Growth Modeling and Unit Economics for Modern Startups

Outline Summary: Planning a Growth-Driven Revenue Engine

Intro This transcript centers on building a growth plan that a board will buy into, with practical methods to align teams around a single direction. Speakers discuss common planning pains, the value of a reverse-engineered ARR target, and the role of unit economics in board-facing conversations. The session features Anthony, CEO and co-founder of Lindscale, and a Vasco advocate, who share frameworks, live modeling steps, and governance practices to make revenue planning both robust and repeatable.

Center

• Key premise: ARR as the north star

  • In SaaS and VC-backed contexts, ARR anchors the growth model; definitions of ARR must be solid, especially for consumption-based models.

  • Inputs to ARR include: current ARR, new ARR (new logos), expansion (upsell within existing customers), churn, and contraction. Each element must be understood per segment to build a credible bridge to the target.

• Two critical plan components (top-down + bottom-up)

  • Top-down reverse engineering: Start with the board’s growth goal (e.g., 2x or 3x ARR) and deduce required inputs to reach it.

  • Bottom-up staffing: Determine the people and capabilities needed—sales reps, CS teams, SEs, tech sellers, and ramp times—so hiring aligns with the pipeline and bookings targets.

• Practical modeling guidance

  • A simple growth model anchors on ARR targets; analysts fill in funnel metrics (SQL-to-close rate, sales cycle length, MQL-to-SQL conversions, average contract value).

  • Recognize the sales cycle: long cycles require pipeline pushes early; short cycles reduce immediate pipeline needs. Delays in ramp or hiring can derail quarterly targets.

  • Use scenario-building to test sensitivity: adjust conversion rates, cycle lengths, and ramp times to see how outputs shift. This helps in negotiations with the CFO/CEO and in board discussions.

• Budget and unit economics emphasis

  • Beyond top-line growth, plan must account for all S&M costs: people, channel costs, sales engineers, customer success, and related overhead.

  • Unit economics framework includes: net growth rate, LTV, CAC, CAC payback, NRR, GRR, revenue per employee, sales cycle, and the “magic number.” Split by channel to optimize resource allocation.

  • The board cares about sustainable growth, not just aggressive topline. Use industry benchmarks (e.g., win rates, quota attainment, ARR targets) to stress-test plans and defend trade-offs.

• Cadence, reporting, and live progress

  • Move from static spreadsheets to dynamic cadences: scenario modeling, live dashboards, and daily progress-to-target emails.

  • A single source of truth reduces misalignment and speeds decision-making when bottlenecks appear (e.g., MQL quality or conversion gaps).

  • Consider “core business vs. new bets” to maintain clarity when pursuing new markets or segments.

• Practical tips and visuals

  • Daily sales tracker: a forcing function that aligns leadership around the truth of pipeline health.

  • Benchmarks and templates: use published benchmarks to anchor inputs; Vasco offers a repo of benchmarks and a board-ready template.

• Mindset for growth

  • There are no silver bullets; consistent, 1% improvements compound to substantial growth. Focus on intentionality, data integrity, and disciplined planning to move from “hellish” planning seasons to predictable, fast, and efficient growth.

Outro Anthony and the presenter reiterate that revops exists to make growth predictable and scalable, not to corner teams in a single department. The aim is to empower leaders with credible models, transparent unit economics, and a live operating rhythm that earns board trust. The session closes with gratitude for Vasco’s tools, a reminder that clear data and disciplined cadence unlock fundraising credibility, and an invitation to keep refining the approach through ongoing measurement and iteration.

