AI to ROI

Bill Binch has led revenue teams at highly successful B2B SaaS category creators, including Marketo and Pendo. Having real-life, applied experience and success at scaling high-growth companies, while also having broad insights into several Battery Ventures portfolio companies provides Bill with a unique perspective on how Chief Revenue Officers use metrics to inform their journey. Bill's jour...

It's hard to imagine being a key part of three industry-defining product categories, which is exactly what Bruce Cleveland has experienced in his Silicon Valley software career.    First, Bruce was an early executive leader at Oracle (first 100+ employees) as they re-defined relational databases, then on to Apple where he led the object-oriented engineering division, next he led the business...

You may have heard the acronym FP&A many times, but always wondered what it stood for?  Financial Planning and Analysis is the function, typically present in more mature companies responsible that is responsible for financial planning, modeling and analysis. Paul has a summarized view of what FP&A professionals are responsible for which is: "FP&A  is responsible to maximize shareh...

How has Customer Success evolved over the past ten years?  What better place to start than discussing the latest Customer Success Benchmarking Index with Kellie Capote, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. Kellie has invested the last five years developing her perspectives on Customer Success at Gainsight in a broad array of Customer Success leadership roles, including becoming the Chief Customer...

How vibrant is the SaaS industry in Canada? Who better to ask that question and discuss how the SaaS industry is trending in Canada other than Lauren Thibodeau, founder and CEO SaaSCan. Saadian is the leading market research and benchmarking company for the SaaS industry across Canada. There are 38 Million people in Canada. Leading SaaS companies like Shopify, OpenText, and Constellation Software...

Venture Capital - a hallmark of the B2B SaaS start-up industry has evolved over the past twenty years - but how have the primary value and responsibilities evolved? Marcelino Pantoja has had a front-row seat in many positions, starting as an analyst at the investment office at Stanford University. Then Marcelino worked with Greg Sands to help stand-up Costanoa Ventures. These views provided insigh...

Cash Management is not one of the top subjects B2B SaaS founders want to discuss, but critical to start-up survival and success. Brandon Metcalf learned the in's and out's of Cash Management as a multiple-time founder and CEO. As a result, he recently founded Place Technology to help early-stage CEOs and CFOs use automation and technology to better manage cash across every stage of growt...

Incentive Compensation and Sales Performance Management - two key ingredients to scaling a successful B2B SaaS company.  Is Intelligent Revenue the next key ingredient to growth? Chris Cabrera, founder, and CEO of Xactly, built a very successful company by helping companies to automate and optimize those two disciplines. The result was an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2015 and a $564M acquisiti...

How should we price our new SaaS product?  How does our pricing model compare to our competitors?  Are there other pricing models that would increase revenue and margin for our SaaS product? These are all some of questions that can be answered by analyzing B2B SaaS industry pricing benchmarks.   This is the world that Bryan Belanger lives in everyday, so who better to ask. Bryan has been conductin...

Does being data-driven result in better decision-making and performance results?  That was a question we asked Allan Wille, co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio which is enabling thousands of companies to do just that through the dashboards they enable. What are the primary challenges with data-driven decision-making? It starts with the data quality going into the metrics used for decisions. Once...

Marketing as an AMPLIFIER to Sales productivity!!! The quote above was the primary focus of my discussion with Mark Stouse - the CEO of Proof Analytics. Mark self-identifies as a communicator turned marketer turned SaaS CEO. Over this journey, Mark has developed a strong perspective on how to prove ROI, especially for marketing investment. What are the metrics that matter to a Chief Marketing Offi...

Sam Baker, Principal at Scale Venture Partners, has been a venture capitalist for six years. Before that, he gained operational experience at Box in both an Inside Sales role and in a Strategy and Planning role. Scale's culture has a very quantitative-oriented DNA, including having its own benchmarking organization known as Scale Studio. Benchmarking delivers reality to every Scale portfolio...

