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As a Go-To-Market (GTM) leader, you know that tracking the right metrics is essential for your successful go-to-market strategy.
But with so many KPIs and metrics to choose from—and new ones being introduced all the time—it can be overwhelming to determine which are most impactful.
Picture this: Rachel, a SaaS marketer who was once in the same boat. Sitting at her desk, Rachel stared at a screen filled with endless rows of data and reports, but none gave her the clarity she needed to make informed decisions.
She felt lost and uncertain until she discovered the potential of focusing on the right go-to-market metrics.
Sound familiar? Don't worry. You're not alone. Many SaaS leaders have found themselves in this same situation, wondering which go-to-market metrics to focus on.
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”
Focusing on the right GTM metrics, you can gain valuable insights into what's working and what's not and make data-driven decisions that drive growth.
In this blog post, we'll guide you through the 10 most important go-to-market metrics for SaaS companies, breaking down what each metric measures, why it's essential, and how to track it.
So, without further ado, let's go on a journey through the world of go-to-market metrics!
Go-to-market (GTM) metrics are quantifiable measures that track the progress and success of your product's journey to market.
Measuring these metrics will help you gain insight into how well your business is acquiring and retaining customers, generating revenue, and achieving its overall goals.
Go-to-market metrics can give valuable insights into various aspects of your business, including but not limited to customer acquisition, revenue growth, lead generation, and customer satisfaction.
It's important to note that the right go-to-market metrics will vary depending on your business's goals, target audience, and overall strategy.
However, focusing on relevant metrics is the key— that works best for your business and keeps you updated with the most valuable insights about your business's performance.
The go-to-market metrics are not just about numbers; they also tell a story about your target audience, market, and industry.
For example, tracking website traffic can give you insights into which marketing channels are driving the most traffic to your site while monitoring the number of qualified leads can give you a picture of how effective your lead-generation strategy is.
Maintaining a regular schedule for reviewing your marketing metrics can help you make data-driven decisions that will improve your go-to-market strategy.
In a nutshell, go-to-market metrics are your business's pulse and are essential to your success as a GTM leader.
In the world of SaaS marketing and growth, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are often used interchangeably.
Go-to-Market Metrics provide a more detailed look at specific aspects of the GTM strategy. They measure the performance of particular business areas, such as customer acquisition cost, churn rate, or the number of website visitors.
On the other hand, Go-to-Market KPIs are the metrics that you set as specific, measurable, and time-bound goals to track the progress of your SaaS business to align with your big picture.
The KPIs are high-level indicators that measure the overall success of a go-to-market strategy.
They provide a quick snapshot of whether or not the business is headed in the right direction without getting into metrics. KPIs usually measure how close or far the business is from reaching its goals and objectives.
For example, the number of website visitors could be considered a metric. At the same time, the conversion rate of those visitors into paying customers is a KPI.
Both metrics and KPIs are important, but the latter is a more critical indicator of your success in meeting your business objectives.
Go-to-market metrics are the key indicators that measure the success of your SaaS business in acquiring and retaining customers.
Measuring these metrics is crucial in understanding the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts, determining the success of your product-market fit, and making informed decisions to improve your go-to-market strategy.
In this section, we'll discuss the 10 most important GTM metrics every SaaS founder and marketer should measure to ensure their go-to-market strategy is on track.
Number of Customers Added: Tracks the number of new customers acquired in a specific period.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Monitors the monthly recurring revenue generated from existing customers.
Demo Bookings: Measures the number of scheduled demos with potential customers.
Opportunity Win Rate: Indicates the success rate of converting opportunities into paying customers.
Number of Qualified Leads: Keeps track of the number of leads that meet specific criteria for further engagement.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Measures the cost of acquiring a new customer.
Website Traffic: Tracks the volume of visitors to your website.
Churn Rate: Shows the percentage at which customers are canceling their subscriptions.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Showcases customer loyalty and willingness to recommend your product.
