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Revenue Operations is on everyone’s mind right now. And they should be.

• Gartner claims that 75% of the world’s highest growth companies look to deploy a RevOps model by 2025.

• When companies align people, processes, and technology, they achieve 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability, according to Forrester.

• 21% of companies that hired a RevOps function see an increase in alignment as well as productivity across their GTM teams.

These numbers speak for themselves. Revenue Operators have impact.

But after talking to 100s of RevOps folks, they all say the same thing:

“I want to do important strategic work, but I’m stuck in my tools without anyone to save me.”

RevOps are involved in a lot of processes, across departments and the entire business. Despite this, it’s still difficult for them to see the direct impact they have on revenue. That goes for how others in the organization see them too.

Having an understanding of the full funnel – clearly seeing how everything in the business is connected – that is the superpower of the revenue operator. Not utilizing it fully is foolish.

The Problem Today

Revenue Operators are the ones responsible for servicing other teams and departments, making sure their processes run smoothly. But when it comes to making strategic decisions, they’re often left out because they’re just doing “tools”.

These tasks are all important, but they rarely have much impact on revenue. However, there are three focus areas that do move the revenue needle:

Bottom-up planning: Focused on actual numbers and realistic goals, hunting down gaps, resource allocation, and testing out budgets. But today this usually happens in a depressing sheet named ‘FY24_plan_Q1_24, V.1.4.23’, or similar, that was never created for the purpose of complex planning in the first place. And, sure, your plans might start off promisingly enough and you manage to hit the targets for Q1. But soon your plan becomes infected with hidden assumptions, complex formulas, and even human error – making it impossible to trust, and even interpret.

Monitoring the full funnel: Moving from being seen as a (mere) System Administrator, to a strategic Revenue Operator, you need to guide the business towards where the biggest opportunities are and articulate the solutions. However, today’s disconnected go-to-market systems and lack of granular targets make it impossible to identify the true root causes of where the business starts to go wrong. And BI can’t solve this alone.

Running business reviews (QBRs): Here’s where good revenue operators find opportunities for growth. Sadly, these happen 90 days too late and mostly consist of pointing fingers, and rarely lead to real improvements.

These problems are too difficult and expensive to get rid of. At least until yesterday. 

Today, you have Growblocks.

Finally – a Solution

The world’s first purpose-built revops platform for revenue operators: Growblocks.

Now, you can:

Create Accurate Bottom-up Plans 

Quickly calculate your baseline and identify the gaps before you start adding actions – your bottom-up planning done in minutes, not days.

We all know the feeling. You’ve been planning for months, confident that you’re ahead of schedule, when someone asks you to move some numbers around “just to see what impact it would have”. Too familiar, and never fun.

Growblocks enables you to create an accurate bottom-up plan, while showing you the revenue impact of any new investment. And it will just take you a few moments.

• Add planned actions such as hires, price changes or projects

• Add assumptions to improvements, such as leads or conversion rates

• See the revenue impact in seconds

With Growblocks you can quickly draft a what-if or best case scenario to test your ideas out. This lets you immediately understand what those lower ACVs and dropped conversion rates mean for the budget, and what impact a new hire or marketing effort will have.

You’ll get the full picture, how you can allocate resources efficiently, and what significance your initiatives have for the business as a whole.

Understanding the immediate effect of your plan is invaluable. And you’ll reap the same benefits when outlining your next move too. Whether that’s an entirely new market segment, a new department, or finding new marketing tricks to convince your Nay-sayers.

On top of this, when everyone can see how you’re achieving your target and understand why, they’re much more likely to buy into your plan. Improving planning gives revenue operators a better chance to make smarter decisions, stay ahead of customer needs, and optimize their sales and marketing strategies.

Monitor Revenue and Solve Issues Instantly One Place

Growblocks lets you monitor your entire funnel metrics, with all and any of its volume and efficiency metrics, and signals you when something is off.

All of a sudden you’re able to not only monitor and detect issues, but articulate a solution as well. A plan is only good if it works, and it’s up to you to keep an eye on it and adjust at all times.

And the sooner you’re notified, the sooner you can act. Growblocks instantly gives you full funnel visibility to track targets, actuals and your projected performance, all in one single place.

• Volume metrics: Traffic, leads, opportunities, customers, revenue etc.

• Efficiency metrics: ACVs, CVRs, Sales cycle length etc

• Dimensions & filters: Revenue stream, region, attribution, traffic grouping, product

• Performance signals and flagging

It shows you exactly what’s happening and why it happened, letting you claim a more proactive role – someone that oversees and engages with the entire revenue production. You’re able to run what-if analysis and best case scenarios, and much faster than before.

Having this complete oversight will let you act in time, guaranteeing smoother sales processes, increased conversion rates, and ultimately, more revenue.

And don’t worry, you’re still getting all of your favorite data stuff. Growblocks integrates with +200 commercial tools. It just lets you add so much more.

Create Reliable QBRs Faster

Detailed reporting with cause-effect relationships and a full-funnel view.

The struggle of working with reviewing multiple funnels is something many will recognize. The funnels are filled with different motions of different sizes, and in different segments on different markets. The amount of data quickly adds up, and creating a report becomes both difficult and extremely time-consuming.

Growblocks does it all in minutes. And in detail.

With Growblocks you can create your reports and reviews much faster, and you can dive much deeper into your revenue streams using filters and drills.

You’ll have a full-funnel view, with clear cause-effect relationships and precise root cause analysis, and you can even export your findings as slides for that end-of-the-day presentation – how neat!

• See how the quarter ended across all metrics

• Identify root-causes of missed revenue targets

• Review impact of actions, such as hires and projects

• Add outcomes from QBRs as actions to your plan to estimate revenue impact

And the best part? With our projections, you’re able to use the past to understand how next quarter looks – and this is where you can make an immediate impact on revenue.

Creating a smoother process for yourself will free up resources for you to focus on important insights, and you won’t have to lumber down into the gloomy mines for more data gathering.

