September 4, 2025
Evaluate your SaaS go-to-market strategy with this 20-question GTM audit checklist. Assess sales, marketing, customer success, and data alignment for growth and scalability.
If 2020 is remembered as the year of COVID-19, 2021 will be remembered as the year of change. Putting aside everything else that may change, let’s just focus on SaaS in 2021.Cloud and SaaS companies overall benefited from the dramatic shift to digital and remote work in the US and around the world since March 2020. That doesn’t mean that 2020 wasn’t hard to manage through, but overall as a sector, SaaS companies grew revenue and valuations skyrocketed. The global shift to digital goods and services was accelerated beyond anyone’s wildest expectations back in January 2020.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a key SaaS metric that accounts for how much it costs your company to procure each new customer. The received wisdom is that reducing your CAC is one of the best ways to increase your company’s profitability and likelihood of success.
Zero-sum delusion is a serious issue for an early-stage SaaS business. It is often acquired through excess contact with purely financial venture capitalists. Happily, with critical thinking and by challenging assumptions, it can be overcome.
Thanks to the expert tips and guidance outlined here, you'll be able to tackle your SaaS company's customer churn rate more effectively: identifying at-risk customers; understanding what they want from your SaaS product; engaging customers with timely support, and measuring and analyzing your churn data correctly.
Companies often group their demand series according to a business or organizational structure, such as a planning hierarchy or reporting hierarchy. Although this type of grouping is easy to organize and report, it is poorly suited for modeling purposes. Instead, companies should think about demand series from the perspective of demand signals and classify them accordingly to better understand them and guide the forecasting process.
Zero-based budgeting is gaining in popularity as companies cut costs because of the pandemic, but it's not the slash-and-burn tactic it used to be. Instead, businesses are having success applying the measure for strategic, targeted savings.
While many of these mistakes or potential issue items are likely to be more prevalent in a business with a lean (or essentially non-existent) finance team, we’ve seen large businesses deal with many of these same challenges. Here are the top 8 mistakes I see most frequently (along with some potential fixes if you are dealing with any of these issues within your own business!)
The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the broader economy have created unprecedented uncertainty for management teams and investors, while rendering many existing business plans irrelevant. This uncertainty has made it much more difficult for most businesses to accurately forecast growth, operating metrics, and liquidity. To better prepare for the future, and any challenges and opportunities it may hold, companies need to invest the time to refine their forecasting capabilities. That includes deciding when to accelerate recovery spending and what financing the business needs to execute its plan.
If there is one thing I have learned in my decades of building businesses, it is that KPIs are most useful if you are clear about the goal of the metric. You have to know what the KPI should be telling you in order to understand how to calculate it. If you don’t, you may end up with distorted or incorrect results.
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