Number of Support Tickets: Monitors the volume of customer support requests.
Let’s get nitty and gritty into each of the above metrics.
What does it mean?
The number of customers added metric measures the number of new customers acquired by the company in a specific time period. It helps understand the effectiveness of the sales and marketing efforts to reach and acquire new customers.
Who owns the KPI?
The sales and marketing teams are typically responsible for tracking the number of customers added. However, this metric is essential for the entire company to understand the growth of the customer base.
How to calculate this metric?
To calculate the number of customers added, simply count the number of new customers who have signed up or made a purchase in a given time period, usually a month or a quarter.
Example: Let's say your business had 100 customers in January and added 50 new customers in February. The number of customers added for February would be 50.
Where can you track this metric?
This metric can be tracked through various marketing and sales tools, such as your customer relationship management (CRM) system or an analytics platform.
Tools such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Profitwell, Chargebee, Intercom, ChartMogul, and Pipedrive, or through an in-house database, can provide valuable insights into the number of customers added.
What does it mean?
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is a crucial indicator of a SaaS company's financial health. It measures the amount of recurring revenue generated from customers each month. It's a forward-looking metric that predicts the company's future revenue.
Calculating your MRR is critical to understanding your cash flow and determining how much money you can spend to bring in new leads.
How to calculate MRR?
To calculate MRR, add the recurring revenue from all your customers for a given month and divide by the number of customers. For example, if a company has 100 paying customers, each paying $100 monthly, the MRR is $10,000.
Who owns this metric?
Co-founders typically track MRR at early-stage companies and VP of Sales at matured organizations. But all teams need to understand the impact they have on this metric.
Where can you track this metric?
You can track MRR using financial management software like Xero and Zoho Books or analytics tools like Profitwell, Baremetrics, ChartMogul, and Dataflo.
The important thing is to make sure that the MRR data is accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible to the relevant team members.
Why is this metric important?
Monthly Recurring Revenue is the pulse of any company with a recurring revenue business model—knowing how many new users you are adding each month and how much revenue they are subsequently bringing tells your company's story.
What if we say you can monitor SaaS businesses’ subscription upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations all-in-one single window?
Sounds curious? Check out Dataflo’s Subscription Dashboard to get a bird’s eye view of increasing retention and generating revenue growth.
What does it mean?
Demo bookings refer to the number of scheduled demos with potential customers. It indicates how many people are interested in your product and how many have agreed to see a demo.
For most software products, where you don't get a chance to meet 99% of your customers, the initial demo meetings are your best chance to interact with your prospects.
Who owns this metric?
The sales team is primarily responsible for tracking demo bookings, a crucial part of the sales pipeline.
Where can you track this metric?
The demo bookings metric can be tracked using Zoom, Calendly, Google Calendar, and CRM tools such as Salesforce or Zoho CRM.
Demo bookings provide valuable information on the interest level of potential customers and the efficiency of the sales team's outreach strategies.
What Does It Mean?
Opportunity Win Rate (OWR) is the percentage of leads that become your customers from the total leads in the sales pipeline.
It represents the efficiency of the sales process and how well the sales team is able to close deals.
How to Calculate This Metric?
OWR is calculated by dividing the number of won opportunities by the total number of opportunities.
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Example: If the sales team had 100 opportunities and they closed 50 of them, then the OWR would be 50%.
This means that 50% of the sales opportunities turned into actual deals, and the sales team was successful in the closing half of the opportunities presented to them.
Who Owns This Metric:
Sales Team
Where Can You Track This Metric?
This metric can be tracked in customer relationship management (CRM) software such as Salesforce or Pipedrive or through spreadsheets. These tools provide detailed information on each opportunity, allowing the sales team to see which won and which were lost.
Why is Opportunity Win Rate important?
Opportunity Win Rate tells you how successful your sales team is in moving leads in your pipeline and ultimately closing them.
Are you struggling to move leads from one particular stage to another?
