trends over time VCs are largely investing in the founder and the team if there is little to no revenue or historical data. It is important that the founder and team takes the relationship and transparency seriously. A regular cadence and rapport leading up to the investment. Investors won’t make an investment in a single point of time. Customer Acquisition Model VCs will also want to understand your customer acquisition model and the sustainability of it moving forward. If it costs more to acquire a customer than they are paying, it is likely not a feasible business. To learn more about customer acquisition models, check out this post. Total Addressable Market and Sensitivity analysis If a business has little to no historical data, a VC may want to better understand the market they are investing. If a market has the opportunity to be large and the investment has the opportunity to penetrate a large percentage of the market, it may be an interesting investment. You can learn more about modeling this and sharing TAM with investors here. Both debt financing and equity financing are solid options depending on your stage, metrics, and financials. Each has its pros and cons for each company. It is ultimately up to the founder to have a deep understanding of their business to make sure they are making the right decision for their business. The Visible newsletter brings you weekly, curated fundraising news, articles, and events Every Thursday we deliver curated insights to help founders raise capital, update investors, and track their key metrics in our newsletter, the Visible Weekly. Subscribe to the Visible Weekly and stay in the loop with fundraising data and insights here.

Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) have become a major trend in SaaS companies over the last couple of years. Why the shift to the new framework? I have two thoughts. 1) The way organizations sell and market their products are different and 2) business software continues to look more and more like consumer software. We’ve scaled Visible to hundreds (soon thousands) of paid customers with a lean team through adopting a Product Qualified Lead framework. Disclaimer: Product Qualified Leads may not fit into every business and organization as some solutions may require intensive initial implementation or for strategic reasons the end-user never gets to try the product. Typically these are high ACV products. Regardless of your business, I hope you still get some value from this post and takeaway parts you want to use in your own processes. My goal is to get you walking away thinking how a Product Qualified Lead framework can increase efficiencies cross sales, marketing, customer success and finance, and product. The “old” way If you’ve attended any sales or marketing conference, seminars or training sessions you’ve likely heard someone beat the BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) drum. It is a matrix provided to make sure you are spending your resources on the right leads. It looks something like this: Paired with the BANT framework is usually the idea of the Demand Generation funnel. It looks something like this usually: Both of these frameworks work off one another. Typically you’ll have marketing initiatives to drive leads. This might be paid advertising, webinars, downloadable content or having business development representatives (usually called BDR’s or if you are fancy “Solutions Consultants”). Once you get a download, opt-in, etc you’re likely to consider that person a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) where they might be nurtured with a steady drip of content, get contacted by a Inbound BDR to qualify them some more, etc. This is where you are trying to understand the BANT for a lead to see if they should be moved to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Then you might have an Account Executive accept the SQL to do their own qualification, provide a demo and truly understand the lead’s BANT. If the AE accepts the SQL it will likely be converted to an Opportunity, worked and hopefully closed from there. Now there is nothing wrong with this framework at all. It’s deployed by tens of thousands of companies and for metric/forecasting junkies it provides a great way to measure ROI across all of your activities. However, if you layer a PQL framework into your current you can allocate resources even more effectively across your business in addition to have another growth lever to pull. What are Product Qualified Leads? Product Qualified Leads are potential leads using some version of your current product that take some sort of action. Typically this is some sort of trial or freemium experience. Defining PQLs are ultimately up to you as engagement for every business is different. E.g. Slack’s magic number is 2,000. Slack knows that if they can get you to send 2,000 messages there is a great chance they’ll get you as a customer. At Visible, our PQL criteria is as follows: Connected 2 or more data sources Created 1 chart Published an Update Invited a colleague If you do those actions, there is a 90% chance we will get you as a customer (if not within the trial then within 90 days). With most frameworks, testing and iterating is crucial here to get you to zero in on your PQL qualifications. E.g. our original PQL definition was just one data source but found our customers value bringing in multiple data streams so wanted our PQLs to reflect that. Improving Marketing You likely nurture your leads based on who they are and what they have downloaded. Shouldn’t you do the same with PQLs? What about prospects who are not yet a PQL? Can you effectively drip them helpful content while they are on a trial? The answer is yes to all of the questions. If you have a definition of your PQL there is no reason why you shouldn’t have dynamic product marketing to go alongside it. E.g. if a lead has taken actions A & C but not B. I’d make sure that your email is geared towards making sure they do B. Whether it is social proof from a customer case study or an AE calling to offer a hand. Hint: Intercom + Segment is great for this. Improving Sales PQLs can help in a lot of areas in your selling organization. The biggest impact (in my opinion) is around where AEs can dedicate their valuable time. Demo Conversion: According to Tomasz Tunguz, “When the sales team calls PQLs, customers typically convert at about 25 