OPEXEngine | SaaS Articles

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

4 SaaS Sales KPIs and How to Calculate Them

Ever had a discussion or sat in a meeting to review metrics and the meeting didn’t accomplish much because the discussion got mired in questions about the metrics, not what the metrics were saying about the company’s performance? Or your executive team looks at metrics one way, but your investors, bank lenders, or new M&A partner does it a completely different way that may or may not relate to your business?

April 12, 2019

Building Better Recurring Revenue SaaS Companies in 2019

Anna and I are about a year into our SaaSX and Beacon9 stories and about 15 months removed from the acquisition of our SaaS company. We worked with some amazing recurring revenue SaaS companies in 2018. Our journey, our clients, and the new year have caused me to reflect on our mission to help SaaS founders and leaders build better companies.

April 9, 2019

Aligning Finance and SalesOps – Best Practices & Tips for SaaS Companies

Alignment between Finance and Sales, especially SalesOps, is critical for SaaS companies to effectively manage growth and expenses. Miscalculating quotas, attainment and On-target Earnings (OTE) for account executives can drive up CAC, not to mention impact revenues and forecasts. Lauren Kelley and Eric Stephenson, Director of FP&A at Domo discussed in SaaS Conversations this week best practices for aligning Finance and Sales, and some of the key Sales metrics and practices at Domo. Eric has been in Finance from an early stage thru Domo’s recent IPO.

April 5, 2019

Should Your Startup Employ Both Assisted and Unassisted Trials to Acquire Customers?

To create a successful PQL conversion process, product and engineering and growth marketing work together to optimize a conversion funnel. Prospects move down the conversion funnel by using the product and by receiving emails or in product alerts to educate. On the other hand, to create a successful MQL/SQL funnel requires marketing support, sales execution and customer success.

April 2, 2019

SaaS Partner Models – Not Your Father’s Buick

I was impressed with the sophistication and creativity of partner models SaaS vendors are executing on. Underlying all of the conference discussions was a satisfying focus on monetization and tangible revenue and product goals. After 20 years of suspicion that partnering is not a viable revenue growth strategy for SaaS companies, the tide has turned.By various estimates, including both SaaS Capital’s recent survey and OPEXEngine’s own benchmarking of channel revenues, 50-70% of B-2-B SaaS companies today derive revenue from channel relationships.

March 29, 2019

Getting SaaS Accounting and Financial Operations Right from the Start

By 2020, more than 80 percent of software providers will change their business models from “traditional” perpetual license and maintenance to subscription-based models. A perpetual model requires customers to pay a fee upfront to purchase a license for the system or application, whereas a SaaS model requires a monthly subscription fee. While some providers, such as Dropbox, were created “as a service,” thousands of other software vendors that started out with traditional licensing models are realizing that gaining market share means embracing the preference for SaaS.

March 26, 2019

SaaS Net Retention Rate Myths - One Size Doesn’t Fit All

A benchmark floating around the SaaS blogging community is that SaaS net retention rates have to be over 100% - or your company isn’t valuable. In fact, according to this school of thought, your net retention rate should be way over 100%, at least 125% or more. Some investors are even associating net retention rates with company valuations, regardless of model.

March 22, 2019

Important Subtleties in Calculating Quarterly, Annual, and ATR-based Churn Rates

The generic issue is a lot of SaaS metrics gurus define metrics in a generic way using “periods” without paying attention to some subtleties that can arise in calculating these metrics for a quarter vs. a year. The specific issue is, if you do what many people do, that your quarterly and annual churn rates won’t foot — i.e., the sum of your quarterly churn rates won’t equal your annual churn rate.

March 19, 2019

SaaS Sales and Finance – Playing Nicely Together or Not

SaaS Sales and Finance collaborate together in planning, forecasting and day-to-day Sales management issues. That collaboration can be smooth and extremely productive, or there can be less productive friction. Working with hundreds of SaaS and software Finance organizations to collect and benchmark key Sales-related metrics, we’ve seen some best practices that tend to make the collaboration work well.

March 16, 2019