Growth
This metric measures the yearly predictable revenue a SaaS company can expect from subscriptions.
What is ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)?
This retention metric shows how much revenue you retained—and expanded—from existing customers.
What is Net Dollar Retention (NDR)?
This metric tells you how much you spend to gain a new customer.
What is CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)?
This chart visualizes changes in your sales pipeline over time.
What is Pipeline Waterfall?
Founded in 1999 with the slogan “No Software,” this company is widely credited with popularizing the SaaS model for CRM software.
What is Salesforce?
This metric reflects the total value of all open opportunities in your sales funnel.
What is Pipeline Value?
This retention metric shows how much revenue you retained from existing customers. Note that it excludes expansion.
What is Gross Dollar Retention (GDR)?
This metric measures the percent of revenue retained by a company after they pay their Cost of Goods Sold (COGS).
What is Gross Margin?
This metric measures the total number of days a Closed Won deal is open.
What is Sales Cycle Length?
Marc Andreessen’s 2011 essay argued that "this" — the broader trend enabling SaaS and other models — was "eating the world."
What is Software?
This metric is a measure of the distribution of revenue within a company’s customer base.
What is Customer Concentration?
This metric tracks what percentage of the number of customers you retain, regardless of their revenue.
What is Logo Retention?
This metric reveals how many months it takes to recoup the cost of acquisition for a customer (CAC.)
What is CAC Payback Period?
This metric measures the percentage of deals that progress to a later stage in the sales cycle.
What is Stage Conversion Rate?
This early SaaS pioneer, best known for its collaboration and storage tools, was founded in 2007.
What is Dropbox?
This metric is the average annualized value of all active customer contracts.
What is Annual Contract Value (ACV)?
This metric tracks how customers up for renewal retain.
What is Renewal Rate?
A high value in this metric means you’re burning a lot of capital to grow.
What is Burn Multiple?
This metric measures the average number of days that a deal has spent in a particular pipeline stage.
What is Average Time in Stage?
Launched in 2006, this platform changed the way software infrastructure was built by offering cloud-based compute services like EC2 and S3.
What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
Used to measure growth in MRR, this metric looks at growth rate on a monthly basis but does NOT simply measure month-over-month growth rate.
What is Compound Monthly Growth Rate (CMGR)?
This is the primary difference between how Net Dollar Retention and Gross Dollar Retention are calculated.
What is Customer Expansion?
This metric compares how sales and marketing spend translates to changes in ARR, calculated as Net New ARR / S&M Expenses.
What is Magic Number?
This metric is a percentage that estimates how much of the ARR in a particular stage of a sales pipeline is expected to be Closed Won.
What is Stage Win Rate?
Before “SaaS” became the common term, these three letters described early companies that hosted and managed software for customers over the internet.
What is ASP (Application Service Provider)?