Loading summary
A
You're listening to Revenue Vitals with Chris Walker.
B
Hello, everyone. Welcome. We're going to give everyone a second to come through here and then we'll get started. Hey, hey. Congratulations to all of you. You found the new link.
A
So.
B
So you are some of the special people that were able to figure it out. I'm sure that there's some people still on the other zoom and we expected that it would take a little bit of time to change over, but we have upgraded the tech here. Now we can have up to 500 people on this meeting live, if that comes to that. So we have a couple of big events coming up and we're making some space for that. Appreciate all the people that show up here consistently. It's great to see the familiar faces and participate in the ongoing discussion. I got some really, really, really interesting stuff to share today, taught off the press from one of my friends, David Spitz. I was actually, I was doing some work last week and sometimes when I'm like trying to understand the data, I'll like hit him up a little bit. And I was like, hey man, have you ever done any research that compares the revenue multiple compared to a company's go to market efficiency? And he hadn't looked at that before. My expectation, a lot of people conceive, like if your go to market is really inefficient, theoretically you EBITDA and profitability will be lower, maybe your growth is a little slower. So it would make sense that your value valuation multiple is lower. So we'll present that data in a second and really excited to be able to share that. But first, just given that some of these calculations are a little bit new, potentially a little bit different than what people are looking at right now, I just want to sort of continue to bring people along with how you actually get to this outcome. For people that are listening to the podcast afterwards, I encourage you to listen to this through once. If you want to reference the slides, you can jump over to YouTube. YouTube for the slides and the video and then consider sharing this with other executive leaders in your company, particularly the cfo. I think that this is literally groundbreaking information that could change how companies strategize and plan immediately. So with all that said, let's get into it. 9, 10 figures in enterprise value on the line here. With these calculations, this can make swings in hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of what a company is worth. And let's talk through how. So let's start with the KPI stack. People have seen this one before. This is a Direct output of the winning by design revenue architecture framework at Passetto. We've already made modifications to how we look at this, but I'm just presenting the core thing from them. You can see that top investor line. Everybody's obsessed with growth rate, the number one thing on the left hand side. And then you have CAC payback LTV to CAC rule of magic number. And you have these efficiency metrics at the top. My belief currently is that all four of those metrics can be replaced by one metric called sales and marketing or go to market efficiency percentage. And that all you need to really understand the health of a mature well performing company is two numbers. Growth rate, go to market efficiency percentage. And then from those then you can continue to break down the KPIs as we talked through. I'm not going to go through all of those again just to be clear. We're focused on the investor level, financial level, KPIs here. And then if you go to the next slide, the calculation that's made here, some people will see this kind of CAC payback period, but it's not really because when you make the idea of CAC payback period, you must make an assumption around how long the customer is going to stay and the percentage of expansion revenue that's going to happen there. And both of those numbers are complete assumptions. And so when you try to take one company's CAC to LTV ratio or CAC payback period and they're saying yeah, we're doing great, we have a 10 month CAC payback period, they might be projecting their customer stays for 20 years and expands at 50% a year. And these ridiculous unrealistic assumptions around the customer growth and lifetime. And so what go to market efficiency does is it levels the playing field, completely removes all assumptions, just calculates two core numbers. The last 12 months, how much did you spend on all go to market expenses? This says sales and marketing. It really should be all go to market expenses for clarity. And then underneath that you have the total net new ARR that the company acquired, which is new logo revenue ARR plus expansion revenue minus churn minus contraction. And you get the net impact on total ARR. And then you multiply that number by 100 and you get go to market efficiency. The lower that number is, the better. If you're trying to make a shorthand comparison to like CAC payback period or a metric you're more familiar with, each hundred percent is going to be more or less equivalent to one year of a payback period. So if you're at 500%, you're going to be more or less pretty close to a 5 year CAC payback period. Just so people have an understanding of how this metric compares to something they might be more familiar with. What David Spitz did in the team at bench sites was looked at the 80 publicly traded software companies that are publicly traded. They have to report their financials. They do it every single quarter. They've looked at the most recent data within that you can see how much their total expenditures were on sales and marketing by quarter. You could then roll that up to how much they spent on sales and marketing in the trailing 