to 30%”. If you are calling on customers who are already PQLs this is a great way to have a more meaningful conversation. They have already had a chance to use your product, will have specific questions and overall be a much more engaging conversation. Hubspot and Openview touch on “In Product Hand Raisers” in Why Product Qualified Leads are the Answer to a Failing Freemium Model stating that “Hand-raisers can convert at 2x-4x the conversion rate of traditional MQLs.” In Mitch Morands’s post, “MQLs are DEAD! Enter the PQL “Product Qualified Lead” = 10X+ revenue impact” he states that PQLs convert 10X+ more revenue than MQLs I’d argue “Need” and “Timing” are identified in BANT through PQLs. You can quickly see how they are engaging with your solution and typically your trial with have a some sort of end date. How many times have your AEs sat a demo where they prospect said “This is awesome, hit me back in 9 months when we are looking to deploy. I’m just doing some research right now” Improving Product & Engineering Getting your team rallied around PQLs will help prioritize the product roadmap, create focus within the product and make sure your onboarding is buttoned up. Related: Check out our new Contextual Help Guide we just launched to help new trialers get to PQLs faster. Improving Customer Success & Support There is a great proverb that relates to customer success and product: “If you catch someone a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime” By focusing on PQLs, we make sure our customers can get in and use the product from when they sign up. If they get stuck we make sure we have a great knowledge base, help resources and more. If they are really stuck, we are always happy to get a quick screen recording or demo setup with a customer. This has mentality has created less customer support issues which means our median response time is 5 minutes. It also lets our customer success team be proactive to help leads get into a product qualified lead state. Improving Finance There is no shortage of ratios that PQLs can help improve. Customer Acquisition Cost, Time to Close, Lifetime Value, Trial to Close %, etc. Focusing on creating PQLs will help all of your metrics become more attractive. Bottomline PQLs provide a great way to align everyone in your organization. The product team gets to focus on building a great product, the sales team can spend their team on highly qualified leads and the marketing team can dynamically nurture leads. Don’t ditch MQLs, SQLs or your current process. Just try segmenting them with PQLs to increase conversions in all parts of your business. Try it out and track it as a metric in your Visible account 😉 Up and to the Right, Mike & The Visible Team

A Weekly Email Template for Marketing Leaders Marketing is one of the most measurable aspects of a business. With vast data points, it is important to hone in on what truly matters and rally your team behind those key metrics. This week, we have put together an Update template intended for marketers to “report up”. Whether that be a marketing representative to manager or manager to executive, our Marketing template is intended to be standardized across the team to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Key Metrics Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs. Some of our favorite marketing metrics include Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Cost (check out this video to use formulas to create CAC in Visible), and these 5 metrics for “reporting up”. TL;DR A quick recap of any major milestones, concerns, and figures from the last period. Always a good idea to piggyback off of any product updates, metrics, projects, concerns discussed at previous meetings/updates. Now Content and Campaigns Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Funnel Review A funnel is a quick way for all parties to quickly digest your marketing conversions and inbound marketing efforts. The metrics used in a funnel can be customized to any business as well. Make note of any interesting leads or trends that have noticed over the previous period. Customer Stories Reflect on the past period and share any relevant quotes from customers; good and bad. What is going well? What is not working? Feedback to certain emails? etc.

“Most organizations still believe in the perfect sales and marketing delineation: This is where marketing generates leads for sales, sales development reps then qualify these leads, to create opportunities that salespeople hopefully turn into revenue… The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our CUSTOMERS.” – Jill Rowley – Founder, #SOCIALSELLING As the modern buyer continues to become more informed it is more important than ever that your sales and marketing teams are aligned. It is vital that companies share the right information, at the right time, to the right person. At the end of the day, the marketing teams role is to enable sales to close more deals. A good place to start? Consistent and clear communication between sales and marketing. This week, we put together an Update template for marketers to share with their team, managers, etc. and most importantly the sales team. The template is intended to be shared on a regular basis and lead to conversations to improve different aspects of your pipeline. If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so. Key Metrics “Enablement means something different in every company,” Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, said. Find the metrics that are relevant to your team and continue to share and reiterate. Get your team behind the data and constantly communicate with the sales team to find areas for improvement. Keep in mind, our template has popular sales enablement metrics in place but can be changed to your organization needs. The team at Hubspot suggests using Lead-to-Customer as your North Star. Last Week’s Efforts Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Is always useful to include any success stories from reps or potential customers from the past week to help make sure everyone is getting the most out of new content. This Week’s Efforts A quick breakdown of content and changes for the upcoming week. Briefly highlight the goal of the content and where/when it should be used. Most importantly – leave a place for the sales team to offer feedback and share the sentiment from the buyers they have been talking to.

