Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is a ubiquitous SaaS metric. It’s a core sales and marketing efficiency metric. CAC measures the amount of expense to acquire a new customer and the associated revenue from that customer. However, CAC as a standalone measure does not tell us much. We need context. This context comes in the […]
cac payback period
How to Assess Your CAC Profile
When I was a CFO at a private equity (PE) backed company, I was always a little envious of the PE folks. They got so many investment looks at different SaaS companies. And they built their SaaS muscle through the management of their SaaS portfolio companies. That’s changed now that I’m a fractional SaaS CFO. […]
Cohort Analysis Explained for Your SaaS Business
We all know that churn and retention are critical concepts to understand in SaaS. As customers churn each month, we track logo and dollar counts in our churn and retention reports. And we document the reasons why. This is an aggregate view of retention. Let me introduce SaaS cohort analysis. Cohort analysis is an analytical […]
SaaS Showdown – CAC Payback Period vs LTV/CAC
CAC Payback Period vs. LTV/CAC This post was inspired by a SaaS metrics question posted on Quora. The user asks, “what is more important? CAC Payback Period or LTV/CAC?” Great question, but it left me scratching my head, because it’s a difficult question to answer anecdotally. Both are important in your SaaS business but should […]
How I Calculate the CAC Payback Period
The CAC Payback Period and Debt Debt takes on many forms within a company. It could be a bond or a traditional long-term bank loan. Typically, there is a principal balance that you repay over time along with some type of interest component. In this post, I detail how I calculate the CAC Payback Period […]
How to Calculate the SaaS Magic Number
Sales Efficiency Metrics – SaaS Magic Number and More As a CFO, the balance between sales and marketing spend and new ARR or MRR creation is critically important to measure and monitor. Over invest in sales and marketing relative to your new SaaS bookings and will you not the see the expected margin expansion or […]