12 months and then they must report on incremental ARR growth. And you have those two numbers and you can look at the 80 publicly traded SaaS companies and see how do they perform on the go to market efficiency number and then compare that to their revenue multiple from last 12 months. Revenue compared to enterprise value. And when you do that, we'll go to the next slide. This is like the magic slide. It shows that companies that run an efficient go to market defined as go to market efficiency, less than 175% have a median enterprise value of 10x Revenue 10x Last 12 months Revenue and on the lower end spend greater than 250% have a 3.6x revenue multiple. And so if you take this and you move it into the private market and you say we're $100 million SaaS company and our go to market efficiency is 350% then you're going to expect around a 3 to 6x revenue multiple. And if the go to market efficiency was 175% half of the amount that you currently have, your business would be worth a billion instead of 360 million having a total impact of $640 million in value for $100 million revenue company. Just because the go to market is efficient in terms of how much they spend and how much they get back. So for some people that are coming into this meeting, maybe from a more of an individual contributor or sub functional leader, some of this stuff might be like a little bit higher level. I'm encouraging everyone to sort of like elevate up, play up and look at how this impacts. So if you're an individual contributor and you had insight into this number and you knew that you were at 350%, it might change how you spend the million dollars a month in digital advertising spend that you have. What I'm encouraging companies to think about, especially private companies, number One, measure this number. Measure the number and look at it As a trailing 12 months trend quarterly and look at is it getting better or is it getting worse? As a CEO or a CFO preparing for a company to IPO or exit, really understand that it is clear that the two top drivers of enterprise value, how much your company is worth is number one, growth rate and number two, go to market efficiency. How efficient you are in the sales and marketing investments you deploy to growth which then downstream impacts EBITDA and profitability. And so big takeaways here. Breakthrough stuff. David's going to be on the show coming up in September. So anyone that's interested in this, we're definitely going to be talking about this more and other things. That's on September 24th at 12pm Central. Same registration link as this event and looking forward to getting into some of the topics and questions around this. This is my first time presenting this. It was published today by David. So we're being fast on on moving on some of this stuff. So would love if people have questions, want to go a little bit deeper in how these things are calculated or what it means to them in their role. Happy to go in any of those directions but I think that just the market has been so trained that it's just, just grow, grow, grow. And it's very clear in what's happening in the public markets that it's not only about growing, it's about growing in a sustainable and efficient and effective way. And so David had some, just one comparison that I'll make just for the audio listeners and people in here. Look at that comparison real quick. Look at these two companies. You have confluent and you have Datadog. Confluent is growing 24% but their go to market efficiency is 296% and they trade at a 6x revenue multiple. And then Datadog is 27% growth. So basically growing at the same rate. They have 123% go to market efficiency which is significantly, significantly more efficient than confluent and they trade at 13x more than double the revenue multiple predominantly impacted by the go to market efficiency metric. And so with all that said, excited to present this, excited to see what people think. We can go into some questions now.
C
All right, we have a lot of questions kind of clarifying. I really want to jump into the calculation and kind of what it means. So the first one is from Donna so I'll bring her on.
A
Hey Donna, can you hear me?
B
Yep. Welcome to the show. Good to have you back.
A
I'M so glad this is happening because this is really where we need to go. Because you know, the market size is not sufficient for most of these companies and that's one reason why the efficiency is so bad. And you've talked about that before. But my question is customer success, is that included? And I guess since the analysis David Smith did is GAAP accounting, it would have to be because it wouldn't be in gna.
B
So public companies do not report on this consistently yet. So some companies will put customer success in cogs and other companies will put customer success in go to market expenditure. I've been thinking about this as well. Somebody made an interesting argument that if your NRR is greater than 100% then customer success should be a revenue producing function. But I think that the jury's not out. There's nobody that's really made the call on how this works. I think that you could make arguments in both directions. One, that customer success is part of the product and should be attributed to cogs. It's part of delivering the software as a service and so you can make the argument in that direction. You could also make the argument that customer success should be a revenue driving function driving renewal and expansion and therefore should be considered a go to market expense to the work that we've done so far. We've chosen to put customer success in go to market expenses as well as account management and other post sale commercial functions.