As the old adage goes, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” When building a startup, it is incredibly important to keep tabs on the metrics, data, and financials that keep your business headed in the right direction. Building your own templates and tracking resources can be time-consuming for a busy founder. Thankfully, there are countless free templates and resources to help you get started in just a few minutes. Check out a few of our favorite free Google Sheet templates to help you better your startup reporting below: An Open Sourced Financial Model for SaaS Startups In the 5th iteration of his SaaS Financial Model, Mike Simmons, the CEO of CredSimple, offers an open sourced Google Sheet template with explanations and resources for the components in the model; ranging from hiring, fundraising, and growth plans. From Mike himself: “I decided to create an open source template so that other founders can benefit from the work that we’ve done. In this project, I have tried to thread the needle between robust and not too complicated or specific. It has been tested by several investors and MBA interns and has proven to work well. But it is up to you to adapt it for your own needs.” Read more here. Runway and Cash Forecasting Tool From the original post by Taylor Davidson of Foresight.is: “This tool is used for forecast your cash and runway. It’s intended to be a simple model with easy inputs for expenses, revenues, and external funding, so that you can get a handle on burn, cash and runway quickly and easily. Input your revenues and costs, and the model will automatically create charts of your burn and runway (over 36 months), a summary of your operating expenses, and an optional sources and uses chart.” Ecommerce Google Sheet Template Dave Ambrose of Steadfast Capital lays out what they have found to be their most important Ecommerce metrics. A few of the major points in the template are the source for customer additions as well as the Contribution Profit (you can read Dave’s original twitter thread here). Read more on the model here. Related Reading: Our Guide to E-Commerce Metrics (with Google Sheet Template) Customer Lifetime Value Template There’s a reason why many experts insist Customer Lifetime Value (we’ll use LTV for short) is the most important metric for your startup. The data points you gather for the LTV formula can help assess the overall health of your company. Not only does LTV provide insight into the long-term trajectory of your startup, but it also gives immediate insight into specific areas that need improvement. Knowing how valuable it is to gain each customer is essential. We created a Google Sheets template that will allow you to plug in your unique numbers to calculate both your LTV and CAC. Read more here. Related Reading: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): A Critical Metrics for Founders Inside Sales KPI Template Every company should also know the progress of their sales team, the goals they need to hit and make sure management understands the return. Don’t forget about the intangibles either. Conner Burt, Chief Operating Officer at Lesson.ly, said the long-term prospects for sales reps can often be about more than just filling a funnel. “Your building a bench that you can use to promote sales reps to quota bearing sales people. That’s an intangible benefit.” With this in mind, we built a simple Inside Sales KPIs template for sales teams in Google Sheets. It is flexible so you can remove any irrelevant info, manipulate it or add anything missing that fits your process. Read more here. Key SaaS Metrics Template For SaaS companies, finding, tracking, and measuring your key metrics is key to success. In order to help you get started with the key metrics, we’ve put together a free Google Sheet template. Our SaaS Metrics Template automatically calculates your key SaaS metrics like MRR, ACV, churn, CAC, payback period, and more. Simply enter in your new customer data and the template will handle the rest. Related Reading: Our Ultimate Guide to SaaS Metrics Let Visible Help with Your Reporting Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days.

Back in April we partnered with OpenView to share our free Total Addressable Market template. With an overwhelming positive response and some inspiration from Point Nine Capital’s “5 Ways to Build a $100 Million Business [Infographic]” we wanted to build a new forecasting template on how SaaS businesses can get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue. For this template we partnered with our friends at Foresight & OpenView to provide 4 distinct forecasting models on how a business can grow to $100 million in ARR. You can get the template here! Getting to $100 million in annual recurring revenue is one of those SaaS benchmarks you’ll hear about frequently. It’s a line in the sand that investors have drawn to deem your business “venture-backable” or not. I’m sure many have asked or received the follow question, “That’s great, but how does this get to $100mil in ARR?” Click here to get the free SaaS forecasting template No two paths are the same but there are some commonalities with different go-to-market strategies that can help frame your business. We’ll break down the following markets and their respective distinct metrics: Consumer SMB Mid-Market Enterprise You’ll be able to define your customer acquisition channels, Average Revenue Per Account, contract lengths, growth assumptions, cost assumptions and more! We hope you enjoy! You can find the post in full at Opeview and Foresight. Integrate the Google Sheet template directly with your Visible Account as well! Get the free forecasting SaaS template here!