Are you bringing in a lot of leads at the top of the funnel only to see them slip through at the closing stage?
Is the Win Rate for a particular channel much higher than others?
The Opportunity Win Rate metric answers all these questions for the sales team.
What does it mean?
The number of qualified leads refers to the number of potential customers who have shown an interest in your product or service and have met the criteria to be considered a qualified lead.
This means that the qualified leads have the budget, authority, need, and timing (BANT) to potentially make a purchase.
Qualified leads, sometimes called Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), are prospects with a higher chance of becoming your customers than others.
A prospect can be considered 'qualified' based on a set of pre-defined criteria - this may be arrived at based on which channel the lead came from, what pages they visited, whether they downloaded an eBook on your site etc.
How to calculate this metric?
To calculate the number of qualified leads, subtract the number of disqualified leads from the total number of leads generated.
Example:
Let's say your marketing team has been running some campaigns to generate leads, and they generated 100 leads in the last quarter.
After following up with each lead and evaluating them against the BANT criteria, they found that 20 leads were disqualified, so the number of qualified leads was 80.
Who owns this metric?
This metric is owned by the marketing and sales teams, who are responsible for generating leads and converting them into paying customers.
Where can you track this metric?
This metric can be tracked in your customer relationship management (CRM) software, marketing automation platform, or even in a simple spreadsheet.
Some popular tools for tracking this metric include Hubspot, Marketo, and Dataflo.
Why is this metric important?
Qualified leads are the lifeline and pulse of subscription businesses - no matter what stage of the business you are in, you should have a steady stream of incoming leads.
By tracking this metric, you can measure the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts and determine which channels are producing the most qualified leads.
What Does it Mean?
Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost a business spends in order to acquire a new customer. It considers all the expenses associated with acquiring a new customer, including advertising, sales, and marketing expenses.
How to Calculate this Metric?
The formula to measure Customer Acquisition Cost is:
For example, if a company spends $100,000 on marketing and sales expenses in a year and acquires 1000 new customers during that year, the customer acquisition cost will be $100 per customer.
Who Owns this Metric?
The customer acquisition cost (CAC) metric is typically owned by the marketing and sales teams.
However, it can also be tracked by the finance team as it provides valuable insight into the cost-effectiveness of the company's customer acquisition efforts.
Where Can You Track this Metric?
Customer acquisition costs can be tracked using various tools, including marketing automation, CRM, and financial management software.
These tools can help the company track expenses and calculate CAC accurately and efficiently. Additionally, some of these tools can help a company track the cost of customer acquisition over time and compare it to industry benchmarks.
Why is this Metric Important?
Customer Acquisition Cost is one of the most important metrics for businesses to track, as it helps you gauge your business's profitability.
Calculating CAC tells you how much you can afford to spend on your acquisition channels without your bottom line taking a negative hit.
CAC also tells you which channel has been effective for your business, where you should double down, and where you should cut down costs.
What does it mean?
Website Traffic refers to the number of visitors to your website, typically measured in page views or unique visitors. This metric indicates people's interest in your product or service.
How to calculate this metric?
To calculate Website Traffic, you can use tools such as Google Analytics. You can track unique visitors, page views, and other website traffic metrics in Google Analytics.
Simply set up tracking on your website, and you will have access to this data.
Who owns this metric?
Marketing team.
Why is this metric important?
Website Traffic is a critical metric for any business selling online; the website is the one identity for your brand, and website traffic is the virtual equivalent of foot traffic for physical stores.
Is there a particular blog that is consistently driving traffic to your site?
Was there one particular email marketing campaign that led to more website visits?
Measuring this metric pinpoints you in the direction on what it is the exact impact different marketing channels had on driving traffic to your site.
Where can you track this metric?
Various tools are available to track website traffic, but one of the most popular is Google Analytics.
You can use Google Analytics to analyze website traffic metrics, such as unique visitors, page views, and more.