A
One thing to look at in the future is contra for partners also shows up in cogs. And so that'll be a little bit of a, you know, not so level may not matter for smaller companies, but as it gets bigger. Yeah, okay, thanks.
B
Love it. I think that raising the awareness of this core thing is really important because I think we've been told a story for a very long time that as long as we just keep growing, everything's good. But what happened in 2022 is the market compressed and public SaaS companies stopped getting 20x revenue multiples and started getting 6x median revenue multiples. And when that compression happens, it's going to push into the private markets. You don't see a series B company raising it at 100x revenue and we're never going to see that again. And you can't just have a 5 year CAC payback period, get a 20x revenue multiple anymore and just keep burning so much money till you raise the next round. What's happening right now is you don't get to the next round, you burn so fast because instead of you raising at 20x, you're raising at 6x and therefore you have to grow so much more to command the valuation increase that investor is going to approve. So it's a totally different landscape right now. And I think as business leaders and go to market leaders, just being aware of how much this matters now in terms of most people are a shareholder in a company, some executives quite significantly. Do you want your shares to be worth two times more than what they are right now? Would you rather exit as a CMO and make 5 million instead of 2 million? Probably like that's the difference between spending the budget more efficiently and really starting to figure this out. Which is not something that you fix in a quarter. This is something that you fix over years of time. Six months, you can make some improvements, obvious cost cutting, necessary cost cutting. But over time it's really an ongoing process of dialing in and approving this metric and being able to keep that metric stable while maintaining a significant growth rate. And like I've been talking about on this podcast a lot, a new function will be born out of this stuff. Whether it's a role or a function, in theory, revops should be doing it. It's not happening, but there should be a whole process of just optimizing your revenue factory, being more efficient in this process, spending the money better over here, reallocating investments to be more balanced across the customer life cycle. If grr is going down, how does that impact how much we spend on Google Ads? All of this stuff should be thought about, but it's currently not really. And it's nobody's fault. This is entirely new stuff that the landscape has changed. But there's a real opportunity here. If you think about solving this as a CEO or a cfo, that if you took this number that is currently like we did a company a couple of weeks ago, their number's 447%. It would be one of the worst compared to the public SaaS median. To think that you could take that number and through strategic changes over the next nine months, take that from 450 to 250. Even if you're growing a little bit slower, it's going to double the value of your company. And so for that company, it would probably be $500 million in enterprise value created just by fixing that number. And we need to be able to put that level of perspective in place, which I haven't. This is something that I'm learning new a lot too. But when you think about the value of a business, the value of a business is determined by two core things. One, the cash flow that it can deliver to shareholders and number two, the value that somebody would pay to buy the shares that shareholders own. Those are the two ways that you can impact it. And in a tech company, especially ones that have, you know, been heavily funded, being able to fix the number of how much somebody would pay for the share is a really, really smart way to be able to augment the value of the company.
C
Donna made a great point that even roll of 40 doesn't really capture efficiency well. So she loves this metric.
B
Correct? Go to market. Let's do that for Donna. Sales and marketing expenses on a company's P and L are by far the largest expense. 40, 50% of total re for a venture or private equity funded company where they might spend 12%, 15% on product development, engineering and R and D. And so the go to market expense is the core driver of EBITDA. If you have rule of 40 and you're just way overspending on sales and marketing and all you do is just cut, cut, cut product development, R and D, things like that, it hides the problem in Rule of 40, but it's going to affect you. When you start only spending 6% of revenue on product development and engineering, that's going to catch up with you. And so by just isolating this, the go to market efficiency is truly the biggest driver of ebitda. And focusing upstream on that, I think is an interesting perspective that I've landed on.
C
We've got a couple other questions lined up so we're going to keep him rolling here. This question is from Andre. He's driving so I will ask on his behalf. Can your net new ARR be negative if you have higher churn and contraction?
