Platforms for tracking SaaS metrics?

lnick · 2023-05-17T17:35:28+00:00

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I am looking for recommendations for software's that track SaaS metrics? I am wanting something that calculates metrics such as CLV, CAC, Customer Churn, NRR, GRR & more. Any suggestions of platforms you have used & liked would be appreciated.

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Ed Powers

Agree with @Doug Havlik and @Rich Rans to start with Excel first, then look at other solutions. I would add that if you just want to capture the financial metrics, applications like ProfitWell and Paddle can help.

One thing I recommend to my consulting clients is not to rely on financial metrics to make operational decisions. You will need them to understand long-term, gross trends, but in Customer Success you're much more concerned with ACV (bookings) than ARR (recognized revenue). That's because what you do more directly influences customer decisions, which are reflected in bookings, not ARR. Obtaining booking information from your CRM and associating it with product usage behaviors and KPIs (e.g., CSAT, customer goal achievement, cadence, account coverage, TTV, etc.) is essential. Once you build your data model, you can then build predictive models for Customer Health Scores and study cause-and-effect relationships for process improvement in Customer Success. Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and other Customer Success-specific applications, such as Immersa.ai, are helpful to connect, extract, and clean data to support it.

Keep in mind data visualization isn't data analysis.

Doug Havlik

@Rich Rans, agree with everything you said about starting in a spreadsheet. In my case, the spreadsheet starts with my export of all Deals from ChurnZero (the Deals are from the HubSpot sync). My building and reporting of these continues to turn into conversations with our CS VM and our Manager of CSMs to work through all of those nuances, and well as conversations with our sales/renewals ops.

This week, I moved it from Excel to Power Query/Power BI because the Excel got messy and complex enough that I was having trouble following my work as I make changes from week to week.

Rich Rans

I always suggest starting by extracting the data into a spreadsheet and do your calculations there. The reasons being:

you can see what data you have and/or may be missing
Even though these metrics have standard definitions, there is always some nuance in how it applies at your company and with your data. Your formulas will evolve as you define exactly how to make these calculations. Those changes are easier to implement and test in a spreadsheet than they are in a platform.

Once you understand how to perform the calculations, then implement them in the tool of choice so that you can have real-time data without manual intervention. This could be in our CRM (I've seen it implemented in Salesforce) or in your CSP.

NaomiAiken

Hi Lisa,

Most Customer success platforms (CSPs) track metrics like these in some form or another. Do you have a CSP yet? And more importantly, does your CSP have good data? No matter which CSP you use, if it does not have accurate data powering it, no tool will give you the accurate calcs you need.

I noticed that ChurnZero recently released a Renewal and Forecasting Hub that easily shows you NRR, GRR, etc. Might want to check that one out.

Naomi

Michelle Wideman

Hi @lnick I've found the CSM successful in providing this info. Here's a good overview of options from a prior post: https://gaingrowretain.com/kb/articles/43-successcape-by-ggr. We also use Tableau to provide this information.