It’s Time to Have an Impact

To deliver your best work, and to improve the work of others, you need to make sure you’re giving yourself as a Revenue Operator a chance.

Have a look at Growblocks, understand how it will improve your work, revenue, and results, and book yourself a demo.

Deciding on how, when, and where to spend resources is essential for all businesses. Any little slip can cost you months of progress, trust between stakeholders could be lost, and missed opportunities might never come back.

You need to find out which channels, markets, or products are the most efficient for you. And which of them you can scale up.

Getting an overview is an important first step. Thankfully, there are simple ways for you to do this.

Let me introduce a particularly helpful box.

What’s in the (Grow-)Box?

Toni’s Growbox looks like this:

Toni’s Growbox – Scalability/Efficiency Model

If it seems familiar, it’s because it probably is. 

Maybe you’ve come across the Boston Consulting Group Matrix? It’s a planning framework that was developed by Bruce Henderson at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) back in the 1970’s.

Their matrix looks like this:

Boston Consulting Group Matrix

They’re a little similar, right?

The BCG Matrix has historically been used by large organizations with diverse portfolios to evaluate the state of their products and services. It’s used to map out offers according to their Market Growth and Relative Market Share.

Just like the Berkshire Hathaways of the world, you can use it to identify potential growth yourself.

You just have to adapt it to suit your needs first. Like Toni did.

Boxing Like A Heavyweight

Toni’s Growbox (fancier)

Toni’s model – his Growbox – is a two-by-two plot graph with two axes. One axis representing Efficiency (measured as CAC Payback) and the other Scalability. Naturally, the higher the efficiency and scalability, the better.

The reason why you want to differentiate these two dimensions is simple: some really efficient channels or markets simply can’t be scaled up. And some really high-growth alternatives are just way too inefficient for you to spend on.

Plotting your initiatives like this is an easy way to help everyone see where investments should go.

So, let’s get into the details. 

In the example above, I’ve plotted marketing channels into the four quadrants. The Stars are the top performers, the Cash Cows are trusted and stable, the Dogs are underperforming, and the Question Mark requires consideration, as they represent uncertain growth potential and could end up as either Stars or Dogs, based on their efficiency once matured.

Plotting out channels like this quickly shows how current investments are doing and where there’s room to grow. Is it possible to increase Google search, and would that be efficient? Is it wiser to use those resources trying to improve my SDRs instead? Or, should I put more emphasis on paid social?

Looking at the four categories in a product life cycle model, they become even clearer. Your Question Marks still have their undetermined potential, the Stars are growing strong, Cash Cows are matured and plateauing out, and your Dogs are declining and you should consider putting them down.

Channel or Market life cycle model

If you want to make the picture slightly more complex, you can also introduce different sizes to your plotted bubbles – indicating the current size of the channel. This will help you understand the impact of growing that particular channel or market over another. 

Just map out your intended markets in the same quadrants, categorize them as Dogs, Stars, Cows, and Question Marks, and you get the same, immediate overview.

Toni’s Growbox with Markets

Domesticating Dogs and Cows

Now that you’ve plotted, it’s time to put your plan into action. 

Stars

As your Stars represent initiatives with both high efficiency and high scalability, your strategy should be to invest heavily and take advantage of their potential. The problem will be that as the more you invest, the less efficiency that channel/market will have – let’s call that Toni’s Law, for simplicity’s sake. Invest too much, too fast, and you can turn that brightly shining Star into an enigmatic Question Mark, as you no longer can be sure that your investment will generate enough value for you.

So, in order to make sure your Star stays a Star, you will also need to deploy efficiency improvements. In other words, the Stars will not only demand a lion’s share of your money, but most of the brain power in your organization too. You will likely end up spending more than half of your resources on your stars. And that’s a good thing – it’s worth it.

Cash Cows

Your Cows are well-established and represent stable cash flow in low-growth markets. It might not sound exciting, but on the other hand they should require little investment and can be trusted to still generate cash.

You can think of your Google search as your Cash Cow when viewing it through the channel lens. You can just leave it be, of course, and let it generate leads for you in peace. Or, you could up your spending. But allocating those extra funds would probably not give you much in return.

What you should be doing is to find out where you could cut costs while having as little impact as possible. If you can find and free up resources to spend elsewhere, without changing how your Cows perform, you’ve wrangled them better than most. And that cash can then be re-deployed to your Stars.

Dogs

These have low scalability and efficiency, and will generate little value for you. They don’t require significant resources from you, but they also yield low returns. This makes them inefficient in terms of spending any time or resources to try to get them to perform.

You need to decide if it’s worth taking a chance on them. Can you improve on the cost per lead or conversion rates, for example? If you can’t, or if your Dogs don’t complement or enhance the rest of your plans, you should consider divesting to avoid tying up resources. In short: reduce what you spend on them and improve quickly, or call the dog pound.

There is a caveat here, as you might operate with channels that won’t get any attribution in your data. For example, that out-of-home advertising you did on the 101 (the tech highway in the Bay Area), or your cab campaign in NYC (btw, those are cheaper than you think), won’t suddenly pop up as high-yield channels in your CRM.

Question Marks

Your Question Marks have potential, but suffer from uncertain efficiency. You just don’t know enough about them yet. If you’re starting up a new channel or trying to get foothold on a new market – that would be your Question Marks.

As you can’t rely on their efficiency, and slightly tweaking the allocated numbers won’t give you the answers you need, you’ll need to figure out what your Question Marks are – almost like a product market fit. This is important work, as the Question Marks also represent your future growth – they will become your new Stars once your current ones have plateaued.

A good example of this is Zoom. During COVID, everyone and their aunts jumped onto the software, it instantly exploded, and a videoconferencing Star was born. But the meteoric rise of their product also exhausted their planned roadmap and all their projected S curves. They were plateauing and needed new ways to grow. Enter Zoom Webinars and Zoom Events, and Zoom Connected Conference rooms and Zoom Appointment Schedulers – aka. Zoom Question Marks. Their initiatives paid off, business continued to boom, and the search for their next Star could begin.