B
Sure can. Zoom info. Net new ARR is negative. Right now their ARR is declining. Their new logo business and expansion cannot refill the bucket as much as customers are leaving and contracting. Therefore their net new ARR is negative and their ARR growth is negative. So yes, that 100% can happen for other companies that we've analyzed. Maybe their GRR and NRR is less than 100% like NRR, 90%. But they've been able to spend enough money on new logo business to still have net new logo business growing, albeit really, really inefficiently. And so even if you have a NRR GRR problem, it's going to affect you no matter what. It's either you're either going to see it in slowed growth because you can't get enough new logo business to Refill it or it's going to show up and go to market efficiency because you have to spend so much on new logo business to refill the bucket. Either way, those top two metrics would clearly show that problem.
C
Follow up question here. We got a couple of questions around both of these. So in that case, could your go to market efficiency be a negative number then? And then another question around the percentages and what they mean is the lower the percent, the more efficient it is. The higher the percent, the less efficient it is. That's how to think about those percentages.
B
Yeah. The problem is if your growth is negative, then theoretically the number is infinite. That it would cost you an infinite amount of money to grow because you're not growing and you're spending a lot of money. And so we would choose to show not a number and a big warning sign. If that number was negative, that's what it should show. So far our design decision has been to not show that as a negative number, but show it as a. A warning like that. Something is terribly wrong here.
C
Okay, let's see. Stacy had a question about the calculation. She's doing the calculation right now live.
B
Let's go.
A
Well, I just note on my reporting, I don't have immediate access to like add on revenue from add ons and expansions, but I'm assuming that the net new revenue would also include that part of the revenue as well.
B
Net new ARR is defined as everything that comes from both new logo and the net of post sale expansion minus contraction minus churn. And then you add those two things together and then you can get it all together. And the altogether number is really important. But then you could also look at it new logo and expansion that requires you to have a decision making tree of how you categorize the expenses. Because a lot of things will flow across salesforce is used across the whole go to market. And so how do you allocate that expense? Half to post sale, half to new logo. All those decisions eventually have to be made to break it down at that level. And then at Pesetta we'll break it down one more level which is create pipeline, close logos, renew customers, expand accounts. And then there would be a V3 that actually has the revenue architecture model by winning by design that has eight total stages.
A
And one more bonus question, if you'll indulge me. If you broke out the percentages based on like good, better, best or whatever scale you want to use, how would you bucket those percentages? Hmm.
B
In terms of like where you want to be landing as a company. Sidney, if you want to pull up that chart again, I think that you can at least. I don't know if you want to directly translate from the public markets, but I think it's pretty applicable. Go back to that chart so people can see. The conventional wisdom is you want a 12 month CAC payback period. That's what people would write about in the 2010s and where it was created was from direct to consumer e commerce subscription model like Rent the Runway or some subscription box where they tried to convert you on a direct response Facebook ad and it would cost them $60 in advertising costs to get you. And they hope that you stayed for five months so that they made $300 on you and they only spent 60 to get you. But when you start to make it into a B2B sale and long term contracts and expansion potential and the time windows are now in multiple years, not a set of four to six months where the LTV is on some of those subscription boxes, that 12 months really breaks down in a B2B company. I think we've almost never seen be equivalent to 100% on this number. So conventional wisdom says 100%. It seems pretty clear here that you want to be below 200% and the lowest performing in this like range of public companies is 300% to the quote unquote infinity where the growth is negative. But 300 to 500% is a real danger zone when you're only getting 3.6x revenue. You're literally losing money and enterprise value as you acquire customers.
C
Any follow ups on that one, Stacy? Nope.
A
That was super clarifying. Thank you.
C
Cool.
