Full Funnel Analytics with Helen Lin, Founder and CEO Discern.io

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Thank you, Mr. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Helen Lin, the founder and CEO of Discern. And today, we will be covering three main topic areas with Helen. First, the challenges with managing the customer acquisition funnel in 2023 and heading into 2024 Second, how full funnel analytics can impact the performance of the customer acquisition process. And third, historic reporting versus future predictions. Where does the future of funnel analytics truly reside? So Helen, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Helen Lin** (1:20)
Thanks Ray for having me. I can talk about the journey to this podcast without speaking about the founding of my company, Discern. I founded Discern because over many years, as a business end user of company performance data, I experienced many problems. It started when I was working as the Chief of Staff for IHS Markit where we needed data to make informed management decisions. However, the data we needed was locked in the various SaaS platforms such as the CRM or ERP or HRIS or marketing automation. So Markit built a large development team whose sole purpose was to build custom dashboards for what the management team needed. And Markit could afford it because we were at almost a billion dollars of revenues pre-IPO. Even if it took a lot of time and strength to get to the analytics and visualization that we needed, we always got it. So then when I worked for a PEBAT growth stage company many years later, I realized the resources were unavailable to enable data-driven decision making.
And it was a prevalent problem among many growth stage companies. So I decided to start Discern to make analytics and reporting easy for all companies. Now, over the years, we've partnered with Ray yourself and your team on several events and presented at your conference. Your company, Revop Squared, target the B2B software companies, who also happen to be our client base. Since I am and my company is passionate about all things data and SaaS metrics, I am excited to join you today.

**Ray Rike** (2:56)
Great. Helen, thank you so much. You know, a lot of times the experience we had as an operator, like you did at IHS Markets, creates the foundation and the catalyst for founding a company. But what I wanted to double click on is, and what I loved about, and I apologize, I actually live in New York City, so you hear an ambulance going by. But what I love about being an operator is getting to talk to other founders, go to market executives, understand what challenges that they're facing, and how my or your solution can overcome that. But let's focus on the challenges of 2023 Everyone talks about, oh my God, it's so hard, people even call it the sassacre. What are the challenges that you are hearing from your prospects and clients about managing the customer acquisition funnel in 2023?

**Helen Lin** (3:47)
This is a great question Ray, especially since we're now almost at the end of the year. For me, 2023 for the entire software industry was mostly a year about efficiency, which on a go-to-market side means lowering back payback months. Now, for those of you who don't know, a payback measures the number of months it takes for a company to recoup their customer acquisition cost. For example, if a company spends $20,000 to acquire a customer, and that customer generates $20,000 of revenues per year for the company, then it takes the company 12 months to pay back the cost. Therefore, CAC payback months is 12 months, which happens to be a pretty good number. In order to lower CAC, we've seen companies focused on two areas, sales and marketing. On the marketing side, the CERN's customers have been mostly focused on measuring the ROI of their marketing campaigns and resources to optimize the customer acquisition spend. In terms of metrics, we see people looking at cost per MQL, cost per opportunity, and ultimately cost per one. These are all KPIs that marketing teams have paid attention to in 2023
On the sales side, companies have been focused on increasing bookings per ramp to rep. So it's about improving current rep productivity, improving reps who are less productive. We also see companies trying to increase their ASP. because if you hold fields of marketing cost constant, and can increase revenues by improving ASP, then you can shorten tax paybacks. So 2023 has been all about efficiency, and on a go-to-market side, shortening tax payback. Yeah.