With the right investment case, your Question Marks can become your Stars, but you should also be prepared for them to turn into Dogs if they fail to gain traction. The best way to treat your Question Marks is to invest carefully, focus on efficiency gains, and then invest aggressively when you get there.

In the ‘Growth at all Costs’ era Question Marks typically got insane amounts of investments, as it was argued that more investments will help drive efficiency-improvements. Only in some very rare cases this proved to be the case.

Model Behavior – for Retention and Acquisition

The Growbox is a way to quickly analyze resource allocation based on scalability and efficiency, and it works equally well whether you’re looking at acquisition or retention.

However, like all models and matrices, the Growbox won’t give you all the answers. It’s just a first step towards making better decisions. The model has problems with oversimplification, limited focus on market share, and perhaps a lack of truly actionable guidance.

To make better decisions, you should always look to complement the Growbox model with other strategic analysis tools – perhaps even Growblocks?

Now, Enter the Matrix

Something as sensitive as capital allocation can be made easy. Force yourself to categorize your offer and you get a better overview and understanding of how you should distribute your resources. Mapping out your allocation this way in a model is a tremendous help for planning and testing strategies, both in the short-term and long.

There’s a Revenue Formula episode on this exact theme, where Toni and Mikkel dive deeper. Listen to it here:

See you later, allocator!

You’ve probably run into NPS surveys everywhere.

Maybe you’ve been approached in the street by a person armed with a clipboard and questions. Or perhaps you’ve been caught by a pop-up window demanding you to rate your experience of an online purchase? At times they even prompt you with a recommendation as soon as you land on the page – completely pointless.

You know what I’m talking about, right?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t some new metric. Back in 2003, Bain & Company developed the system to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction by how likely they are to recommend a company, product, or service to others. The NPS is based on this simple question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?”

Respondents are put into three categories depending on how happy they are to recommend: 

• Detractors (0-6)
• Passives (7-8)
• Promoters (9-10)

The NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, resulting in a score that ranges from -100 to +100.

For context, the average NPS score for B2B SaaS is somewhere between 31-50.

This single number is then supposed to provide organizations with valuable insights into their customers’ overall attitudes, and also act as a powerful indicator of business growth and customer retention.

Surely, a little too good to be true.

The Problems with Net Promoter Score

Too Oversimplified

You ask a single question, “How likely are you to recommend us?” and expect your customers to encapsulate their entire experience with you in a single number. Things are more complex than that. Try asking someone to describe a twelve-course dinner they had with a single color. It just doesn’t work like that.

People Play Games

Many companies have resorted to gaming their NPS to inflate their scores. The tactics range from selective surveying of only happy customers to offering incentives in exchange for some positive feedback. Practices like this undermine the integrity of the NPS system and distort their customer satisfaction. Gaming the NPS leads to a misrepresentation of customer happiness, restricting any accurate data analysis, and prevents companies from addressing the real issues that are affecting their customers.

Three Categories to Fit Everyone

NPS classifies your customers into either Promoters, Passives, or Detractors, depending on how they score. Great. But does that tell you anything about the respondents themselves? All you know now is how they feel about recommending a product or service, and nothing about why they feel that way. It makes it impossible to draw conclusions or get any real insights.

Likelihood to Recommend – That’s It? 

NPS focuses solely on the likelihood of a recommendation, but something as intricate as customer satisfaction is not a one-size-fits-all situation. It’s like judging a movie solely based on the popcorn you eat while watching. What about the plot, the acting, or even the soundtrack? NPS can only give you one thing, and you’re often left with just a popcorn score.

Split Personalities

Your users can be both Promoters and Detractors at the same time, depending on who they’re recommending your product or service to. Think of it like this: are you likely to recommend a holiday destination to all your friends equally? If it’s a lively destination with foam parties and all-night clubbing, then sure, some might love your recommendation. But those looking for a peaceful and family-friendly place probably won’t. This clearly impacts the NPS your user is giving, and your score might be off because of it.

Just a Score in a Vacuum

Now you’ve got your NPS from your survey – let’s say it’s 41. What does that mean? Is that a good score? Mediocre? Or even worryingly bad? How did your competitors score? Did they even use the same methodology? This exercise has now turned into a game where you’re unsure if you’re winning or losing. The limitations of working with arbitrary numbers only bring more questions, confusion, and problems. In the end, you won’t get any qualitative insights that help you make real improvements.

A Starting Point, Not the Finish Line

Analyzing your NPS is a bit like trying to read a book by only going off the back of it. It might give you an idea of what the book is about, but to truly get the full story you need to properly dive in. NPS is just the tip of the customer feedback iceberg, and you need to combine NPS with other mechanisms to get the answers you were hoping for.

Actions Speak Louder than NPS Numbers

Knowing your NPS alone won’t magically fix any of your problems either. You need to make something useful with it. You need to get involved when looking for answers, and you need to look with purpose.

Do you want to measure and drive word of mouth, or is it retention that you’re after? They mean different things for NPS.

You need to take the feedback and try to find patterns. Look deeper, find the issues, and make actionable plans for them. That’s how you can start to make real improvements – how Detractors become Promoters.

So, NPS Is Not That Good – Now What?

Talk to People, People

Pick up a phone. Send an email. Go for an overpriced coffee. And ask questions. 

Talk to your customers at key moments. Why do they buy your service? What are they hoping to get out of their investment? Why did they opt out of your subscription?

Ask your active users what made them buy into your solution in the first place. Where were they when they decided to go with you? Where did the customers hesitate, and when were they convinced?

Every opinion matters – especially those coming from the rage quitters. Exit interviews can be incredibly valuable, as the ones that left you are usually the ones with the most important insights. Since they’re already out the door, they have little to lose and will let loose with brutal honesty.

This isn’t something to be scared of. Take their feedback for what it is and put it in the context of what you set out to find out.