B
Yeah. Target rule be try to be under 200%. If you have strong NRR and you aren't like super wasteful in newogo, you should probably be able to get there. Sidney, I want to draw just a comment in and then we'll get back into the questions. But it's been interesting for me to observe really distinctly between the stages of companies and the mindset of the companies at those stages. And when you look at a series B or newly raised series C company and the mindset in that company versus a series E or like later stage company and the mindset at that company that you can see that it's very clear how all the problems that show up in series D and E companies start at the mindset of series B and C companies. And that I get the luxury of just seeing the problem happen two years later at companies and then just seeing other companies do Doing all the same dumb when they raise $100 million Series C that ends you up in this problem two years later. Companies knowingly wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Google Ads to show signup growth to investors that know that those signups never become a customer, never give them a dollar and they still spend hundreds of thousands a month on it. To pump up a metric to show vanity growth and then to watch the company that's at 150 million that's been doing that for four years and watch that company basically crash and burn at 150 million ARR. Because they did that for four years for signup growth or for a 2K ACV customer and blow $50 million on advertising over four years, that does close to nothing. And so that has been a really interesting insight because all the people that are in series B and series C are just getting instructed to go and spend a million dollars a month. Show me the signup growth, show me new user growth, especially usage based and PLG companies or low ACV trans SaaS. All this like high volume, low deal size type of stuff. It gets real dangerous real fast. And if you don't play it right and you go through your series C scale plan, then 12 months later your growth rate didn't go the way you thought it would go, your sales and marketing efficiency just hits 500, 600%. You have to hit the abort mission button now, cut your sales team in half, reduce the marketing budget, put your company in a spiral for a year to rebuild just by making very irresponsible decisions off of a significant funding round. There is a real pattern here. So for all the companies that are series B and series C that are listening to this, when you do this, just be careful because I'm consistently seeing this pattern. My camera changed, I have no idea why I'm seeing this pattern right now. And I'm just cautioning you that I see the problem when it shows up a couple years later. And it takes years to unwind the problem once you create it. So just try really hard not to create it in the first place.
C
Well, I think you're reading David's mind because he was our next guest and he has a question basically related to exactly what you just said.
A
Somewhat related, absolutely. And I think from where Stacy was coming from, establishing benchmarks for different company stages. So what one does at one stage in the company's evolution might be different from another. And then what's a benchmark, what's good, what's bad look like for the the 10 million to 100 million and 100 million to 500 million and so forth. And I guess it's impossible to know what those benchmarks are because the data that you have right now are based on public companies. So anything smaller you're just not going to have at least you starting to accumulate it.
B
And then I got to say, just because this is what's happening in the private markets from a benchmark perspective doesn't mean that it's right. So like the average or the median you got in private companies would probably give you a number and if that number became your target, you'd be ruining your business.
A
Right.
B
So I think that's something also to be in consideration of.
A
Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's the point of the metric. But I guess so if any leaders of go to market communities are listening to this or any VCs are listening to this and they wanted to put a poll out to their membership or to their companies to try and capture some of this information so we could try and at least establish some benchmarks for non public companies that might be helpful.
B
I think David Spitz is working on collecting self reported data from finance leaders. It wouldn't get into the detail of CRM metrics and things like that, which is fine at this level. It's just financial data. But you get growth rate, sales and marketing efficiency, EBITDA and then self reported. So take it for what it's worth. But I think that would be like the fastest way. So he'll be on the show in less than a month. Maybe we have. I'll push him. Maybe we got something to present for that.
A
That would be very interesting. And I think your points that you just made before I came on is so important. You know, whatever metric we're managed to becomes the metric we work to. So this is a new metric to manage to.
B
Yeah.
A
And so we'll see how it goes.