Welcome to part 3 of 4 of our Ultimate Report series. When we talk to our customers and potential customers we love to get an understanding of their “ultimate report”. It’s the report that stakeholders can quickly rally behind and understand how the business is performing, usually to a goal or target. Part 1: Pacing Part 2: Cadence & Operational Metrics Part 3: ARR Movements Part 4: Coming on July 12th This week, our ultimate report is ARR Metrics. For any SaaS business, the movements in your recurring revenue are crucial to making decisions, hiring and resource allocation. What makes SaaS metrics great are that they are fairly easy to benchmark across industries. Tracking Your ARR Movements This report focuses on 4 key recurring revenue movements. New Business ARR: When a lead converts to a customer (for the first time) Expansion ARR: When an existing customers increases their recurring spend with you (more seats, better package, etc) Contraction ARR: When an existing customers decreases their recurring spend with you (less seats, downgrade plan, etc) Churn ARR: When a customer cancels their subscription and doesn’t renew. If you want to dig into more SaaS metrics and definitions we recommend checking out our friends at ChartMogul and their SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. P.s. we have an awesome integration with them!

Your Ultimate Report: Sharing Operational Metrics Welcome to part 2 of 4 of our Ultimate Report series. When we talk to our customers and potential customers we love to get an understanding of their “ultimate report”. It’s the report that stakeholders can quickly rally behind and understand how the business is performing, usually to a goal or target. Part 1: Pacing Part 2: Cadence & Operational Metrics This week we want to touch on two key parts of the reporting process every company should be doing. Operational Metrics Developing a cadence for stakeholder reporting The below chart is a common one that most VCs love & one that you’ll see in just about every “Investor Update” template post online. The goal here is to quickly see: How fast is your top line growing? How much cash is in the bank? Is burn under control? What does headcount look like? With Visible, this is incredibly easy to visualize and automate through our different data integrations. Putting this together should take no more than a couple minutes. The other key to great reporting is not doing it just once but building a repeatable cadence that is timely. According to Peter Drucker, the key to building a successful company is about how well you attract and retain both talent and capital. Attracting capital (read: investors) is one thing; but how do you handle the added pressure of putting someone else’s capital to work? Regular communication. While we spend most of our day talking with founders and operators we also spend a good amount of time speaking with stakeholders and those “consuming” reports. The one component they look for more than certain metrics, wins, losses, or other sections? Regular communication. With some back of the envelope math we have found companies that regularly communicate with their investors are twice as likely to raise follow on funding. Consistent communication builds trust and helps keep you top of mind for your investors. It also creates accountability on both sides of the table. When an investor comes across a great designer looking to join a startup, who do you think she will recommend? The company she hasn’t heard from since wiring the money, or the one that comes to her each month with a quick overview on how things are going and how she can help? But what is “regular communication”? That is something that should be answered by your, your team, and your stakeholders. Find a cadence that works best for both you and your stakeholders. One of our favorite cadences we see companies use is similar to the one below: Weekly – Short, data heavy Updates sent to the entire team. Highlight big wins, losses, and your “North Stars” for individual departments Monthly – A more qualitative focused Update sent to all Investors and stakeholders highlighting all important wins, losses, and questions from the month. Quarterly – the “friends and family” Update. Send to any of your stakeholders that have interest in the business with a quick update on the state of the business while keeping potential investors in the loop. Make sure to check our recurring templates in Visible to help automate your cadence.

How to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost in Visible Check out the video above to get a glimpse of our formula builder. In this example we calculate customer acquisition cost by combining data from Salesforce and Google Sheets!