Maybe their annoyances are something as small as the size of the buttons they had to click. Or the software might have been too unintuitive and slow for them to work with. They might have some strange system integrations pet peeve. Or perhaps they simply couldn’t stand that irritating notification sound your product makes?

There are tons of things to learn from just asking. The insights are valuable for your entire business and everyone in the organization should care. From your AEs and CSMs to UX designers and CFOs.

You should always look deeper and understand. You will learn something, and what you find are usually insights you can bring to the board and investors.

Get Your Referrals On

Finding your Promoters can be valuable, as these customers are most likely to refer your business to others. Now you can leverage their positive sentiment by nudging them for a referral of your business. You can do this through personalized programs, discounts, incentives, or exclusive offers. By reaching out to promoters and tapping into their willingness to recommend your business, you can significantly increase the number of referrals you receive.

You also need to make it easy for people to talk about your product. Let your users know what your product does, make your message easy to understand, and then teach them to pitch it for you. PLG expert Leah Tharin touched on this in a previous podcast of ours: “If you cannot explain to me what your product does, how can I explain it to someone else?”

Make your product shareable. Happy users want to share their progress and the work they’re achieving. Let them. They are great ambassadors for you. Prompt users to share their progress and your product within the application itself by connecting it to relevant platforms. You can even have a “Share this with a friend” message pop up at opportune moments.

You can always put the acquisition cost of a new customer in a referral context. Look at your MQL costs from LinkedIn, for example. Once broken down, what you’re paying for a qualified lead on LI is then also your budget for referrals. Your targeting will likely even be more precise than when you pay for the ad.

What’s the Total Score Here?

There’s no way around it – Net Promoter Score has its drawbacks. It oversimplifies the customer experience, it’s easily gamed, and it lacks context and actionable insights.

But, there’s hope. When you combine it with other feedback mechanisms, NPS can provide a starting point for understanding customer perception. Engaging in meaningful conversations, gathering feedback at key moments, and encouraging referrals can lead to improvements.

Did you like this blog post? On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend it?

Our founder Toni talked to Mikkel about NPS and more on this week’s Revenue Formula. Check it out here:

Your CSM supports your customers as they transition from won customers to active product users. They focus on building loyalty and long-term client relationships, and the same rep will often stay with their customers as long as they are with your business.

To separate the CSM from sales a bit, think of it like this: your salespeople get customers in, and your CSM makes them stay with you.

So, why is customer success such a big deal?

Subscription is King

Freemium, pay-as-you-go, and tiered fixed fees are all different subscription models. There are more, of course, and it seems like they’re all here to stay.

Customers are drawn to the convenience and flexibility that’s offered through subscriptions, and they appreciate the hassle-free ways they access products and services regularly. Being able to also easily opt out of their plan if it’s not a good fit only adds to this.

And, from streaming services for $10 a month to dinner kits for $100 a month to B2B software for $100k a year – it is now a subscriber’s world.

Adapt or Die

Instead of panicking, many companies realized the power of subscriptions: they generate recurring revenue.

What these companies need to do now is to find ways to provide consistent value throughout their customers’ life cycle. If they provide a recurring impact, there’s no need for customers to change anything.

Voilà – recurring revenue!

But, just throwing customers onto a complex and difficult-to-understand product might not get them to derive that value. This is a particularly important lesson for B2B software companies.

They might not think the product is effective enough without proper onboarding and guidance. Or that it doesn’t cure their particular headaches. Maybe it’s just an ongoing conversation that’s missing – perhaps even a valuable one, full of important insights?

The sales rep promised them the world, but to realize this value, the user also needs to be able to use the product. And often.

In many cases, your recurring impact comes from one place: your CSM.

And, yes – many will cry out “No! It’s the product!”.

Ok. Sure.

But with complex tools, in particular, you need the other side as well.

This Time It’s Personal

Think of your business as a gym. The salespeople and AEs are the ones making phone calls, sending emails, knocking on doors, and trying to sell gym memberships around town. Their job goal is to get as many new sign-ups as possible.

Your CSM team would be the personal trainers of your gym in this analogy, and their job is a little different. Instead of chasing new customers, they keep track of your existing customers’ progress and help them reach their individual goals.

Just like personal trainers push clients to complete that extra rep or lap, the CSMs keep customers motivated and informed on their progress, and ensure they’re using your product to their full potential.

As your CSM continues to support their customers, they will also get a deeper understanding of and can tailor their services better. Now, armed with greater knowledge, they can provide even more accurate coaching and advice for the customer and trust is built.

But your CSM is not merely selling. They understand their customer’s needs now and can give better advice. The addons, payment plans, package upgrades, or consultancy services they suggest are all things that will make a difference for the client.

And any success they have will be a shared one, as finding the right solutions at the right time will only strengthen the relationship further.

Understanding how to best work with your Customer Success and subscription offers will help you create better scalability. What’s more, being able to prove a recurring revenue will be attractive to any potential investors.

And speaking of subscriptions… don’t miss out on joining our founder Toni on Substack, where he shares his thoughts on B2B SaaS (and occasionally other things).

Punchy and controversial headline? Check.

Muddy acronym to keep amateurs away? Check.

Reader hooked for a few leisurely minutes? Check.

Great.

Let’s start with what CAC stands for.

This is your Customer Acquisition Cost; how much you spend to convert new customers. You get this number by adding up all your costs to acquire new customers over a certain time period. Those costs will most likely be your Sales and Marketing expenses for the period.

Tada – there’s your CAC!

This approach is simple enough, but the problem is that there’s no universally accepted way of approaching and calculating CAC. And, if you think about it, that kind of makes sense – all parameters just aren’t equally important for all businesses.

CAC isn’t a properly “audited” number that is regulated – it’s simply a made-up metric.

The problem with this is that it then lets everyone tweak their CAC numbers to their advantage. Some will leave out counting sales reps that aren’t fully ramped yet, or people that were let go. Others might argue that Recruiting Costs should not be part of it at all. A third one takes it to the extreme and even adds partial rent and lunch expenses. A fourth might add CSM costs or Account Management to the total.