B
Yeah. Can we pull up the revenue breakpoints one time? I'll explain exactly why this happens. Yeah, so whenever you're doing your series C, right. I don't know, 15 million, 30 million. Somewhere in that range, maybe that. Normally the thing that you think is the problem is the Breakpoint 7 scalability of inputs. Just like the example that I said before. This, what is it? Just drive more signup growth. If we just get more inputs then we'll be able to push it through the funnel like our model says and we'll hit our theoretical thing for our usage based pricing model that has all of these fucking assumptions around how Much our customers expand and use us and then so they raise a series C and they put a foot on the gas on inputs. So it's just bunch of money on the inputs. What happens when you scale up? Volume quality goes down, conversion rates go down, number of SDRs you need to follow up to people go up, number of sales reps you need go up because win rate goes down and you have this inefficiency spiral that's created through this like artificially inflating volume, number of a specific middle stage KPI. And then that company is able to push that all the way. So they're at 30 million, they grow at whatever 30%. So they get to 40 million or 42 million, they go forward again and all of a sudden the conversion totally falls through. And what happens is growth rate slows and then all the costs are still there and go to market. Efficiency goes through the roof. And then what happens is you realize you don't have an inputs problem, you have a cost efficiency problem. And you got to knock the whole building down and build it again. And so the way that companies the growth at all costs scale before when the valuation multiples were different, you could just Pass by number eight, unit economics didn't matter in 2019. You could just spend more money, get 20x revenue multiple, get to 250 and IPO or sell or whatever and you could just skip that whole process with a 5 year CAC payback and it didn't matter. Now you get stuck there and your business dies there if you don't fix it. And so number they push up the inputs, create this inefficiency spiral, then they run into a unit economics problem, then they have to knock the whole building down and start over. Knock the whole building down means like significant cuts and changes to how they, how much they invest and go to market and then try to still when they're doing all those cost reductions still grow at 25%. And that, that becomes like a real challenge to try to. You grew 20% last year, now you're trying to grow 25% next year with half of the go to market investment. You spent 50 million last year, now you have to get the same growth rate at 25 million in invest. And so it becomes really challenging. But that's exactly why that happens. The growth at all costs era. And like the, what do people call it, blitz scaling, that's what people are doing at series C. Five years ago, unit economics didn't matter, right present day when you do that, unit economics really do matter. In 12 to 24 months you're going to run into a real issue for 90% of the companies that try that. And you could literally destroy your company by doing this. The environment is really different than it was three or four years ago.
C
All right, thank you David for your commentary as always. That's kind of all the initial questions we have. I feel like this was a lot to consume. A lot of people in the chat said that they're going to re listen and re watch this to kind of further consume it. But if there's any final comments you want to make or go through that example. Back to the napkin math.
B
Yeah, let's go to the KPI stack one more time so that people can see how their work elevates up to these numbers. So let's do that for a second. As a VP in marketing or a Chief Revenue Officer or a CMO or something like that, you are really in the performance metrics layer, layer three where you need to be able to deliver on unit economics. You need to have a formula of how you're going to grow using a leading KPI that you can measure and achieve in a faster timeframe than close one customers. And you need some type of productivity metrics. And then underneath that you have all of your budget. And so like for a CMO if the company measures and says we have 450% sales and marketing efficiency which is on, you're in the red right there. Like very dangerous territory. If you continue this for a long time, you're going to be in real trouble to know as the CMO that my budget impacts that number, 20% of that number, that the marketing budget of total go to market cost 20, 50% somewhere in that range, that my expenses have a massive impact on whether that number is 250 or 450 and then to be able to think about the expenses that we have, how those expenses are allocated, the actual return, the actual impact of those investments, not what shows up in the influenced revenue report, not that we can track a touch for it, that the actualized impact of those things and then be able to think if this number is 450%, my stuff cannot possibly be working. It's impossible for that number to be that and for the marketing investment to be working. And so I think just seeing how this breaks down where you have growth rate sales and marketing efficiency at the top, then you have all the ARR waterfall data so you have like new logo expansion, churn contraction, total cac. Then you go to the next level and you have like this is how much it costs us to create pipeline. This is what our per rep productivity is, how much revenue we close per rep, what our