SaaS operators must understand the balance between sales and marketing spend and the acquisition of net new revenue. Enter the SaaS Magic Number. Here are my thoughts on how to use the Magic Number in 2025. Overinvest in sales and marketing relative to your new SaaS ARR bookings and will you not the see the […]
cac payback period
How to Calculate Your Overall CAC Payback Period
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 […]
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
CAC Payback Period is a top operator and investor metric. It’s part of my Five Pillar SaaS Metrics Framework. It’s core to GTM efficiency calculations. There are many flavors of CAC Payback Period now. I’ll cover the traditional metric that you must master in your SaaS business. However, you should consider the Dollar-based CAC Payback […]