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If anyone else is wondering what the acronyms stand for:
KPI : Key Performance Indicator
MRR : Monthly recurring revenue
CAC : Customer Acquisition Cost
CTLV : Customer Lifetime Value
ARPA : Average monthly recurring revenue (MRR) per customer
SaaS: Software as a Service
Interesting but only works if you have a consumer or SMB product. Enterprise sales is a completely different game, where granularity (at least at the beginning, when you have just a few sales a year) prevents you from doing sexy dashboards like this one.
Agree - which is why I called it "A simple KPI sheet for early-stage SaaS startups with a low-touch sales model". I would argue that one can create a sexy dashboard for an enterprise sales based model too though. :)
If you have any interesting thoughts on that ("a sexy dashboard for enterprise sales") I, for one, would love to hear them.
We're an enterprise software startup, and both founders are techies, not salespeople. I'm working on learning enough about sales to get up past the initial "hump", until we can hire real salespeople. In the meantime, any thoughts on what metrics to track and their value / usage, would be much appreciated.
FWIW, we are working on developing a sales process largely rooted in Solution Selling and the ideas from Jeff Thull ("Mastering The Complex Sale", "The Prime Solution", "Exceptional Sales", etc).
Did you take a look at David Skok's posts and templates already?
Not yet, but I absolutely will. :-)
We're an early-stage SaaS startup[1], and some of these metrics have proven very useful for us. Highly recommended.
Edit: Inbound leads are another important metric to track.
For SaaS startups I found this post by David Skok to be very informative and comprehensive http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/ . It is a bit old now but is still very relevant. Author talks about David Skok in the article too.
Edit: Added ref to David Skok
I just recently rebuilt our KPI dashboard for Blossom.io and read through the following spreadsheets/posts/pdfs …
* Christoph Janz – http://christophjanz.blogspot.de/search/label/financial%20pl...
* David Skok – as mentioned in the article (http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/)
* Ryan Carson – http://bit.ly/9w8eJ5 (talk: http://video.seedcamp.com/video/867124/seedcamp-week-2010-me...)
* Bessemer Venture Partners – http://www.bvp.com/cloud
Had a ton of a-ha moments and learned a lot. Highly recommended.
Google Docs version here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkJVUDhVuAHldE1...
Excel version available by emailing the author
What tools do you guys use to be able to track these metrics? Mixpanel I imagine is one of them?
At Blossom.io our KPI dashboard is powered by KISSmetrics, Google Analytics and billing information from Saasy (FastSpring).
Interesting. are you guys manually updating the dashboard? How frequently?
I find it hard to justify $150/month ($1800 per year) for analytics :(
Great template - most of my SaaS portfolio companies use very similar metrics templates. One addition would be YoY numbers so that you can better account for seasonality.
Great suggestion re. YoY numbers, Boris. I didn't include it in the template because I've entered only a few months of sample data, but in real-life this should definitely be added and I will keep it in mind for the next version.