We’re huge fans of the NPS (Net Promoter Score) at Visible. This article is all about NPS & is broken down into 4 sections. What NPS is? Why we love it! How we implement it. Do unanswered NPS surveys correlate to churn? (This question was the original idea for writing this post) What is NPS? If you’re not familiar with NPS, it is used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s relationships. It is used by more than 2/3 of the Fortune 1000 and it can measure a company, employer or another entity. You have likely received an NPS survey yourself. It’s a score of 1 to 10 usually with a question of “How likely are you to recommend X to your friend or colleague?” X could be your company, your customer support experience, an event, etc. If you answer 1 to 6 you are considered a detractor and at risk of customer churn, 7 & 8 are considered passives and 9 & 10 are considered promoters. To get your score take % Promoters – % Detractors. This creates a scale ranging from -100 to 100. 0 to 49 is considered good, 50 to 70 is Excellent and 70+ is World Class. To give you an idea for the 4 Major Airline Carriers in the US the scores are as follows: American: 3 Delta: 36 Southwest: 62 United: 10 On the other hand of the spectrum Apple clocks in at 89. (*note these are rough estimates from free online resources). At Visible our NPS is a 75 and we are incredibly proud of that! Why We Love NPS We love NPS for a number of reasons but all of them are related to being a signal that is reported directly from our customers. We have written about NPS before in “How to measure customer experience better”. With NPS we can identify problems we didn’t know about. Here is a real example… it looked like we have an incredibly active customer that loves our product but they recently answered our NPS survey with a 2 stating our pricing didn’t make sense for our business. This allowed us an opportunity to start a conversation on how we could better price our product for a particular customer prior to them churning. A strong NPS is a great sales tool as well. It is something we can speak to with our customers, investors, potential hires, etc. Not only can we point to company logos as customers but we can prove that they love using the product. It’s also great for motivating the team internally as it touches all parts of the business. NPS qualitative feedback is also amazing. The score is great but understanding why they scored the way they did is gold. At Visible we hear two things over and over again. 1) It’s simple and 2) great customer support. We always think about these two main pieces of feedback as we build the product and talk to our customers. We want to make sure we don’t overcomplicate the product and continue to serve the customer the best we can. Finally, NPS is a great signal for early stage companies to use as an early identified or product-market fit before they have metrics at scale. How Visible Implements NPS We use NPS for all of our customer relationships. We’ve tried using NPS for free trial users or if customers used a particular feature but found that data didn’t yield any insightful data. We care most about the customers who providing us with their credit card in exchange for our service. We use Promoter.io to handle the surveying, scoring and all things related to our NPS. There are a bunch of providers in the market but found that Promoter works best for our needs. Once a new customer signs up on Visible we then tag them as customer in Intercom. This then adds that customer to a queue in Promoter where we set a 20 day delay before the first survey is sent. Why 20? We don’t want to survey right away as we want them to get all the benefits of the product, have a customer success interaction and fully dive into our offering. With a 20 day delay we also give ourselves 10 days to address any problematic issues with a customer that may be paying us monthly to avoid churn. From there the customer gets surveyed automatically 60, 90 and 180 days after the most recent survey. Each survey has an auto-reminder 3 days after an initial send if they haven’t responded. Do unanswered NPS surveys correlate to churn? There is a solid argument to make that detractor NPS scores (0 to 6) correlate to revenue churn; however, what about customers that don’t respond to NPS surveys? My hypothesis was that if customers don’t care enough to answer a simple survey that just takes one click to answer, do they really care about the solution? Of our customers that churned in the past 6 months, 43% of them responded to the NPS survey. That response rate falls in line with our active customer base. Of those that answered, all of them were promoters (answered with 9 or 10)! This was actually quite perplexing and something I don’t have a great answer to (yet). If you do, we’d love to hear from you! I wish I had an amazing, ground-breaking takeaway for this last point but the reality is we are still in first inning of our NPS journey. As we get more data, more experience and learnings we’ll make sure to update it! Questions, thoughts, comments? Email hi at visible dot vc. Want to share your NPS with your team and stakeholders? Sign up for Visible! Up & to the right, -The Visible Team

The success—or lack thereof—of a sales enablement team isn’t the easiest to track because the area itself isn’t always clearly defined. When a scaling company develops its initial sales enablement strategy, it’s often a struggle to determine exactly what the organization needs to focus on first. And that lack of clarity can present a real problem. “Enablement means something different in every company,” Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, said. “A lot of companies think they need enablement. But if there is not a clear understanding of the purpose of sales enablement, it can die very quickly.” So how do you start? Simply. Focus first on a handful of easy-to-identify valuable functions that drive performance in a sales organization. Here are three great ways to start: Decrease time to quota obtainment All new hires face a steep learning curve when entering a new organization and a new sales process. Providing the right tools that boost a new hire into peak productivity mode is remarkably important. And cutting down the number of days until that happens can wildly profitable. So the role of a new sales enablement team must start hacking at that time to quota obtainment with insights for into the sales process. Empowering new hires with basic strategies that overcome common obstacles that have slowed success in the past is a key component in enabling the sales team. Identifying selling pitfalls, core value propositions and common pain points and some additional tricks of the trade helps shorten the road to top performance. Decrease time to pipeline obtainment In order to hit that quota, reps need to fill the pipeline first. Most