Full Transcript

Thank you very much. Um I am extremely excited to be with you today. Uh it's a topic that is dear to our heart in revenue operation. It's how to build a growth plan that the board uh could buy. Um and here with me today we have Anthony. For those who don't know Anthony, Anthony is the CEO and co-founder of Lindscale. Lindscale is an amazing partner of Vasco. They're one of the best revenue operation agency out there in the world. They have amazing logos and I think what differentiates them really Anthony um you can tell is is they have an expertise in P and VC backed company and we know that when we raise capital as a VC backed company there's that capital clock that is ticking and you make sure that you go fast and you don't have a lot of trial and errors and they really understand that world and they help you actually build all the foundations that your company needs in order to go from C to series A series A to series B and so on and so on and they can act both as a strategic partner but also they can get their hands dirty into the CRM in order to set those foundations. So Anthony, super happy to be here with you. Uh we're going to kick it started but uh but it's going to be a good one. Yeah, GM thank you so much for being here. I don't think I could have said it better myself and I am unbelievably passionate about the topic we're going to be going over today and I don't think there's any platform in the world that facilitates this process better than Vasco. So, thank you for having me. Really excited to dive in and can't wait to see what some of the questions are in the chat as well. Awesome. Okay, so it's planning season again. Um typically it starts around mid October, beginning of November and from what I can recall and the various you know boards executive position that I had as a founder of a company it always starts with some kind of macro goals that comes from the top and that numbers feels always a bit arbitrary. You need to grow 60% year-over-year. You need to double your growth. You need to 3x your growth and that becomes kind of the mark that the entire company has to work backward from that mark is agreed upon leaders and then someone within the organization then needs to turn that mark into an Excel model and that's when the storm starts a lot of conversation happen we're talking about alignment everyone who want to throw their initiative everyone who want to have their say and then as you go through that the copies of that spreadsheet multiply and finance pushes back and so on and so on. And if you go through that loops, it always is kind of the same scenario. You go through an immense effort and in the end you approve your budget and you approve your plan in February or March which is almost already a full quarter inside the next fiscal year and the reality has already changed. So you've approved the plan that is already obsolete, right? And out of sync with reality. Um, and Anthony and I, we we had a lot of experience with that and we believe there is a better way. And that's what we want to show you here. It's to build a plan that not only gets alignment, but also kind of aligns everyone around the table on a single direction in order to avoid kind of the defocus and the drag of time that this exercise can can give. We're going to go through five parts. The first one we're going to be unpacking what is the growth goal and then we're going to be talking about kind of the two major pieces of every plan which is the top down reverse engineering that goal and the bottom up the staffing of people individuals in order to really give ourselves the chance to hit plan. This is going to be covered by Anthony and then afterward we'll conclude with some more strategic elements on reporting to that plan and it's called budget and unit economics and why they matter and in the end how do you can apply and get continuous reforcasting with scenario modeling and the ability to have a cadence to report to plan. So with that said I'm gonna hand over the mic to Anthony who's going to go through the the first parts. Yeah, appreciate it. Go. And before before I kick off, just to give some reference, before starting Lean Scale, I was actually a VP of RevOps for three ventureback companies. One of them I was ahead of RevOps where we led through a $500 million exit. And planning was key at all of them. Um, but I had so many missteps in the beginning. And there are so many subtle things that can really, really trip you up when you're going through the planning process. And I saw some of the comments already too, like, hey, how do we get leadership to look at the right data? How do we get the team aligned? And I think a lot of those components are actually some of the more important ones is just getting everybody on the same page and the growth goal and growth model and having a home for it to live in is an amazing way to do that and get everybody rowing the same direction. So uh if we go to the next slide, I think the main thing that we want to talk about um so most SAS AI any ventureback tech company the northstar target is going to be annual recurring revenue um and even in companies where a lot of it is a consumptionbased model. So I think that's something to keep in mind. You know the quick shortcut for your valuation, quick shortcut to where you are in your growth stage always gets condensed to ARR. So sometimes you may need a lot of meetings and definition building just to wrap your head around what ARR means for you in your company because when you have consumption based models uh you may have to put some definition around that. But these are the major components that is going to anchor what your growth model is. And then everything else is going to be built around whatever this top target is. So typically you raise money, you set targets to a board, those targets are in the context of ARR and then you have to ask yourself what is it going to take to get to that ARR number. So couple breakouts here. Some of them are obvious. Um some of them can be a little bit more