3 min - May 26, 2021

The SaaS Metrics that Matter Most with Laura Lenz, OMERS Ventures

Based in Toronto, Silicon Valley, and London, OMERS Ventures invests in stand-out technology businesses typically raising Series A to C with a first cheque ranging from $5M – $25M. The team invests in all areas of SaaS, with a particular emphasis on the Future of Work, Retail Tech, and Fintech.

OMERS Ventures has invested in a number of Canadian SaaS companies including:

Jobber – Field service management software to schedule jobs, optimize routes, send quotes and invoices via text messages, and get paid on the spot.

Klue – Market and competitive intelligence software that enables competitor research and delivery of sales battlecards to B2B Sales teams.

Solink – Video surveillance software that connects security camera footage with point of sale data and creates a dashboard of analytics and searchable moments.

TouchBistro – A software company that develops a restaurant point of sale system for the iPad.

While the Rule of 40 is a good starting point to try and balance the inevitable trade-off required between growth and profitability for a company aiming to scale, Laura recommends growth-stage CEOs track a series of specific metrics that demonstrate velocity, profitability, and capital efficiency.

Examples of each include:

Velocity

Profitability

Capital Efficiency

Laura advises CEOs to think about how the metrics stack up throughout each round of financing – because it is rare that a company will be hitting the mark across the full set of core metrics. For example, the team may have demonstrated strong Net Dollar Retention during the Series A funding round, but acknowledged the need to improve Revenue per Employee or Rule of 40 as they scaled. Naturally, when the company starts the Series B fundraising, investors are going to want to see improvements in these metrics.

As Laura explains, as a company matures and progresses from its A round through to its C round, each functional area should be thinking about its own key metrics. Here’s a starting point for what some of those metrics could be:

Sales – Number of demos booked, conversion ratios of pipeline stages, days in sales cycle, quota attainment, win/loss ratio.

Marketing – Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) added in quarter, ROI by channel, MQL to Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) conversion rates.

Product – Number of Features Released per Month, Uptime, Monthly Active Users, Monthly Active Accounts, Usage Minutes.

Customer Success – Time to Launch, Net $ Retention, CSAT, NPS, Customer Health, Customer Advocacy and References.

About SaaSCan

SaaSCan was created to bring deep experience in customer-centric growth and SaaS metrics to Canada’s growing SaaS ecosystem.

SaaSCan for Startups services were born in the early days of COVID-19 to help Canadian SaaS companies understand COVID’s impact on churn and retention. We have expanded to provide enablement for SaaS startups on SaaS metrics and benchmarks.

SaaSCan for Early Stage Growth services emerged from the need startups have to adopt a customer-centric approach as they grow, so they can deliver ongoing value to existing customers and optimize key SaaS retention, expansion, and efficiency metrics.

SaaSCan for Later Stage Growth services empower SaaS companies to be customer-centric and metrics-savvy at scale, further optimizing customer retention, SaaS metric performance, and company valuation.

 

To learn more about our Advisors, Partners, and Services, please visit www.saascan.ca.

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