You can also see your website visitor's geographic location, device type, and referral sources, which can provide additional insights into your marketing efforts.
Other tools you can use to track website traffic include SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
What does it mean?
The churn rate measures how many customers stop using or cancel their subscriptions to a product or service over a certain period.
How to calculate this metric?
The formula for calculating the churn rate is as follows:
Who owns this metric?
The customer success or account management teams are usually responsible for tracking and managing the churn rate metric.
Why is this metric important?
For subscription businesses, the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful one often boils down to their churn rate—the level of customer dissatisfaction with products or services.
While it is inevitable that a small percentage of your total customers will churn due to reasons beyond your control, you can bring down your churn rate by taking preemptive measures that eliminate avoidable churn.
For example, payment processing errors are one type of customer churn that can be reduced when appropriately monitored.
Where can you track this metric?
Tools that can be used to track churn rates include Dataflo, Intercom, Profitwell, and ChartMogul.
What does it mean?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm with a company and how likely they recommend a product or service to others.
It ranges from -100 to 100, with higher scores indicating a higher level of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
How to calculate this metric?
This metric is calculated by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending the product or service on a scale from 0-10.
Responses are then divided into three categories: detractors (0-6), passives (7-8), and promoters (9-10).
To calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS), subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters.
Who owns this metric?
Customer success, marketing, and product teams often own this Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric.
Where can you track this metric?
NPS can be tracked through various methods, including customer feedback surveys, customer service interactions, and online reviews.
Additionally, NPS can be tracked and analyzed using customer experience management platforms, such as Qualtrics, SatisMeter, and Delighted.
Why is this metric important?
NPS is important as it tells you how your customers genuinely feel about your product/service and is a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
A high NPS indicates that a company is delivering a high-quality customer experience, while a low NPS score indicates areas for improvement.
Additionally, learning about customers who are happy with your product is an opportunity to request testimonials for the website, reviews on third-party platforms, or even referrals!
Who Owns this Metric?
The customer success team is primarily responsible for tracking the number of support tickets.
However, this metric can be useful for the entire company, including product teams, marketing teams, and senior management, to understand the level of customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
What Does it Mean?
The number of support tickets refers to the total number of requests for assistance received by a company's customer support team. It's a measure of the volume of customer inquiries and can be used to track changes in demand over time.
How to Calculate it?
The number of support tickets can be calculated through customer service software or by manually counting the number of requests the customer support team receives.
Where Can You Track it?
Popular customer service software tools that can be used to track this metric include Zoho Desk, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Desk.com.
These tools can also provide additional insights into the nature of customer inquiries, such as the average resolution time, the types of inquiries received, and the departments receiving the most inquiries.
Why is it Important?
A crucial part of ensuring customers' success with your product is proactively resolving support issues before they escalate into more significant problems.
Knowing how many tickets come in on average gives you a lot of insight into your product and how teams operate: Is there a particular feature responsible for many customer queries? When is the right time to scale your support team?
In conclusion, measuring the right Go-to-Market metrics is essential for the success of any SaaS business.
The 10 metrics mentioned in this blog will help you understand your business's health and make informed decisions. It's not just about tracking these metrics but also about analyzing the data and making necessary improvements.
But tracking all these metrics can be challenging, especially if you're juggling multiple tools. That's why we introduce Dataflo, the ultimate tool for measuring and monitoring your go-to-market metrics in one place.
With Dataflo, you can get daily reports on Slack at your scheduled time—making it easier than ever to stay up-to-date with your metrics and make informed decisions.
Just like Rachel, you, too, can unlock the potential of focusing on the right go-to-market metrics. So why wait? Book a demo today and start tracking your way to success!
Pravinan is a physicist turned writer who's currently wearing the marketer's hat. A tech enthusiast by nature and an avid non-fiction books reader, he loves to explore the world around him and always keep learning new things. When he's not working on his latest project, he likes to spend his time writing Tamil poetry or finding out more about organic farming.
