On November 28 and 29, over 1,500 attendees and 500 companies convened to discuss scaling up SaaS businesses and the state of software as a service in Canada at the SaaS North conference in Ottawa. The GrowthGenius team was thrilled to sponsor and be a part of this amazing event.
Our CEO, Will Richman, was invited to moderate a panel featuring James Thomas, Chief Marketing Officer at Solium, Sabrina Leblanc, Director of Sales at SurveyMonkey and Anusha Srijeyanathan, Vice President of Client Success at Benevity. The panel elaborated on what a customer revenue engine is and how you can scale it. Here are some of the learnings from the discussion.
"A customer revenue engine is truly an engine, you have to look at all of the parts of the organization to make the engine work. These parts need to be perfectly positioned. If not, the engine will break down. You also need to oil the engine and make sure that you are fuelling it properly.
Your product, sales, marketing and customer service teams need to work together and be aligned on the growth strategy. As you scale and reach points of tension, you will realize that your customer revenue engine is breaking down and you have to constantly iterate and work together to stop it from doing so."
- Sabrina Leblanc, Director of Sales at SurveyMonkey
Over time the metrics that you measure will change.
When your company is smaller, you might be experimenting and measuring extremely granular metrics because you need to know all of the fine details to know what's working, what's not and what to double down on.
From a sales perspective, you may want to look at the following:
a. Year on year growth - where are you compared to where you were last year? Are you trending in the right direction?
b. What is the average LTV and how is that changing over time.
"The thing you want to be careful about is not to add too many metrics. Don't spend all of your time looking backwards and miss out on what's right in front of you.
Find the metrics that are the most critical to your business and measure those - you probably want to measure at least 5 metrics."
- Sabrina Leblanc, Director of Sales at SurveyMonkey
What metrics should you track at a 20 to a 100 person startup?
a. Look at churn closely
Figure out if your customers are churning because they aren't happy or if they are the wrong type of customers for your business.
b. Measure conversion rate at every stage of the funnel
From marketing qualified leads to booking a call to closing and so on - measure every single conversion in the funnel. Look at each stage closely and understand why and how things are shifting over time.
c. Introduce and measure advocacy metrics
There are many different metrics you can capture in marketing efforts, but when it comes to brand advocacy in particular, there are some key performance indicators that you should be focused on - a simple one to measure is number of referrals.
"The wrong customer can kill your organization while you are trying to serve their needs. Know your ideal customer profile well."
James Thomas, Chief Marketing Officer at Solium
Putting process in place early on can help the organization make better decisions.
"Introduce processes to ensure good data hygiene. Making decisions based on the wrong data can cause distractions and costly mistakes. It is also important to always question data hygiene when you are changing processes and systems."
Sabrina Leblanc, Director of Sales at Survey Monkey
It can help get everyone on the same page. Customer growth managers can then have access to better data and can report on key metrics with increased transparency and ease.
View the video above for the full discussion.
Interested in learning more about how you can scale your customer revenue engine? Contact us today!