companies will use the 3x sales pipeline-to-quota-ratio as the goal for the sales team. For the sales enablement team, it’s essential to identify the best ways new reps can hunt for new leads. Your enablement team can provide information on the right customer types, how to best reach them and how to determine which opportunities might be better than others. Again, you’re providing new reps with a better roadmap to avoid obstacles others have already encountered. The bottom line is if your sales enablement team isn’t decreasing time to quota obtainment or pipeline obtainment, they aren’t providing the right boost to your onboarding efforts. Decrease sales cycles Finally, moving beyond new hires, sales enablement teams must deconstruct the sales cycle and find ways for the entire organization to cut down on the time to commitment. They have to monitor how deals track through the process and identify common factors that are often introduced and slow down the action. Sales enablement teams gather intelligence and data from across the team and synthesize the learnings into communication training that drives iterative improvement. That speeds up the process and makes enablement worthwhile in the long-run. There is almost no end to the avenues your enablement team may explore to keep your organization innovating and working smarter. But by focusing first on just a few key areas, you can convince investors of the need for sales enablement and earn buy-in from the rest of your leadership team of its value.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways to ensure a healthy sales funnel is to reevaluate the quality of your leads. Better leads produce better results. And taking a product-first approach to qualifying leads can help optimize your funnel. But first, let’s look back at how Categorizing leads Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, qualify your leads by placing each in three separate categories: “organization-level,” “opportunity-level,” and “stakeholder-level.” Then ask specific questions that will determine if your product actually fits their needs or if this is a customer destined for failure. This filter alone can save your customer success team a great deal of headaches in the future. Types of lead qualifications Beyond categorizing leads, it’s important to assess where your leads are coming from and what teams are qualifying these customers. Traditionally, lead qualifications have come from two areas: Sales qualified leads (SQL): Some of the hardest earned customers come from SQLs, when your sales team identifies one of the customers in the previous three categories through research and deems them viable for a follow up call. With SQLs, you’re relying on a sales development rep (SDR) to cold-call to set a meeting or demo to get these clients into the funnel. These clients usually require a hefty amount of work to educate them on your offering, explain why you’ve identified them as a good fit and how your product solves their current pain points. Marketing qualified leads (MQL): Inbound marketing efforts produce leads that engages with your company through a number of actions—like requesting a demo or downloading a buying guide-that help educate users before they ever receive a sales call. Before they are passed on to an SDR or account executive (AE), these clients will have some familiarity with the pain point your company can solve. While effective strategies to help fill your sales pipeline, increasing the close rate on SQLs and MQLs can be difficult. One of the best ways to identify the potential customers with highest probability of purchasing is through product qualified leads. Product qualified leads (PQL): When a potential customer is already using a version of your product—whether that be a trial participant or user in a freemium model—they can qualify as a PQL. With a PQL, the customer has hit a designated trigger that lets the sales team know they are ready for a follow up call. As Christopher O’Donnell notes, by using the product to educate the customer first, you’ve given your sales team a huge advantage. “If we flip the traditional model 180 degrees and start instead with product adoption, we find ourselves selling the product to folks who understand the offering and are potentially already happy with it, before they even pay,” O’Donnell writes. Scale Leads, Create Focus PQLs rely on the product selling itself. With this approach, you’re providing the best possible introduction to demonstrate how the product can be a long-term solution. That’s an easy process to replicate too. “[PQLs] are scalable because they require no human touch and they are high-quality leads,” Tomasz Tunguz writes. “When the sales team calls PQLs, customers typically convert at about 25 to 30%.” If you have a freemium offering of your product, you can gain the benefits of the potential velocity of incoming leads while also earning the financial rewards of an inside sales price point. Furthermore, a focus on PQLs can improve your product roadmap as well. Tunguz notes that PQLs actually serve as a management tool as well because the focus on customer action gets everyone onboard with revenue as the key performance indicator. are a “Typically, the product and engineering teams don’t have goals tied to revenue which bisects a team into revenue generating components (sales and marketing) and cost centers (eng and product).” That can create a lack of effectiveness when it comes to creating a product that sells itself and providing the best ammo for a sales team to finish the job if needed. Of course, your product and engineering teams will have longer-term features that will not be revenue significant in the short-run. However, a mix of both can help get everyone on the same page and quickly end potential arguments. That’s a great addition to any company culture. “PQLs provide a rigorous framework for prioritizing development,” Tunguz writes. “Each feature can be benchmarked to determine the net impact to PQL which is ultimately funnel optimization.” Measuring PQLs If you’re ready to track PQLs, determine which triggers require an AE to follow up with a call. Product feature limits, a number of days in the free trial or specific actions in the product can all be good reasons to get in touch. Because you’re relying on customer actions, a large volume of PQLs may be tough to attract at first. However, learning how to optimize all your sales efforts to create more PQLs is essentially one of the best ways to constantly be improving your funnel. Track the number of PQLs each month and see how that compares to MQLs and SQLs. Share these results at monthly or quarterly investor updates to help make the argument that the team is determined to create an exceptionally efficient sales process as the company scales. Adding more PQLs could be one of the best KPIs for your company’s growth in 2017.