To make matters worse, in many cases these calculations are simply “wrong”.

Because of this, the metrics of CAC are very, very flexible.

“Is It Loaded?”

So then by default, CAC is something of a loose metric, and an investor asking “Is the CAC fully loaded or not?”, is not at all uncommon.

The reason why they’re curious about this is that people tend to get hyper-creative with their CAC, and like to take things out of it, rather than putting anything in. The “Fully loaded question” is testing you on this – they’re really asking “How much did you fiddle with this number?”.

But your CAC troubles won’t stop there.

Once you played around with the CAC definition, now you are asked to use it for CAC-to-LTW, or some other metric, and – you guessed it – all of it will be completely useless and the whole thing won’t make sense anymore.

Ok, but let’s say you’ve managed to figure it out and you now have a solid, clean CAC definition.

What do you do with it? What can you do with that number?

Is it a good thing to have $10M CAC or $100M CAC? And even if you break it down per customer, does it actually tell you anything other than that one company has 10k CAC per customer and another one has 100k in CAC per customer?

Honestly, your CAC is not particularily useful by itself.

The Superior Key Metric

Instead, you should be looking at your CAC Payback, also known as your break-even point. This is the time it takes the company to recoup its spending. Intuitively, the shorter the Payback period – the better the business is doing.

Determining your CAC Payback is better for more than one reason.

Firstly, it shows you the true efficiency of your sales and customer acquisition. Getting those numbers will then enable you to reallocate funds into growth plans and even more customers.

The value in finding your CAC Payback is that it gives you a metric that’s comparable to others, and your CAC is no longer floating around in some vacuum.

Longterm, you should even aim to break down your organization into tiny little CAC Payback streams and get an even better understanding of their efficiencies. Once you do this, you can actually now start using your CAC Payback as an actionable metric.

Is your CAC Payback the highest in the US? 

Or at its highest in your Outbound? 

Or even Outbound within the US?

These are insights you can use and plan around. Maybe you want to make a big play for the US market? Then this is the way to go.

But if you are actually worried about cash and are trying to find the cheapest ways to grow, well then just steer your budget away from the expensive stuff, and move towards the cheaper ones.

Much smarter, right?

CAC by itself is not very reliable, but its cool cousin CAC Payback is the sort of friend that will help you move, come pick you up at the airport, and actually give you real help in running your business.

Toni and Mikkel talked more in-depth about why “CAC is caca” in our podcast The Revenue Formula. When you want to learn more, you find it right here:

“So, where do I begin?”, I asked myself. 

On my first day here at the office I felt a little lost. Funnels, flywheels, and bow ties were apparently some very important models? I was also immediately peppered with a million acronyms in SaaSian short-speech. ACVs and CVRs. BOFU, MOFU, and TOFU. And then onto NDR, SAL, and TAM. 

What was I thinking?

The most sought after positions on the job market right now are within RevOps, so I imagine there are other people feeling the same things as me: starting a new job at a B2B SaaS company in RevOps is very exciting, but it can also feel somewhat overwhelming. 

There are a lot of great blogs and people to keep tabs on, of course, but I learn best from listening. I’ve gathered up a list of Podcasts and thought I’d share it with you. Maybe it could be just what you’re looking for, or maybe this is just the thing for that person starting on Monday?

1: OG Ops Podcast

Launched at the start of the year, the OG Ops Podcast invites people that are actively working in operations to share their stories and lessons learned – all expertly hosted by Jordan Henderson and Brandon Redlinger.

Why it could be for you: The conversations are relaxed and non-scripted (but still tightly packed with insights), and their less-than-dead-serious tone is inviting and entertaining.

A good place to start is:

2: B2B SaaS CEOs

Josef Fallesen of Vaam hopes to be the world’s best B2B SaaS CEO one day. Cunningly, he uses the podcast B2B SaaS CEOs as his vehicle to get there. Join him if you’re into picking the brains of inspirational leaders and entrepreneurs.

Why it could be for you: Even if you’re not aiming for boardrooms or shareholder meetings, the episodes are chock-full of important insights and lessons from small startups that made it big. Crispy, Scandinavian accents and brilliant minds – What’s not to love? 

A good place to start is:

3: RevOps Therapy

Listening in on Revops Therapy and the guests of the show will give great insights from skillful revenue operators and their different work processes. You hear about the lessons they’ve learned, which pitfalls to avoid, and why data is king.

Why it could be for you: Inspirational people armed with wonderful storytelling and interesting perspectives from every corner of the SaaS world. 

A good place to start is:

4: FINITE: B2B Marketing Podcast for Tech, Software & SaaS

For your shorter commuting needs, the FINITE: B2B Marketing Podcast for Tech, Software & SaaS could be just the thing. This show invites (mostly) marketing guests to talk about trends, growth, and marketing in the SaaS sphere.

Why it could be for you: Short, sweet, and to-the-point. All episodes clock between 20 and 30 minutes, and each show is focused on one specific issue. Handy!

A good place to start is:

5: Predictable Revenue Podcast

Purpose-driven prospecting, how to get limitless leads, how to get your customers to trust you – AND MORE! All in the Predictable Revenue Podcast .

Why it could be for you: There’s a patience in the way host Collin Stewart cajoles the nuggets and truths from his many successful guests. Thanks to both format and tempo, the flow of the episodes is inviting, and they’re conveniently snack-packed in less than an hour.

A good place to start is:

6: The SaaS Podcast with Omer Khan

Founders, bootstrappers, and proven SaaS know-it-alls take turns filling the episodes of The SaaS Podcast with Omer Khan to the brim with insights, lessons, and stories from the industry. 

Why it could be for you: The guests share their own journeys with intimacy, and both failures and successes are happily discussed. Khan lets the conversation ebb and flow, which makes the episodes feel like chats between old buddies, rather than a court hearings.

