Measuring the ROI of Transitioning from Outbound to Inbound GTM - with Aviv Canaani, CRO Datarails

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, 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.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Aviv Canaani, the Chief Revenue Officer at Datarails. We'll be covering four primary topics with Aviv today. First, the top measurements for ACRO. Second, the catalyst for Aviv leading the charge to transition from a primarily outbound to an inbound go-to-market motion. Third, how to leverage social media to build awareness with the Office of Finance. And then fourth, how to measure investments in content and community for the CRO, CMO that a CFO can get behind. So with that, Aviv, can you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here at the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Aviv Canaani** (1:27)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Ray, for having me. So I'm Aviv. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at Datarails, we're a Series B startup in the field of FP&A. We sell an FP&A solution to the office of the CFO for SMB and mid-market companies.
Our claim to fame is the fact that you can stay in Excel. You don't have to drop Excel once you implement an FP&A solution. And the fact that we are AI native, we introduced to the world the concept of Finance OS, one source of truth where all of your information is available. And I've been here for the past three and a half years and saw the growth of the company, constantly beating industry benchmarks and growing. And I'm really happy with where we're at now. But once you have a good success stories and growth, then the targets increase as well. So we have a lot that we plan to achieve this year and in the coming years. And I'm excited to be here.

**Ray Rike** (2:32)
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Well, I'm really interested in your story because you went from being the CMO to the CRO, correct?

**Aviv Canaani** (3:16)
Yeah. When I joined the company, I was actually the VP of Marketing.

**Ray Rike** (3:21)
I'm going to be really interested in this because I use LinkedIn as a primary source of the research I do for identifying guests for the Metrics Major podcast. Our audience is unique, Aviv. About 50 percent of our audience are senior finance executives, VPs of Finance, VPs of FP&A, and CFOs. About 25 percent are CEOs, and about 25 percent are C-level go-to-market execs, CMOs and CROs. You're the perfect guest because you cross all of those. Here's my first question based upon some LinkedIn activity I saw you engaging, and that is, what are the two primary measurements that a CRO should be measured on? I think you have a strong opinion on this.

**Aviv Canaani** (4:03)
Yeah, I do have a strong opinion. I think a lot of CROs are just measured on revenue growth, especially in high growth startups, which of course is the most important metric. But I do believe that they need to be measured on another metric as well, which is payback period or CAC efficiency, however you want to call it. So I can even say, like for me, it's a 50-50 split. It's not only about growing the ARR of the company, but it's also how efficient are we doing it. You can look at it, especially in terms of in our field, it's more payback period when we were able, like in the past year to reduce by almost 50% our payback period, which makes the company more successful. And I think a lot of CROs are just focusing on the growth regardless of how much it's going to cost them.
So I am a very strong believer that every CRO should also manage the cost, not only the revenue coming in.

**Ray Rike** (4:59)
Okay. So all I do all day long is talk about metrics and benchmarks, analyze, research, evaluate. So let's talk about efficiency. Because to me, efficiency combines the inputs that I put into a process and the outcomes that I get. And as you said, revenue growth is the primary outcome. I'm a big fan of both the CAC ratio and the CAC payback period. But let me ask you, first of all, when you think about efficiency, if you're using CAC payback period as the top level metric that your board loves, what are the primary input signals that you're really looking at, that you have your VPs of sales or directors and VPs of marketing focus on, that has the highest impact on compressing that CAC payback period?