nuanced. One is what is your current ARR? Uh so if you don't have that figured out and a lot of companies don't so don't feel self-conscious if you don't. It just means you need to spend some time defining it. But start with your current ARR and then decide where you need to build to. Then here are the changes that come along the way that you're going to need to plan for and forecast. First is new ARR. So sometimes that means it always means new logos. Sometimes it means new contracts with existing customers too. So people think about this section a little bit differently, but for simplicity, let's just say this is going to be new customers. So new ARR getting added into the mix. And this is just the beginning. A lot of teams tend to stop right here and don't realize the other components that are part of this build. So, next is going to be your expansion. Take a look at your existing customer base. How much do you anticipate this cohort to expand throughout the year? If you have a really good line of sight onto what that expansion number is, it can actually take a lot of relief off of new logo business if you feel like you're in a position to expand. Well, now on the flip side of that, you're also going to want to take a look at churn and contraction or downgrades. And that's taking a look at the same cohort of existing business. How much of that revenue do you expect to actually contract away? Uh how much churn do you anticipate? And you may need to make up that loss with even more new business. So having a really solid understanding of each of these components, being able to plan for these for your different segments of business is going to be vital to build that ARR bridge to your new goal from where you are today. So I know for some that might be basic, for others it might be new, but there's some nuances there that's really important to just make sure we capture. Um, and Gilm, I don't know if you have any comments on that or in your experience, if you see people making any missteps on any of these foundational metrics in the beginning. I think people often underestimate as you grow. Um, the ARR that churn and downgrades take away from your top line. uh the more you grow the more that 1% 2% 3% turn rate is actually complex and a lot of growth goals are toward generating new AR but a lot of leverage come from the second and the third line and getting that growth loop that really turns your existing customer into additional revenue I couldn't agree more before my time in revops I actually spent um a lot of my career in customer success owning the existing revenue and it absolutely compounds and compounds either way. If if you're expanding well and things are going well, then it can really take a lot of relief off of the new business. Um but if you're not, it leaves a pretty big gap that you need to fill. 100%. All right. So, the other thing to keep in mind, too, um, a lot of times we're going to say, "Okay, great. We're going to go from 10 million to 20 million because doubling always sounds good to the board. So, let's do that." And now we have to think about when do we actually anticipate that performance to come in. So, this is a huge area where people often get themselves into trouble because they say, "Hey, 10 to 20 million and then let's evenly spread that across the year." Um, and then immediately you're already starting to fall behind or running into issues. The other one too is sometimes people will say, "Hey, we have a lot of seasonality. Let's hope like at the back half of the year we're going to figure it out." and then you're also not getting a head start on how you need to be performing to achieve the target that you have as well. So, two things really to consider. Um, one is, do you have any seasonality in your business? Are there any major reasons why you'd expect exceptional performance in certain quarters over others? Sometimes that's the Q4 e-commerce season. Uh sometimes it's tied to an event or some event season where you tend to drum up a lot of business. Um but take a look at any macro external factors that could be creating that seasonality and then see where you want to spread the performance. That's one bucket. The other bucket is how do you anticipate ramping up your resources and ramping up your team? We're going to talk about that when we hop into a live example of a model real quick. But you don't you don't build resources and then immediately start to get the results from that. It takes time. if you're hiring reps, if you're testing new marketing channels, if you're deploying new customer strategies, if you're deploying new products, um all of these things take much more time than people tend to anticipate and you really need to time out the performance of that. So those two things can impact when you expect the performance to come in the year and how you plan throughout the year. So before I hop in, uh if anybody wants to get a copy that they can follow along as I go through, uh we have a very simple model. We also have a video on YouTube that walks you through it if you want to. Uh so that QR code will enable you to download a copy of a growth model so you can start building this on your own. Um and then I'll walk through some of the components. Now I'm going to go through the growth model that's on the QR code here. So, we're looking at the same uh same piece of paper, if you will, but I'm also going to step into a slightly more complex one because this one will give you the basics and give you an idea and unlock a few perspectives that are important. But when you start to build this for your company, you're likely going to need further segmentation and breakdown. So, I'm going to show two. This is an example of what you should have been able to download on the QR code. So, you'll have an exact copy of this. Um, it's a very simple growth model um that really is just looking at one segment, but I think it's going to give the core fundamentals that will enable you to build your own and also give you an idea of, hey, if I'm using Vasco, how would I