A good place to start is:

7: Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast

Here’s an established podcast for all your data driven B2B needs. Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast invites guests to openly talk navigating through data, instead of opinions. It’s hosted by account-based marketer/genius, Corrina Owens, and GTM enablement wizard Danny Wasserman – both fantastic.

Why it could be for you: The show is well produced, the episodes are appetizingly short, and the content is relevant for anyone living in a Go-To-Market world.

A good place to start is:

8: Startups For the Rest of US

At the time of writing, Startups For the Rest of Us is on its (beastly) episode 666, so they must be doing a lot of things right. The show is heavily focused on SaaS business and their founders, and tells the stories of entrepreneurs, developers, and designers getting their software off the ground and propelled into the stratosphere. 

Why it could be for you: Accessible language and tips for us newbies, a wide catalog on all things startup-related, and inspirational guests with important things to share.

A good place to start is:

9: SaaS Sales Players

Always be closing, sure. But first, listen. The SaaS Sales Players is a podcast that’s packed with tips and top seller guests in SaaS. The host and guests share advice and experiences on overdelivering, smashing budgets, and how to soar to the top of your discipline.

Why it could be for you: It’s easy to find relevant episodes, the content is succinct, and the takeaways are plentiful.

A good place to start is:

10: Indie Hackers

Are you curious about how a teeny, tiny, terrific idea can grow into a profitable online behemoth? Then Indie Hackers could be just your thing. The rising (and already risen) stars of the business explain the tools, strategies, and philosophies you should put to use in your work.

Why it could be for you: What they talk about on the show is serious business, but how they do it is entertaining – not a bad combo.

A good place to start is:

11: B2B Better

If you’re in the need for B2B content, then look no further. The B2B Better is a podcast full of industry experts spewing wisdom. Whether you’re looking for answers in CRM management, GMT strategies, or finding the targets that matter to you, you’ll get some great ideas here. 

Why it could be for you: The conversations all have authentic flows and generate true and important takeaways, so it should be worth your ear time.

A good place to start is:

12: The Revenue Formula

If you’re curious about what our founder (aka. my boss) here at Growblocks has to say about crushing QBRs, the challenges of GTM, and much more. The Revenue Formula is growing fast, and it’s actually really good (I’m not forced to say that).

You find all episodes here, have a listen →

Having run more than 200 quarterly business reviews (QBRs), we know a thing or two about the power of QBRs.

There’s a reason we hit 12 quarters in a row at Falcon.io (Brandwatch today) – we used QBRs.

But there’s a problem with QBRs: They’re really good at identifying problems that happened 90 days ago. And since you can’t go back in time, congrats, you’ve lost 90 days to fix the problem.

As technology has evolved, it’s time for QBRs to evolve. And boy do they need to.

After all, Ford is making cars of any color today, as opposed to their old adage “you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black”.

That’s why we’re introducing a framework for Quarterly Business Reviews 2.0.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s establish what a QBR is today.

QBRs as we know them today

A QBR is a quarterly performance review. In the review you identify areas of success, failure and improvement. These translate into goals and action plans for the next quarter. During a QBR, stakeholders share their insights and review KPIs. 

The purpose of a QBR is to create a shared understanding of performance, goals and priorities. In simpler terms, QBRs lets you respond to changes in the market, identify challenges, and define solutions.

There are usually two reviews happening, a monthly and a quarterly – and there’s a reason for that.

• Monthly review: Focused on tactics and volume metrics (opportunity to target, forecast etc)
• Quarterly review: A deeper look at performance including processing metrics (ACV, CVRs)

In the case of QBRs, you can include more important metrics such as ACVs and CVRs. The reason is simple, these metrics don’t move as fast as leads and opportunities. But they’re critical to performance and efficiency.

A 5% change in ACV creates a 5% impact on your gap to target next quarter.

Why everyone should run quarterly business reviews

It’s not a secret, here at Growblocks we admire product folks. They’ve figured a lot of things out already.

And when it comes to reviewing performance and work, they’ve simply built a great process called “cycle reviews” (albeit within a shorter time frame).

Much like cycle reviews, running quarterly business reviews provide a structured approach to continuously manage and improve performance. In the case of QBRs, the focus is on revenue.

If there’s one reason to run QBRs that I want you to remember, it’s this:

If you improve just one thing every quarter, it has a compounding effect. As you continuously improve, you’ll see outsized performance across your revenue engine.

And with compounding interest, you’re on the path to see exponential growth.

But there are other reasons you should run QBRs:

• Systematically improve revenue performance
• Creates accountability within the organization
• Establishes a shared focus of what’s important
• Identify continuous improvement areas

The most important thing you need to do to establish a QBR is getting everyone to believe this is important to run the business. 

They need to believe that the numbers are of importance, and that the actions defined from the findings are carried out.

To get there, determine the key metrics around your GTM that you’ll measure, and put them into the QBR format.

The main focus will be on revenue, acquisition cost, churn, upsell – but there’s more to dig into. You want to start with the top to understand how it affects your business – and that’s what the CEO & CFO care about. ARR, NRR and CAC are important because ultimately that’s how the business will be evaluated by investors. 

But the problem is that these metrics aren’t actionable, they’re a part of the scorecard. Can you really find any actionable insights from “ARR was missed by 5%”? No. They don’t help you arbitrate.

To unlock actions and make the right decisions, you’ll need to dig deeper. And one step is realizing that your business will consist of multiple funnels.

You’ll have different: 

• Motions (PLG, outbound, inbound etc) 
• Sizes (mid market, enterprise)
• Segments (agencies, retail)
• Markets (DACH, US, etc)

And within all those, behavior will be different. ACVs, CVRs, volume, you name it.

This is where you’ll move from fx. a blended CAC to a CAC for outbound in DACH vs US. You’ll slice your data in multiple ways to surface insight.

And ultimately, it is your job in the QBR to…

Find 1 thing to improve

To find actionable insight that’ll make an impact on revenue, you need to:

1. Identify the most important issues
2. Identify root-causes
3. Identify the revenue gap it’ll cause

From here, a conversation ensues to discuss next steps.

