Present SaaS Metrics Like a Pro - with Dave Kellogg

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
The following Metrics that Measure Up episode is from SAS Metrics Palooza 2023 During this three-day virtual event, top industry leaders shared best practices, insights, and ideas on how to make better metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. You can view every SAS Metrics Palooza 2023 session at benchmarket.ai/sas-metrics-palooza-23. Now, on to today's show.
Well, our next speaker doesn't really need a lot of introduction, but he's got a new title this year, and that is Dave Kellogg, one of the SaaS Sass Metrics brothers. So with that, Dave, I'm just going to hand it off to you.

**Dave Kellogg** (0:57)
Thanks, Ray. Thanks, growth, as we call you on the podcast. For those who don't know us, my name is Dave Kellogg. I'm an EIR at Balderton Capital, an independent consultant and author of a blog called Kellblog. And today I'd like to talk to you about how to present SaaS metrics like a pro by avoiding these 10 all-too-common mistakes. So a little bit of background on me. In the past, I've been basically CMO of three companies, CEO of two, the GM at one, over 25 years of operating experience, largely in the zero to 100 million range, but I've also got all the way up to a billion and actually beyond what I was in sales for. So today I'm focused on working with Balderton Capital. I've been a director of nine companies in total, an advisor to over 20, an investor in a bunch as well. So pretty active and have a pretty broad view from the operator, the go-to-market, the CEO, the board level. So that's the perspective I come from. Hobbies, this is tongue in cheek, but one of my hobbies is S1 diving. So when I read the Clavio S1, they had this very perverse definition of NRR, and I spent some time on the weekend building this spreadsheet to see if I could replicate what they were doing. So anyway, that's one of my hobbies. That's why we run the podcast with Ray, the SAS talk with the Metrics brothers, and that's why I want to talk to you today about the way, how to present SAS metrics like a pro. This is the complimentary presentation to one I did a month or so back at SASTER, which was the strategic use and abuse of SAS metrics. So I view these two presentations as a matched pair. The SASTER one is more strategic, things that go wrong at a strategic level. This one is more tactical. There is some overlap, but if you want to see the slides, there's a link in the footer. There's also a link within that link to a video. So, but today, as mentioned, we're going tactical. We're going to try and leave strategy to the other presentation and talk about tactics. And before you switch off the livestream, wait a minute, going tactical, does that mean we're going to do nothing but nits and formatting? Is this content really unimportant relative to the other one? Are we going to be in the weeds, literally, as they were in the picture? The answer is yes, but only a little bit. We're not going to go that deep in the weeds. And second, remember, tactical mistakes can become strategic. If you've never seen this slide slash analysis, this is actually an analysis that Edwin Tufte did of a slide that we used at a presentation before the Columbia re-entered, and subsequently, as we know, burned up, and he shows about 15 things that are wrong with the slide, and they're all tactical. You're mixing units, you're doing multiple deep levels of indentation, you're using imprecise characterizations, like significantly, right? And those are all tactical mistakes, all tactical mistakes, but you kind of add them up, and you get one heck of a big strategic problem. And that's the way I feel about this stuff, and this is why I dive into the detail on SAS Metrics, because if the foundations aren't good, then the whole thing can collapse on top. So one last story, I'll tell you a tale of two ill-fated journeys. This is actually an FAA briefing called Fly the Aircraft First, about which I did a blog post, but it's the story of an actual doomed flight in 1972, where the entire crew at that time, which was three people, because you had a person who managed the fuel on board as well, two pilots plus the fuel person, they were so single-mindedly focused on the malfunction of a landing gear position indicator that nobody looked at the altitude, and literally the plane descended and crashed in the Everglades because they were so focused on a non-critical task that they failed to detect the rest of the descent. Nobody ever said, hey, what about our altitude? I feel like we can do this in SaaS. I worked once time, a ways back with a SaaS startup that was a hot company in a greenfield market. The whole team was naturally focused on growth. It's greenfield, there's competitors, we need to grow. That naturally led to a strong focus on CAC. By the way, most of the leadership team came from a sales and marketing background, which meant they were also naturally focused on CAC, and they spent a lot of time in Metrics analyzing questions like what channels have the best marketing, or what segments have the best marketing conversion rates, what segments of the business have the highest average sales price, the shortest average sales cycle, the highest win rate, the highest competitor takeout rate. They're looking at all these go-to-market metrics, and nobody ever said, hey, what about churn? This is another way that we can go wrong with SaaS metrics, selective attention on what's interesting as opposed to what's important.