house this in a platform like Vasco? So, like I mentioned before, everything is really anchored to that ARR target. So, you have to think where am I today? Uh, let's say let's use that example that we had. We're going to go 10 10 million. I want to double to 20 million. So I need to build a plan that's going to get my company from 10 million in ARR to 20 million in AR. And then all of these inputs are going to have massive effects in the performance that we expect and then the new business that we need to bring in and pipeline we need to build. So next let's take a look at annual net retention. Uh you could break this out if you wanted to between expansion and contraction, but for simplicity, let's just say, hey, net of churn and expansions and upgrades and downgrades, the net of it, our customer base, we actually anticipate to grow maybe about 10% this year. So that's going to actually take a little bit of relief off of the new business that you need um because you're anticipating that existing book to grow. Now a couple other inputs that are going to be important. These are more funnel metric focused. So huge one is going to be the SQL to close one conversion rate. Uh once you have a lead, you have a salesqualified lead at what clip are you bringing those to close one deals. Um if you're for some benchmarks because sometimes people don't even have this data. Um anywhere from 20 to 25% is a decent benchmark to use if you're mid-market enterprise. Um, if you're smaller business, uh, you know, anywhere from a 30 to 40% you might be able to expect as a conversion rate. But for this case, let's just anticipate a 25% conversion rate. We're going to close a quarter of the SQLs that come in. Okay, next, let's take a look at sales cycle. Great. We built the pipeline. The pipeline is here. How long does this actually take to close? And I'm going to pause right here because I saw Guyom smile for this because nothing. Absolutely nothing trips up a growth model more than factoring in your sales cycle. Indeed, indeed. Indeed. And very often there is that kind of magical sense that people will close leads that come in within the same months. But uh if you need to reach a certain number within within I don't know um the second quarter, but your sales cycle are actually um three months. Well, those leads, this pipeline you need to generate in January, February, March. Otherwise, you're sending your troops on the death march. And I think this is where things get a bit more complicated. Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm just going to shine the red sirens. Uh, pause here. We'll turn this into a clip after. This is the time where it's like you really need to know your sales cycle and how it's going to impact because I'll show you some examples of what it'll do in the performance. But, you know, hey, do you close in quarter? That's great if you can. Does it take one quarter, two quarters? All of that's going to impact how much pipeline you need to build earlier on. Okay. Next, uh MQL to SQL conversion. How much flow do you need to get the number of SQLs that you need? Average ACV. This is going to help you get an understanding of logos and number. Sometimes number um number of leads or opportunities can be a little bit of directive of how much resource you need. So, we'll take a look at that. Um then let's take a look at the team you need to go the resources and team you need to go capture this demand and make it happen. So we have customer success capacity. How much can a CSM carry in your world? Uh sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower. If you're looking for a benchmark, um if you're around a 20x uh CSM cost to carry ratio, you're doing okay. If you can push it higher, great. If you're getting below 15 or nearing 10, then you may have an inefficient CS operation. So, I would take a look at that. Next is going to be the quota expectation. Um, and I would actually say there's the quota you assign and then there's the performance you actually expect. So, in this case, I'm going to put the performance I actually expect because you're going to over assign quota and then there's going to be what actually comes in through the door. Okay, another one, probably another siren to ring here, sales ramp time. Um, a lot of people will think of sales ramp time as when did my salesperson go through training. They went through the pitch boot camp. They know the product. They're ready to hit the field. They're ready to sell. Yes, that's an important component of ramp, but even more important is when is that salesperson building pipeline and closing deals and being fully productive? That's when you have a ramped salesperson. And I put a note in here for you. This should not be shorter than your sales cycle because the math just doesn't make sense. If it takes a quarter to build pipeline and close it, then you can't have a rep fully performing earlier than that. So, take a look at those to to give you some guidance on how to set it up. Average cost per SQL. This will give you rough idea of your marketing budget. You can get hyperdetailed if you have excellent channel and lead attribution metrics set up and you have a system to do this. So you can look at this at the exact channel and lead source level. Um a lot of companies especially when they're starting out can take your overall marketing budget over uh the opportunities that you created. That's going to give you a rough idea of how big your marketing budget should be. So lot of nuance there but for simplicity I'm going to leave it there. throw in some salaries and then you're ready to take a look at your performance. Now, I'm going to pause here because this is the moment where you align all of this with your executive team. So, when they're asking, "What does it take to go from 10 million to 20 million?" And you tell them, "We're going to need this number of reps. We're going to need this type of marketing budget. We're going to need to be able to build this amount of pipeline." And they start to challenge and push back. What