While the data is very unemotional – it doesn’t tell the full story, so the conversation is critical. Data will give you clues, but more often than not the reasons behind a problem sits outside of what data can tell you.

Sure, there’ll be external factors that can influence performance. Today we’re seeing extended sales cycles, lower win-rates and lower ACVs. But the QBR will focus on what is in your control.

There’s usually two causes of a problem, either it’s a result of volume (did we generate enough opportunities?) or quality (are we processing leads fast enough?).

Here’s an example:

We didn’t hit our revenue target in DACH (issue), because we didn’t produce enough marketing opportunities.

At this point you understand the issue is, but not the root cause.

There can be a lot of reasons why this is happening, your job is to consider whether it’s a problem that resides in marketing, sales or both.

The clearer you are on the root-cause the better you can make decisions around solving that problem.

If the problem is the time it takes for sales to process an inbound, the solution is not going to be fixed by marketing sending more leads.

Conversely, if the issue is with the quality of the MQLs being passed, a faster processing time by sales will only give you more disqualified leads – not more opportunities.

Once you know the most important issue and understand the root-cause, you can calculate the revenue gap it’s creating. 

As you present these findings, it’ll help create buy-in and establish a sense of urgency. At the same time, this will be something that can clearly be taken action on.

But there’s a reason why we said that QBRs need to evolve.

QBRs are broken, here’s how to fix them

From the example, you can imagine that someone is about to get hit with some bad news.

While QBRs are intended to be actionable, provide direction and create a shared sense of purpose to influence revenue – this is what happens:

• People know they missed target
• They get told 3 months later why they missed
• With no chance to implement a solution proactively

Already now people aren’t very happy about the unique insight.

While they might not know the exact root-cause, it often leads to people dreading QBRs, thinking “how will I get fucked now?”.

Quickly everyone gets defensive – making any progress impossible. Classic objections are:

• Where did you get that number from?
• That’s not the number I have!

In effect, the meeting is over at this stage.

All you’ve done up until this point is perform an autopsy telling your team how the patient died.

And this is exactly why QBRs must change. And I’m telling you, there’s a better way.

Introducing QBR 2.0: The next generation of quarterly business reviews

Imagine a QBR where people look forward to the next business review.

They already knew how the quarter went.

If there was a problem, they had already identified the root-cause and taken action before the QBR.

The conversation changes completely and is focused on next quarter, and what you as a team must do in order to reach your goal.

In a simple view, this is how we see it:

I believe technology has evolved to a point where we can change how we operate our revenue engine, and as part of that QBRs.

If you tell the team what is happening now, why and here’s what you can do, you’ll build trust. A VP of Sales hates hearing “you missed, here’s why”, they are much more focused on what they can do to hit their target now.

Very quickly the conversation is focused on what actions should be taken. 

How big is the gap to target, and what can be done to impact revenue. What if we hire more?

And this is where it gets incredibly difficult. 

The most advanced teams today have a stack that will give them a snapshot of current performance, they’ll have a revenue model in a spreadsheet and BI with a solid data science team.

The problem with this setup: Identifying the root-cause, defining the revenue impact and modeling scenarios.. That takes forever, and the reason is quite simple 👇

It’ll require a series of custom drills in a BI tool, extracting data, modeling & manipulating it in a sheet – followed by iterations upon iterations to prescribe the best solution.

To make matters worse, the team becomes dependent on a variety of resources within revenue operations.

Building this instrumentation of proactive alerts, root-cause analysis, defining revenue impact and modeling what-if scenarios is incredibly complex.

It’s the equivalent of building your own CRM.

Imagine if there was a solution that sent you proactive pings when something went wrong.

A solution that lets you identify root causes and determine the revenue impact in minutes.

A solution where anyone on your team could test different “what-if” scenarios against how your revenue engine is actually performing.

Well, such a solution exists. We call it a Revenue Planning & Execution Platform (RP&E), and that’s exactly what we’ve built here at Growblocks.

And if you’d like to learn more, we’d be happy to show you how we can help.

Before we recorded this episode of our podcast The Revenue Formula, I discovered something.

It’s called Bravado, and it’s an anonymous sales community. 

As you can imagine, the conversation is very… direct.

The first thing I looked at was marketing (that was a mistake), but then I stumbled upon a post about sales enablement:

“the title is basically, sales enablement sucks and they’re a bunch of fake teachers. 

First paragraph is something like: I feel like sales enablement doesn’t know what they’re talking about 95% of the time.

They either have never sold, have little to no experience in sales, or they sold for six months, five years ago. (…)

What annoys me is that on top of offering zero value, they’re the ones annoyed when I am the one doing all the busy work, instead of focusing on what really matters. Lastly, they don’t do anything but talk about adding decks and saying hi to new hires. 

They’re even worse than marketing.” (02:32)

Wow! That was kinda crazy considering sales enablement is there to help. 

To top it off, it was followed up by this poll

So our aim with the episode we recorded (and this article) is to help make sales enablement useful.

What is sales enablement

But first, are we actually clear about what sales enablement really is?

Sales enablement is the process of equipping sales teams with the necessary resources, tools, and information to engage with customers and close deals. The goal of sales enablement is to streamline the sales process, improve sales productivity and effectiveness, and ultimately increase revenue.

And as Toni puts it:

“Generally speaking, you start thinking about sales enablement once you listen to your sales reps and are like, why is she pitching that? What is going on in my sales team?” (04:17)

But what’s the goal?: “it’s about sales efficiency, right? So you wanna basically make sure that people are trained on the best practices for your company in terms of how to pitch. Obviously, which deck to use is also in there.”

“Which questions to ask, which objections to be prepared for, and what competitors to have in mind and so forth. There’s a lot of stuff that needs to happen and needs to land in someone’s brain. 

