SaaS Talk™ with the Metrics Brothers - Strategies, Insights, & Metrics for B2B SaaS Executive Leaders

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike break down the recent Benchmarkit B2B Marketing Budget and Productivity Benchmarks Report. Key trends and insights into how the Marketing budgets are established, consumed and reported upon including:

• Marketing budget as a percentage of revenue including YoY changes and segmented by company size
• Growth Rates compared to Marketing budget allocation - the chicken or the egg discussi...

How do you calculate the efficiency of pipeline generation in a B2B SaaS company? Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike take this metric(s) topic on head first by discussing both the Cost per Opportunity and Pipe to Spend metrics - key to understanding how much investment is required to generate pipeline!

During this episode CAC and Growth also touch upon the closely aligned metric of "Pipeline Conversion" which ...

Customer Acquisition Cost efficiency continues to be challenged in the B2B SaaS environment, while alignment across the Go-to-Market organization continues to be a topic of conversation. So, Dave "CAC" Kellogg a long time Marketing executive and Ray "Growth" Rike, a long time Sales executive decided to take on the the topic of Marketing and Sales alignment from their respective experiences as department executives. Topic...

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike recently did a LIVE episode of SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers at the Baker Tilly Technology Finance Symposium in San Francisco. The topic of their discussion was aligning Finance and the Go-to-Market functions and included how SaaS metrics can be used as a core "alignment" strategy. 

During this "extended" version of SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers, Ray and Dave di...

Stock-based Compensation (SBC) has been a hallmark of the SaaS and Cloud industry since the early days. Stock Options, Restricted Stock Units, Strike Price, and vesting periods continue to be a key discussion point for potential hires. Today's episode covers how Stock-based compensation impacts Operating Expenses on the Income Statement...and how SBC can impact SaaS metrics.

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike div...

B2B SaaS Benchmark reports are popping up like mushrooms - but how do you know if the benchmark report is good, contains valuable insights and how to use the benchmarks to inform your own objectives and SaaS metrics goals? 

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike take on a topic that is near and dear to their hearts and discuss several key factors that are a tell for a good benchmark report including:

• Top things to...

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a term commonly used across the SaaS industry - but what does it really mean, how can a company effectively build a customer acquisition strategy around it and what METRICS can be used to determine a company's ICP and then measure if it really is the best target customer segment?

During this week's episode, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss the following ICP elements to underst...

Net Customer Base Expansion = (Expansion ARR - Churned ARR) which helps SaaS companies to understand how the existing customer base is impacting ARR growth excluding the impact of new logo customer ARR. 

Why not just use Net Revenue Retention? CAC and Growth dive deep into this SaaS metric including:

• Calculation formula for Net Customer Base Expansion (NCBE)
• How is NCBE different from Net Revenue Retention (NRR...

B2B SaaS Pricing models have evolved over the past few years with 67% of SaaS companies now saying they have introduced at least one element of Usage-Based Pricing. Though this benchmark does not tell the whole story of pricing, as the primary pricing model is still based upon a subscription fee per user or a subscription fee per user + a Usage-Based or Value-Based pricing variable.

During this episode, CAC and Growth ...

Common practice is to measure Sales and Marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue, which in the SaaS industry ranges between 20% - 60% based upon stage, growth and efficiency. CAC and Growth discuss an alternative metric which measures the ratio between Sales expenses and Marketing expenses, known as the Sales/Marketing Expense Ratio.

During this episode topics discussed include:

• Sales and Marke...

The Sales Velocity metric calculation formula is (win rate x average contract value x # opportunities)/ average sales cycle length. The resultant Sales Velocity metrics highlights the amount of new bookings a Sales team can deliver per day....one key question about Sales Velocity is " is this a metric to help understand sales capacity, sales effectiveness or sales efficiency?

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike break d...

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss the latest revenue growth trends and the related metrics driving the growth as highlighted in GONGs 2025 State of Revenue Growth Report. Topics discussed include:

• 2024 Growth Rates
• Sales Velocity Trends including Win Rates, Sales Cycle Length and ACV
• AI Adoption
• Top Growth Initiatives
• SaaS Magic Number trends

If you are responsible for the GTM and Revenue growth teams...

Implied ARR is the SaaS metric used to convert GAAP revenue for public SaaS companies into an equivalent to Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) used by investors and private SaaS companies. Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss the what, why and how behind Implied ARR.

During this episode CAC and Growth discuss multiple Implied ARR topics including:

• Implied ARR Calculation Formula
• Why Investors Calculate Implied ARR
• ...

Max Schireson and Jason Mendel, from Battery Ventures recently published an article on Managing and Measuring R&D spend including key metrics from the DORA and SPACE frameworks and they also introduced their own 5 step R&D measurement framework including:

• Allocate top down
• Break R&D into granular buckets (not a lump sum)
• Listen to product-adjacent teams that are customer-facing
• Be deliberate about measuring suc...

In this episode, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss the SaaS Quick Ratio, a SaaS metric first introduced in 2015 with the goal to measure ARR growth efficiency by comparing New ARR growth versus existing customer ARR contraction.

The SaaS Quick Ratio borrows a concept used in general finance known as the "Quick Ratio" - which measures a company's ability to pay it's current liabilities.

The formula used to calc...

Marketing budget and productivity benchmarks are hard to find, so when Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike first saw the ICONIQ Growth Marketing Budget and Productivity Report - they knew it was a great topic for this episode of SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers.

During today's episode, Dave and Ray discuss several critical Marketing Planning, Budget, and Productivity benchmarks including:

• Marketing budget as a pe...

ServiceTitan, a vertical SaaS company for the trades recently filed their S-1 and went public on December 12, 2024. Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss many details regarding the S-1 including the basic enterprise value creating performance metrics and some very interesting aspects of the IPO structure.

During this episode, Dave and Ray discuss several aspects of the S-1 and IPO measured against indus...

KeyBanc Capital Markets in partnership with Sapphire Ventures recently published their 2024 SaaS Metrics Benchmark report. During today's episode, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike dive into this years highlights including:

• Growth Rates
• Net and Gross Revenue Retention
• Rule of 40
• Go-to-Market Organization Ratios
• Marketing Strategies and Productivity
• Human Capital Efficiency
• Valuation Multiples - By Growth Rate

I...

The Sales Operations function evolves dramatically as a company scales and Meghan Gill, SVP Sales Ops and Sales Development at MongoDB has lived that reality. Meghan started in Marketing at MongoDB as employee number 8 as the first non engineering hire, and then seven years later took over Sales Operations in preparation for their IPO.

CAC and Growth discuss the evolution of Sales Ops with Meghan and discuss several key top...