you do is you go back to your inputs and tell me which one of these inputs is wrong. Do we expect more performance here? Do we expect a better conversion rate? Do we think we can reduce the sales cycle? Do we think we can increase the conversion from MQL to SQL? Where do we feel like we can improve performance on these inputs? Because that's the only conversation we should be having and then we'll talk about the outputs. So this is super super important. Usually this takes a few meetings, probably a couple yelling matches to get alignment on and um then you can start looking at your plan. Which one is the one you get the most push back on when you present that plan on that structure of a plan? That's a great question. I would say it's not a metric, but a perspective that these metrics should be significantly improving while you're scaling. I think that's the biggest feedback when I when I would bring this to a CEO and we we do this at lean scale. We we do growth modeling for our customers and when we present it they go well our SQL to close one was 30% last quarter like should shouldn't we be able to crank it to 40%. Like we're getting better. We're training better. When you are building the airplane while you're flying it, I really really caution you to also expect your efficiency to increase at the same time. So when you get to a certain destination or certain level of scale, then you can start to increase. But I think the biggest push back I get is uh CEOs, founders expect these to be getting better while they're getting bigger. I would caution at least keep it the same. you experience the same or is there anything that kind of pokes out to you? For me, the the ramp time and the sales cycle is where very often people underestimate how fast you need to build the pipeline and how fast you need to hire your people and how good your hiring process needs to be. Because if you compound them actually you realize that the year or the ability to hit the year is almost you know in in the maps within the first three to four months. Um and I see a lot of people focusing on the lead stage of the bow tie. So closed one expansion and everything but those are the inputs that really matter. Actually I think you're absolutely right. I the timing component is huge and I'll show you um kind of what happens over here. So now I have a four quarter plan uh built out here and we took a swag at hey how do you want that performance to distribute across the year and we said hey maybe maybe it's a little bit more back weighted and we have some ramping to do we have some building to do um so we'll push it back there and then this is what your ARR build needs to look like in order to go from 10 to 20 we anticipate the net retention we're going to have a quarter of a million a year but again If I change that, then it changes how much we're expecting and then it increases the number of new business that we need. So, I'm going to put that back to 110. Take a little bit of pressure off the sales team. Then, here's how we anticipate the bookings to come in the door. And then this is the pipeline that we need. So, I want you to kind of take a look at these numbers real quick. So, if we had a shorter sales cycle, let's say we close everything in quarter, that definitely takes a lot of pressure off of the amount of pipeline you need to build because the bookings you need here, if we're going to close a quarter, then we can build the pipeline in this quarter and close it. Now, if I need to close 2.2 million in Q3 and I have a two quarter sales cycle, that $9 million of pipeline build moves to Q1 now. So, now we have to have that built in Q1. So, we were able to close 2.2 in Q3. So, I think that's a massive difference if you're setting up a pipeline target for a CMO for a marketing team. The difference between 9 million and 5.4 million, you know, 54 SQLs versus 90 SQLs. These are dramatic differences just based on moving the sales cycle component conversion too. So if we just increase this, you know, 25% to 30%. That reduces that pipeline need in Q1 from 90 to 75. But let's say you were off 5% the other way. Now from 90 it's going to go to 113 SQLs. So the importance of the accuracy of these metrics couldn't be highlighted more and how much pipeline you need to build one. All right, I'm going to fly through the rest and hop into another model real quick and then we'll wrap up kind of the live demo here. But I think what's what's really important as we look at this is that very often I see targets of MQLs or pipelines or SQLs being driven by we did X last year therefore we need to do X plus 30% this year. um with this way it's actually reverse engineering the goal of the company to get to the next stage and the target of the company becomes mathematical. So you stop arguing about what is the right target of MQLSQL or pipeline and you move directly the conversation to how do we get there knowing that it's all connected. Absolutely. And that's and that's why when you're going through this planning, it's so important that you get as accurate data as possible here and you keep the conversation there. Like Y was saying, just talk about which of these metrics are off and what you expect in one of these. Then we can talk about the performance that we need. And also sometimes you may have an opportunity to do better than last year plus. So if you believe in some of this and depending on how much capital you raised of course you could accelerate this even more. So it's not just about hey hitting achievable targets. We work with companies where they forecasted too low and now they're losing opportunities because they don't have enough salespeople to convert the demand. They don't have enough CSN to manage it. So the problem definitely goes both ways. It's it's an exercise of being accurate, not pushing higher or lower. Um, okay. So, the same thing. You're going to get the MQLs you need, then you'll get the sales team you need. I'm just going to illustrate ramp time, too. Yes, if sellers could ramp immediately, then maybe you only