And the problem is when you have 10 AEs and a sales manager, you’re basically gonna run into this issue of the sales manager being really busy, closing all the deals, versus onboarding and teaching and doing all of that stuff with your sales reps. And you know, if you don’t do that, then you end up in this [bravado situation].” (04:30)

What next level sales enablement looks like

In spite of what anyone over at Bravado says, sales enablement is important for a couple of reasons.

You want to a) ramp reps, b) train reps, c) retain reps – all to impact revenue. This involves ongoing training, coaching, improving sales performance and much more.

“Instead of just making this a sales enablement piece, it should be a revenue piece.” (09:14)

And that’s exactly the mindset we tried to carry as we discussed what elements are key to ultimately impact revenue.

Ongoing training

As the market and product evolve, it’s essential to keep training your sales team and supplying them with not only material, but an approach.

“Then you have an ongoing flavour to it around the training, ongoing, product training, ongoing competitor training, which is simply necessary due to the fact that your product is evolving, the market is evolving.” (09:55)

And if you have an ongoing approach, what will happen next is this: “I’ve heard a lot of reps basically say this makes me a little bit happier in my role” (10:19)

Maybe that’s a small step to start patching the relationship. But think back to the revenue impact. If you’re unable to articulate the value of new features, or tackle new objections, you’ll be less efficient in your sales approach.

“So let’s just say either you are rolling out MEDDIC or MEDPICK, or you know, some of those concepts. So to reinforce that it’s being lived and breathed.

So, and this is actually where we’re starting to get into like, but wait a minute, isn’t that like a sales manager, sales director kind of responsibility – and it is. But you know, this is one of the areas that I would say it’s shared” (10:49)

Listen to calls, obviously?

We can read the deal history in any CRM, we can see the conversations and listen to the calls. But you need to go a step further.

“if their main medium of receiving information is Gong or other versions of that (…) try and make one little tweak, try and make them jump on actual sales calls, live. Introduce them. And have them participate in that pitch and not necessarily lead it.” (28:09)

The pressure will instantly shift. When going from passive to active participation, things change. If you need to use the deck you created, or tackle the objection you’re training a team on – things are just very different.

“when you’re in it versus you’re just listening to the radio, a lot of more things will pop up in their brain like: this is broken, this is broken.” (28:44)

And the beautiful part, the reps will trust you more:

“They got the same reality check I got. Now I can trust your output a little bit more because I know now we are a little bit closer aligned than you sitting in theory land” (29:17)

And last but not least, you’ll be much more in tune with the reality the sales team face on every call.

Onboarding and training:

If you can ramp a rep faster, that’s a major efficiency gain in your performance. However, it can also be a drain if it takes longer to get new team members successfully out of ramp.

“If someone has been in Salesforce once and then in Salesforce again, sure. That’s doable. But think about Salesloft and Outreach for the SDRs, that’s very complicated and having lots of new folks joining who haven’t dealt with those tools before, think about all of those data tools that you might have, Zoom, Cognism and so forth.

There’s a lot of that stuff that needs to be taught and understood.” (12:27)

There’s a lot to cover in onboarding, and everyone will be at different stages in their experience. That’s why sales enablement has to have a clear plan to successfully onboard new team members fast.

And as Toni points out: “if you have the luxury to specialize your sales enablement team (…) then the way to go about it is for the onboarding and ongoing training on product and on the sales methodology” to be carried by one person (13:15).

Coaching

Another area where many struggle, simply because  “who earned the right to do the coaching?” (15:45).

And the problem really is a result of not hiring the caliber needed to successfully coach the team. While the sales manager should definitely be coaching, there’s just a limit to how much coaching that person can do while managing a team and closing deals.

So why aren’t you getting the right people?

Well simply put, “you don’t have a competitive package at all, usually a terrible package. Usually it doesn’t carry any prestige.” (17:32)

“which then leads to something that I call negative selection. So who goes for that role? Yeah. It’s reps that aren’t successful in the first place.”

Who would wan’t sales coaching from someone who wasn’t successful in selling? You’ve guessed it. No one.

So how do you create a scenario where there’s a good coach that reps actually seek out for advice?

“What Gartner’s actually doing, they are offering their best sales reps to become a coach for a year. And they’re basically paying them, the OTE that they hit, last year.” (18:15)

What’s great about this scenario is that reps will actually want help from that person. And think about this:

“because of the competitive setup of those plans, because of this clear deal ownership thing, because (…) there can only be $1 paid for $1 earned, so to speak. Not multiple times. It’s like, well, if someone wants to help you on your deal, you usually need to, depending on the help, you need to kind of give some percentage up.

So what happens? It doesn’t happen, and the only person helping you is your manager.

And that manager probably is busy with all the other stuff going on. So now you introduce that sales enablement person, suddenly it becomes like an awesome free resource. Do I need to share my deal with that person? No. I’ll take it.” (20:29)

And as Toni puts it, in this scenario you have “a sales enablement function on steroids” (21:50)

There’s just one caveat, “you will have someone running around doing that stuff that’s being paid $250,000 a year (…) And you need to be prepared for that number.” (21:57)

Performance improvement plans

Being put on a performance improvement plan (PIP) is in many companies the mark of death.

“It’s kind of common practice that after some underperformance of a rep, you put them on a pip, you know, performance improvement plan. And in many cases, this is just the heads up, we’re gonna fire you in two months” (29:58)

But in an ideal scenario, you consider investing resources in actually improving performance (provided that’s the issue). The simple reason being: You’ll have a very concrete gap in your team. If it’s an SDR, you’ll get fewer opportunities and in effect create a gap. If it’s an account executive, you’ll distribute more deals – but your closing capacity doesn’t change. Meaning: Sales efficiency will drop.

“I think with good sales enablement, you can actually create a bit of a stronger case for improvement. You put someone on a PIP, and then you’re paired with resources.” (30:26)

“if you don’t give them any help, neither from the manager, because the manager in many cases is like, yeah, this is kind of wasted time. Now I’m gonna spend my time with my high performing reps instead. Then you’re creating the self-fulfilling prophecy.” (31:11)

Want more of this?: Check out our podcast here.