As we head into 2017, I have a steady stream of operating plans hitting my inbox. Since many of our investments are companies that are scaling, vs. companies that are just getting started, there are a lot of derivative metrics in these plans.
Q1 is the easiest quarter to make your plan, so most of these companies are getting a free pass for the next three months after fighting the good fight of making or beating plan in Q3 and Q4. For the SaaS and recurring revenue companies, if they missed by more than 5% in 1H16 and didn’t reforecast, they’ve had a particularly grueling uphill climb for the past six months.
While the relief of Q1 was missing last year because of the existential freakout caused by the public markets (anyone remember that?) I know a bunch of people who are hoping Q1 will be nice, calm, and normal. Good luck with that.
Regardless, you can start the year off by being clear on how you calculate your various derivative metrics and make sure that your plan – and the expectations of your board and investors – fit what you are putting out there for the next year. Before you say, “yup – no big deal – we are great at that” go read two posts by Glenn Wisegarver, the CFO at Moz.
If you’ve worked with me, you’ve probably heard me call out CAC as a nonsense metric, since it’s super easy to game. Or maybe you read my post about ICDC (increase conversion, decrease churn). Or, instead of growth rate at a moment in time, you’ve heard me ask for a monthly graph of trailing twelve month growth rate so we can see the actual acceleration or deceleration of growth, which is way more interesting than last months growth number.
There are tens of thousands of words written on the web about SaaS metrics, consumer metrics, recurring revenue metrics, and all kinds of other metrics. Entertainingly (at least to me) there are very few words written about CE / hardware metrics (other than nonsense about how to value CE companies).
As part of getting your metrics together for 2017, I encourage you to go read some of these articles. And think hard about which metrics really matter and where the change in them will impact your business performance in 2017.
I got an email today from an exec at a company who I was with at a recent board meeting. I thought it was a powerful summary of part of our discussion, specifically around the sales pipeline for Q4 and overall sales execution. I’ve been in something like 91,293 pipeline reviews in my life and it continues to baffle me that experienced sales execs manage to snow the CEO and the board with “probability weighted sales pipeline.” I hung in there in this case and continued to make my point about playing offense on sales forecasting.
Rather than trying to summarize it, I got permission to just reprint the email. It follows.
One of the larger take aways for me was your insight on our attitude towards how we were predicting revenue. Prior to our meeting, we thought we were doing a good job of predicting revenue. We are working on 10 deals and we explained to you that we thought that 75% of these deals would close within the next 60 days or so.
You asked specifically, “which of those deals would close?”
Our answer, was “we feel confident that each of these deals has a 75% chance of closing”.
You pushed us and asked “which of these 10 deals has a 100% chance of closing?”
Our exec team looked at each other in silence.
We were hard pressed to answer that specific question. We couldn’t answer that question.
The takeaway for me was that we need to take the offense when it comes to predicting revenue. We need to change our mentality from Defense to Offense.
Defense was: Us allowing FATE to play a large factor in whether or not a deal closed. We accepted the fact that 75% of these deals will close, but couldn’t point to WHICH 75%. We were in “wait and see” mode and allowing fate to decide our monthly revenue.
Offense is: We feel good about these 5 specific companies signing and we are going to commit to them closing as a sales team and a company. We are going to keep on top of them, be proactive, and make sure they close. Fate will have VERY LITTLE to do with whether these deals close or not.
It is a subtle adjustment, almost semantic, but one that will make a very large difference in how we act, how we talk, how we think, and ultimately how much revenue we book.