expansion and conversion rates are. And being able to use all that insight to say, okay, with these numbers, this is how I'm going to deploy the $10 million budget. If you were in that situation, you might say, okay, I'm not going to deploy 10 million next year, we're going to deploy 6 million which means that we need to reduce headcount by 33% and we're going to move programs over here and I'm going to get better impact on 6 million by making these strategic changes where we focus the 6 million on these three places where we have the biggest opportunities. That is a big boy, big girl decision when you sit in the, in the CMO seat to make that recommendation given the business situation and I rarely hear it. And so we just as revenue leaders, we need to be thinking and seeing the data in the eyes of what the finance team is looking at. We need that alignment and we need that insight when we deploy our budget and plan and make decisions. We need the insight of these numbers. It's going to guide how like even the most basic parts of planning, if you know that number is 450% and you know it needs to come down to 250% next year, you know that the budget has to go down. And so I think that this connection and these insights becomes so important for revenue leadership to have the context around the financials to really drive these, these decisions, which they're different challenges than most revenue leaders have faced before. They really are. So with all that, we can stop the screen share. If any other questions came up, I'll give a second here on that. Otherwise, happy to end a little bit early. We got the Labor Day holiday coming up this weekend. We will be back here again on, on that Tuesday after the holiday. So feel free to join again. The new link is live. Delete the old link on your calendar. The new one is, is the real one. Same time, same, same stuff. And then we have a couple of events coming up in September, so feel free to join those as you would. Some really great stuff happening. I think a lot of momentum here. So thanks y' all for being here. Hope it was valuable re listen to it, try to, try to take it in, try to understand the concept, try to see how the, see how it's put together, see how these metrics are just the adding up, the combining of a lot of smaller metrics that we can control in how we spend our budget and the conversion rate between stages and what our deal size is. And bubbling nulls. All those go to market metrics, up and down to the top level financial metrics. So take some time to relisten. We'll be back for more questions next week. Thank you all for being here and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye Sa.
Podcast: GTM Live
Date: September 3, 2024
Hosts: Carolyn Dilks & Trevor Gibson (Passetto)
Special thanks: Chris Walker (brief intro), analysis from David Spitz
This episode dives deep into the relationship between Go-To-Market (GTM) efficiency and enterprise value/revenue multiples, primarily for high-performing B2B SaaS companies. Building on fresh, proprietary data from David Spitz at BenchSights, the hosts make the case that two financial metrics—growth rate and GTM efficiency—are the primary drivers of enterprise value, upending the focus on outdated indicators like CAC payback and Rule of 40.
Main theme: Why GTM efficiency has become more critical than ever for both public and private SaaS enterprises, and how founders, revenue, and finance leaders should measure and act on this insight.
Quote:
"All you need to really understand the health of a mature, well-performing company is two numbers: growth rate and go to market efficiency percentage." — [03:00]
Quote:
"This can make swings in hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of what a company is worth." — [02:35]
Comparative Example [08:00]:
Quote:
"You could make the argument that customer success should be a revenue driving function... To the work that we've done so far, we've chosen to put customer success in go to market expenses." — [10:35]
Quote:
"Go to market expense is the core driver of EBITDA." — [15:08]
Quote:
"If your growth is negative, then theoretically the number is infinite... a big warning sign." — [17:22]
Quote:
"Target rule: try to be under 200%. If you have strong NRR and aren’t super wasteful in new logo, you should probably be able to get there." — [20:49]
Quote:
"All the problems that show up in series D and E companies start at the mindset of series B and C companies... Companies knowingly wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Google Ads to show signup growth to investors that know those signups never become a customer." — [21:04]
Quote:
"If you were in that situation, you might say, okay, I'm not going to deploy $10 million next year; we’re going to deploy $6 million... and get better impact by making these strategic changes." — [29:50]
Direct, data-driven, honest, and practical—skewed toward boardroom realities for SaaS CEOs, CFOs, and GTM leaders. Little patience for vanity metrics, strong advocacy for financially literate, efficiency-centric GTM leadership.
GTM efficiency is now a principal driver of SaaS company value—measure it, manage it, and focus your revenue leadership, or expect investor penalties and destroyed equity. Most other KPIs can be replaced by two numbers: growth rate and GTM efficiency percentage.
Public data makes it clear: sub-175% efficiency? 10x revenue multiple; above 250%? Just 3.6x. Use this in your boardroom now.
Next Up:
Tune in September 24 for a deep dive with David Spitz on private benchmarks and more actionable tips for SaaS leaders.