It’s simple: if customers are happy, they are more likely to renew. Customer experience is essential—it can make-or-break your retention efforts, determine whether you’re at an acceptable churn rate and potentially drive your SaaS startup toward the all-important negative churn milestone. After all, as Tomasz Tunguz wrote, “startups that manage customer renewals better than their peers grow faster and require less capital.” What are you customer experience metrics? You wouldn’t avoid measuring marketing leads or quantifying the success of your sales staff to hit its quarterly goal. So if you’ve avoided measuring and evaluating customer experience until now, you’ve ignored an indispensable part of assessing your business. Luckily, your current client base likely offers a wealth of data you can quickly tap into if you ask your customers the right questions. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use Net Promoter Score (NPS). How to start measuring NPS It starts with a simple question: How likely are you to promote this company or product to a friend or colleague? Survey your customers and this will give you initial insight into the overall direction of your customer experience. Use a scale from 1-10 to measure their response. Here’s how the different scores are grouped. Promoters(score 9-10) – These are the most loyal customers likely to renew and make recommendations to their friends and colleagues. It’s this group that will drive your company’s growth. Passives(score 7-8) – Consider these customers satisfied, but unlikely to recommend you to others. Your company is vulnerable to losing this client base to a competitor if you’re not careful. Detractors(score 0-6) – This is your unhappy customer base who can actually harm your company’s reputation and prevent referral growth. To get your NPS average, subtract the percent of detractors from the number of promoters. According to Zendesk, a good average for a SaaS company is 29. Establish your company’s first average as the baseline. This will help you determine whether future efforts work. Also, it will help as we move into the second part of developing NPS feedback: segmenting. Filtering NPS Paid vs. Trial A one-size-fits-all approach to NPS can be limiting for a growth startup. In order to best measure customer experience, parse out different customer segments. Start by separating free trial signups and paid customers. Determine how each scores individually on their level of satisfaction. Trial customers won’t have enough experience with the product to deliver a quality assessment. However, they will provide insight into your conversion efforts. By evaluating this group’s NPS trend over time you’ll be able to measure your trial performance improvements. NPS can be the most important indicator of whether any new efforts the company is making actually produces customers. As for paid customers, they can provide essential feedback on how well your product improvements work. After a new release, measure the NPS performance in the subsequent weeks to find how your customers are responding to the product tweaks. Location Customer experience can vary by location, especially if where a client lives determines how much they interact with your sales or customer success team in person. For international companies, different countries can have very different renewal or customer experience patterns. Job Title Are you selling to right customer? How is your company performing when the C-suite is using your product versus middle management? By segmenting NPS scores by job titles, you’ll know which groups like and dislike your product the most. That will help you improve messaging to the low-scoring groups and double-down efforts on selling the segments performing well. Plan Type If something like price point is causing dissatisfaction or an expanded offering of your product is driving customers to deliver high scores, segmenting plan type will reveal these sentiments. Parse out your different plans and you might find that some of your current offerings are weighing down the rest of your customer experience. Number of users By creating different segments by a range of the number of users, you develop an understanding of whether your products start to perform poorly at a certain number. If adding more users is a large part of your strategy to scale, identifying a breaking point in customer satisfaction by number of users could be a crucial red flag that the product needs immediately attention. Determine your own No one knows your company better than you. If the above groupings aren’t the best segmenting options, create your own based off the demographics that are most essential to improving your product. Select experiences Now that you’ve created customer segments, ask for feedback on specific experiences with your product. Do you have an appealing interface? How is your customer service response time? These kinds of questions can help you isolate problems and make necessary changes. Qualitative feedback Metrics aren’t the only things that matter. Once you’ve asked your customers the first NPS question, allow a free-form feedback option and/or an additional survey to drill down into specifics you might not catch in your segmentation. Zendesk found that 63 percent of customers that gave negative reviews left additional feedback—that can be remarkably important to your business’ growth. Changing minds It’s important to segment and identify who is unhappy early because changing a customer’s opinion is incredibly hard. Zendesk found that more than 70 percent of surveyed users that gave negative reviews in the past didn’t change their mind. The majority of positive reviewers maintained their high marks, but to a lesser extent than their negative counterparts. Zendesk also found that more than half of NPS respondents rate a company 0 or 10, so your product is likely to produce a pretty strong reaction from the people paying for it. Share the results Now that you’re receiving more customer experience data points, be transparent about the performance of different segments with your team and investors. This level of detail helps your organization focus and will inspire confidence in your investors that you’ve parsed the necessary numbers to make big improvements.