need six reps in Q1. But since it's going to take two quarters, we should probably hire 11 reps in Q1. So, that way they're ramped in time for the bookings target that we have coming up in the next couple quarters. And then you can start to assess your costs and go through that. So that's a simple model. This is like a one segment, one year, onedimensional, but this will get the juices flowing. I'm going to flash up just another example just so you have an idea of what it might look like. If you have an enterprise segment and maybe a mid-market segment, then essentially all you're doing is a bunch of mini growth models and then you're adding them all up because your funnel metrics are going to look different. like your sales cycle in enterprise might be three quarters. Your sales cycle and your mid-market or SMB might be one. You might be able to ramp up this part of the team faster. Um there's a lot of factors that can change uh depending on what segment you're talking about even regionally as well. Hey, maybe you have a team in Europe or AMIA um an APAC team. Maybe funnel metrics look a little different in different geographies. And then the other thing I want to caution or just stress, I know you can only plan so far ahead in the future, but I would have an idea at least 2 years into the future because a lot of what you're going to be planning for in 2026 depends on what you want to do in 2027 because the back half of 2026, you're likely going to need to start ramping for the 2027 plan. So that way you can stack what your ARR build and growth will look like from year to year and then make sure you're not underestimating the amount of investments you need to make next year. We have a question from the chat. Um Nicholas is asking, "What pipeline coverage do you recommend?" Yeah, great question. I would point you back to what your conversion rate is. So I would go see what your 100% Yeah. If you're 100% conversion rate, that'd be great. No. Yeah. So I would look there and then I'd add a little bit of a buffer. So let's say let's say, hey, when we pull historically, we got 25% conversion rate. Yeah. A 4x coverage is going to be healthy. A 5x coverage is going to help you sleep at night. So basically your pipeline coverage depends heavily on your conversion rate your win rate. So if your conversion rate by the way is way too low like let's say a 10x that means that you 10% that means that you need to get a pipeline of 10x your revenue goal. So that's also an adjustment that uh that you can discuss at a strategic level with the CRO, the CEO, the CFO saying well before we throw you know more SDRs are generating pipeline maybe we need to fix the conversion rate so that we balance the right amount of pipeline and the right amount of targets. Absolutely. And Nicholas if if you don't have this data sometimes you just haven't had a chance to collect it. Um I'll throw out some you can put some benchmarks in. It's okay to put placeholders. Nobody has perfect data. So, it's just about getting as close as you can to the truth. If you're kind of a SMB smaller, let's say sub 50k uh ACV deals, then maybe like a 3 to 4x coverage. If you're enterprise, anywhere from a 5 to 10x coverage. All right, Anthony, thank you so much for showing the model. I think it gives you an idea of the things that you can build in order to really reverse engineer that macro goal that the company has asked you to deliver on with you know assumptions and things that need to happen in the business. So if you want to download again that templates feel free to uh pull your phones up and and and scan that QR codes. Uh we're going to be sharing of course also the presentation for the attendees so you'll be able to look at it as well. Um, so now I want to get to the other piece of the conversation. So we've been understanding how to reverse engineer again that 3x or 2x growth goal into things that are attainable at the top of the funnel. But it only matters if it's within the right parameters. And by parameters, I mean budget and unit economics. So the first thing you really need to to to build after you have that plan that kind of makes sense, it's to understand how it how much it's going to cost. And I see very very often a lot of mistakes being made at that stage because people don't take all the costs into the equation and that's where often the CFO starts to push back. So what do we mean by all sales and marketing cost? Well, it's the cost of your people, not just the cost of acquiring leads through ads. So, the cost of your people includes both the people who are producing pipeline and producing closed one and so on, but also all the teams that are helping uh around those. So, if you have a team of sales engineer, they should be factored in. If you have a team of technical sales, they should be factored in. If you have no customer success with different layers, account management, all those costs that you will see on the profit and loss of your P&L, sorry, on the lines in line in your in your profit and loss, you need to to find a way to trickle them back into into your model. Um, so people, marketing acquisition costs and also all the other custom expenses that you can have like computer potentially allocation of square meters and so on and so on. And once you have that then from the investment and the growth you can balance it with the budget and calculate your unit economics and unit economics are very important especially when you talk to the board. Okay for those who really want to go deep into that topic we have built at Vasco a board meeting uh playbook and template so you can scan it and go through that. I will not go in very much detail. I will more stay on topic into why this matter in the planning exercise. Very briefly, what are the typical unit economics that you see in a SAS business? Well, the 10 ones that I almost see every time is net growth rate, lifetime value of customer, customer acquisition costs, CAC payback, LTV of a CAC, net revenue retention, which is what we saw in the model. It's your expansion