Customer Lifecycle Metrics - With Craig Rosenberg

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Craig Rosenberg, the Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners, and former Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, and co-founder at TOPO. Today, we'll be covering three main areas with Craig. First, defining the end-to-end customer journey. Second, how do vital signs and triage play a role in B2B SaaS? And third, why a well-defined sales process is critical to be able to make metrics-driven decisions. Craig, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Craig Rosenberg** (1:18)
Well, Ray, first of all, thanks for having me on. It's an honor and we're taking our conversations we have offline and bringing them online so everyone else can listen to them. But yeah, I mean, look, you, you gave my background. I mean, I, at TOPO, I, you know, spent what, seven, eight years with SaaS companies at various stages of growth, you know, to find the strategy people, process technology tactics that would work for them to help them achieve hyper growth. The thing that I learned is it's actually strategy people, process technology tactics and metrics. That is actually the key. I mean, you know this, you started this company, right? That without metrics, it's really hard for us to really pinpoint, you know, where the issues lie. And so that was one. But number two is when you looked at the best companies in the world, they were metrics driven. Anyway, so we were required by Gartner and I became a distinguished vice president analyst there. And I started working with really big sales organizations outside of SAS. And what you realize there is that there's this massive movement towards being data driven there as well. Now, they got a lot of, you know, if you're a 50 billion dollar company or whatever that's been around for years, you got a lot of stuff to move around to go do it, but they're doing the right thing, right? And so, you know, what got me here is like, well, I'm going to go help people. Oh, my God, we need to understand metrics because that's what works. And then number two is it's happening across the board and for everyone. So, you know, for me, this is a really important way for us to figure out how we run our businesses. And that's why, you know, so my experiences tie back to your experiences and bring us here today so we can go have a good conversation.

**Ray Rike** (2:54)
We need to double click on that experience. It's funny, Craig, you know, my first almost 10 years after undergrad was at GE, back when GE was viewed as kind of one of the best management programs in the world. And they forced us to not only understand metrics, but to drive decisions with metrics. I still remember being at the pit. The pit is at the Management Development Institute at GE, where Jack Welch would call upon you and say, hey, I've got a question for you. We're having this challenge. What do you think?
And he wanted to see that you actually could back up your opinion with critical thought and data. And if it was just you opining on something with no critical thought or data, you could actually get fired on the spot.

**Craig Rosenberg** (3:34)
So well, I mean, a little scary, but the intent is good.

**Ray Rike** (3:38)
Exactly. Well, you learn to make sure you know your data before you walk into a meeting with Mr. Welch. But anyhow, so SAS Metrics Palooza was just a couple of weeks ago. And I loved your session. And one of the things you talked about at SAS Metrics Palooza was the end-to-end customer journey. And we hear a lot about the customer journey, customer lifecycle, journey mapping, etc. But let's start at the top. Why is understanding the end-to-end customer journey such an important concept to B2B SAS companies?

**Craig Rosenberg** (4:10)
Yeah, well, I think, well, first of all, I like that you threw in all those different sort of terms, because the truth is most customer journeys you look at are actually very generic. And to sort of high level and just really focused on sort of some kind of naming convention or whatever that might be, whereas the way I think about it is, we have to be able to track, well, first of all, understand first, right? And then, you know, how our buyers are going to buy, which actually isn't as complicated as people make it, right? because in B2B SAS, ultimately they might twist and turn, but they're going to end up very similar milestones to everyone else.