Last week in a post about hitting revenue milestones to prepare for a Series A, I mentioned the importance of achieving true growth rates and avoiding false indicators of success. The problem for many founders comes when they try too hard to show exciting growth numbers at the expense of a clearer picture of the company’s performance. Avoid Misleading Metrics You don’t want to look like an idiot in front of your investors. At the same time, you want to excite your backers with some of the new accomplishments that are adding to the bottom line. So how do you avoid misleading numbers? Be honest with the size of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) numbers and your month over month growth (MoM) percentage. Your investors are likely assessing revenue figures from a number of portfolio companies, which means they know where to find weak spots. Don’t look unprepared. Here are some of the most popular mistakes–according to Amplitude–that founders make when outlining revenue growth figures: Don’t pass off big growth rates on small numbers If you’re still gaining traction as a startup, your month over month numbers may be tiny. So boasting mega percentages in MoM growth will be laughable to seasoned investors if you’re passing the rate off as sustainable growth at scale. January February March April May June July August September MRR 1000 1300 1800 2500 3300 4100 5000 6200 7300 MoM Growth Rate 30.00% 38.46% 38.89% 32.00% 24.24% 21.95% 24.00% 17.74% Don’t hide MoM fluctuation It isn’t sustainable unless you can show a detailed strategy for sales and market growth. An early stage startup with 30 percent growth MoM may not wow new investors, but it is a sign that you’re moving at a strong pace. That’s only a problem if you’re passing off your big digit percentage as a large MMR number. Your numbers can fluctuate. That’s perfectly normal. Especially over the course of quarter, a SaaS company can often begin their first two months hitting only 50 percent of its mark, but rally for more than 50 percent in the final month on the back of the groundwork down in the beginning. Make sure your founders now how your numbers may fluctuate from month-to-month. Showing the chart below and claiming a steady 15 percent growth rate over the course of nine months is inaccurate, even though the company hits that average over time. January February March April May June July August September MRR 10000 13000 14000 18000 20000 22000 26000 31000 32000 MoM Growth Rate 30.00% 7.69% 28.57% 11.11% 10.00% 18.18% 19.23% 3.23% Instead, show your investors a list of your monthly numbers and explain the factors that cause the fluctuations. If you’d like to calculate your compound monthly growth rate to have the metric on hand, use the following formula: Compound Monthly Growth Rate = (Last month/First month)^(1/Number of months difference) – 1 Don’t disguise declining growth rates Using the compound growth rate (CMGR), the following chart shows a 15 percent average over the course of nine months: January February March April May June July August September MRR 10000 13000 16000 19000 21500 24000 26500 28500 30500 MoM Growth Rate 30.00% 23.08% 18.75% 13.16% 11.63% 10.42% 7.55% 7.02% But as you can also see, as this startups numbers continue to climb, the growth rate is slipping. That’s not always a red flag. Sometimes scaling your MRR is going to come at the cost of maintaining your growth rate. However, you don’t want to lead with your CMRG during the period without discussing the difficulty of holding that percentage moving forward. In the long run, it’s only going to benefit you to share any bad news with investors, invite their help and be as transparent as possible to get everyone on board for the future. As Archana Madhavan said, distorting your company’s revenue picture can really damage your reputation moving forward. “When you fudge your growth models, you’re not just deluding yourself and your team,” he wrote. “You’re not just giving potential investors the signal that you don’t know what you’re doing.” Be clear about your MoM goals and how they impact your company’s long-term success strategy. Your month-to-month performance isn’t going to be the only indicator of your company’s growth, especially if you’re sacrificing in the short-term to improve product or reformat with your team. Nevertheless, discuss these numbers with regular updates to investors in order to allow for the necessary information to be shared and everyone to feel confident in the future direction of the business.