Everyone talks about the "Customer Journey" but often operates in stage-by-stage silos of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. What is the Customer Journey - first, it often depends on if you come from a "Buyer perspective" versus the "Seller perspective." Ultimately, the seller is trying to figure out how to turn the buyer's meandering journey into a...

Taft Love's journey to becoming a Revenue Operations leader started in law enforcement, with a pivot to starting his tech career by becoming a Sales Development Representative, on to direct sales, sales leadership and ultimately to Revenue Operations. This journey is exactly the cross-functional experience that builds a strong foundation to being a strategic revenue operations leader.  Intere...

SaaS Capital - I have always loved that name and followed their B2B SaaS Research for many years. Todd Gardner was a founder at SaaS Capital, which helped lead the early days of "Debt Lending" for SaaS companies. Most recently, Todd is now the principal at SaaS Advisors assisting both SaaS companies and SaaS investors during the financing process. During Todd's career, he has review...

Kyle Porter, the founder and CEO of Salesloft, started the company over ten years ago. The goal was to have sellers "loved by the customers" they serve. An initial observation was that it was difficult to deliver a personalized customer engagement experience at scale, thus the catalyst for Saleloft and the Sales Engagement category. The future of Sales Engagement? All professionals who a...

The Great Resignation has been a trending topic for six months - how does a B2B SaaS company prepare for  the impact?  Sales Enablement is one strategic function that will be a key component to combat attrition and ramp new sales hires to productivity...quickly Dave Lichtman has been a sales trainer, a sales professional at Salesforce and a sales leader at Sales Enablement platform vendor, SalesHo...

Anna Baird is the Chief Revenue Officer at Outreach, the leading Sales Engagement Platform.  Anna started her career as a partner at KPMG, and continued her career journey across multiple “C-Level” roles including CFO, COO, President and now CRO. The first portion of our conversation centered on the maturity of the Sales Engagement Platform category.  Anna shared that across all B2B Sales, that th...

Customer Success has been growing in importance across the B2B SaaS landscape for over 10 years. Guy Nirpaz recognized this trend early on and founded Totango in 2010 to deliver a SaaS platform to empower Customer Success (CS) professionals to focus the company around the customer. Guy stated our conversation with his belief that Customer Success is a company strategy - not just a department.  If...

We apologize for the sound quality on this episode of the Metrics that Measure Up. Bill was not able to participate on our traditional digital channel medium and instead we relied upon the traditional "analog phone line". This traditional approach created a little "reverberation and noise".   Bill shares so many great insights developed over his 37 years of being a Silicon Vall...

One of the great aspects of the Cloud software delivery model is the generation of insightful data generated by users and the purported ease of using the data to better inform  decision-making. At the same time, the amount of data being generated in the Cloud makes the job of normalizing, analyzing, and determining what data is truly informative and predictive versus just adding noise and complexi...

Usage-Based Pricing is trending across the B2B SaaS and Cloud industry.  This pricing model is not new and is also known as Consumption pricing as the cost of the service or product increases as the "consumption" of the product increases. Saas has traditionally become known for the use of subscription pricing, which often associates an annual subscription cost for each user of the produc...

B2B SaaS founders envision their entrepreneurial journey including a liquidity event such as an IPO, a financial acquisition, or a strategic acquisition from an industry leader. Lowell Ricklefs has deep operating experience leading tech companies and has experienced acquisitions on both the buyer and the seller side multiple times. During these processes, Lowell often wondered why banks were requi...

Andy Byrne is the founder and CEO of Clari, an enterprise artificial intelligence B2B SaaS platform that enables companies to build more pipeline, accelerate revenue growth and increase revenue predictability. Andy has a long-term relationship with machine learning from his previous company  Clearwell Systems (acquired by Symantec), and that experience was the foundation of his vision for Clari. ...

Benchmarks go far beyond the “numbers” and “metrics” Benchmarking is a discipline that enables organizations to identify processes and best practices that companies inside and outside of your industry to become best in class in a specific discipline. Scott Sutton is the VP, Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo and shares his experiences in building the Revenue Operations function. Scott’s initial career...