037 Ray Rike - Successful SaaS Leadership: Measuring What Matters in 2023 and Beyond

In today’s SaaS Fuel™ episode, Ray Rike joins SaaS Fuel to discuss how he helped develop the industry's largest (and first) interactive, real-time benchmarking database, saaskpibenchmarks.com

Episode Sponsor

Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/

Navigating Success Together 2023 Virtual Event

Key Takeaways

[1:51] The importance of metrics

[10:52] Customer CAC ratio versus existing customer expansion cap ratio

[13:51] About saaskpibenchmarks.com

[14:52] Measuring the return on investment of customer success and responsible forecasting

[15:41] Using benchmarks properly

[17:13] Customer Success responsibilities

[17:52 ] What Investors Look For

[20:30] The SaaS Metrics Board

[23:10] Three things that make financing deals difficult for SaaS Companies.

[31:09] Three things your organization can do to impact net dollar retention – and how to measure it’s working

[38:18] SaaS metric and benchmark analysis example

[43:26] Final thoughts and where to contact Ray

Tweetable Quotes

[1:51] Metrics and the associated benchmarks are the best way to inform decision-making

for a fast-growing SaaS company. I also believe that metrics provide a great alignment foundation between the organizations responsible for customer acquisition, retention and expansion, marketing sales and customer success.

[15:41] Benchmarks, just like metrics, aren't absolute. They're not one hundred percent accurate…but benchmarks are directionally very instructive and insightful.

[30:26] So many of the VCs have great educational content about the metrics that matter, and B2B SaaS. If you just spend an hour a week kind of following two or three great thought leaders or learning about one metric from a venture capital website, you're gonna be so much better informed than the head of marketing, head of sales, or head of product. You’re also going to be positioned to be that CEO in the future.

Guest Resources

Ray Rike - https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/rayrike

saaskpibenchmarks.com

Twitter: @ Rayrike

revopssquared.com

https://www.revopssquared.com/metrics-that-measure-up

https://www.key.com/businesses-institutions/industry-expertise/library-saas-resources.jsp

Todd Gardner – https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddgardner1/

SaaS Capital: https://bit.ly/3WYmBxQ

Lauren Kelly/Opex- https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-kelley-13972

Ben Murray - SaaS CEO - https://www.thesaascfo.com/about-ben/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrmurray

Chelsea Stoner - https://www.battery.com/people/chelsea-stoner/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelseastoner

Mary D’Onofrio - Bessemer Ventures

https://www.bvp.com/team/mary-donofrio

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-d-onofrio-a125b2154

Dave Kellogg - https://kellblog.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelloggdave

https://twitter.com/Kellblog?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Gainsight - https://bit.ly/3CjsxK6

David Apple - https://www.linkedin.com/in/appledavid

Ryan Morrison: https://www.founderscircle.com/our-team/ryan-morrison/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-morrison-98225198

Saasmetricsboard.com

SaaS Fuel Resources

Website - https://championleadership.com/

Jeff Mains on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/jeffkmains

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/thesaasguy/

Instagram - https://instagram.com/jeffkmains