minus your churn, how much can you grow with your existing customers, gross revenue retention, which is basically one minus your churn rate. So how sticky are your existing customers and then efficiency metrics like a r per employee sales cycles and conversion rates and the magic number which basically tells you by dollar of sales and marketing expenses how many dollars can I generate uh of uh new AR net new AR okay so those are ballpark like the typical unit economics that you'll find in SAS now put yourself in the shoes of the CEO and the CFO because we always see the process as being you build a plan, you show that plan, it feels it's grounded in reality and then you go into that term all of selling that plan and you don't understand why people don't go into details as much as you do and it just push it back um without giving you concrete sometimes answers on very detailed elements that you should add or remove. That's because in the process most people forget that your CEO and your CFO they have a boss and that boss is called the board and very often the board is composed of the investors who've injected money in the company with the expectation of certain results and yes the CFO and the CEO they are part of the board but the other members are your investors right so when you build that plan of course the CEO and the CF Therefore, we'll look at it and we'll have a view. But when they present it to the board, they will never go into details because what the investors will look at are not the sum of all the little initiative and changes and drivers and so they will look at the unit economics balance with the growth that you propose in order to find whether ballpark or not you are within the right parameters for you to graduate to the next phase of your growth. And if you don't pass that stress test, then the CEO and the CFO have the plan rejected to the board. So very often they push you back because they know this is a plan they can't sell to the investors. And this is where you can actually shine. You can shine by getting the right balance of growth and unit economics because in the end this is what will help you graduate to the next round of financing from a markets perspective. If you're a seed company and you need to get to series A, this is what a series A company needs to have in terms of metrics. This is what a series B company needs to have in metrics. And if your plan don't support that, it might be the best plan in the world. It's a plan that's going to reject be rejected because it's a plan that's going to condemn the company, right? But it's also your opportunity for you in revelops to become strategic because if you understand that language of the board then you can talk that language to the CEO and the CFO and you can have really a seat at the table that is way different. And for the CEOs out there and the funders speaking the unit economics language also builds trust with the board because you speak the language of the investors. They want to know if you understand the game you're playing. So let me give you a concrete example. you're a seat company and you want to get to a series A milestone. Well, first ask what are the metrics that the board and the investors are looking at so that you can graduate to series A. So in this example, we're sell you need to reach 2 million of AR within the next 18 months. So that means you need to get a growth rate above 100%. Because 2 million in five years, it's not a VC play, it's not a PE play, private equity play. So you need to get a certain velocity to get to those 2 million. But also the investor want to make sure you acquire customer in a way that is scalable. So they want to see your customer acquisition cost payback to be lowered in 18 months. They want to make sure that actually your product is sticky so that when you graduate and you move to the next phase, you're not losing so much customer that it's impossible to grow from. So they're going to ask some kind of you know gross revenue retention around 85%. and you go on and on and on. Of course, you're never perfect, but you understand the kind of metrics that you plan or the bound that you plan needs to pass so that it's not rejected by the investors and then you know it goes back to the organization and you have that terminal again and again. So once you build that and you have your plan that Anthony Ash has shown then compile those unit economics and show them and this is a format that you can use where you see all of them and how they're growing and performing months over month you'll see that there's going to be quite a lot of volatility around those because as you invest they degrade as you divest or you see you know the investments starting to produce some ROI they improve what you're looking at is not the perfect thing you're looking to a trend that grows you through the right unit economics. Bonus point, if you want to become strategic, try to get those unit economics split at the channel level because channels speaks resource allocation. You're going to realize that there's going to be a lot of pressure to grow the unit economics, but also to grow the top line and both are conflicting because you want to spend more to grow more and they're asking you to spend less to grow in a certain way. So what you can do is kind of know balance and benchmark your different channels and say well we're going to reallocate some resources from out ofbound to partnership and inbound because they produce better unit economics. So we're going to spend less to get the same result in the end. And of course you need to think about how many leads you can acquire. So you need to make sure that you diversify your channel at certain period of time. That's a way for you to be very strategic with the CFO and the CEO by proposing resource allocation based on data. An amazing way for you also to defend the plan when you talk to people within your organization, the CFO or even as a founder to the board is to anchor that plan or to stress test that plan within benchmarks. And what is great here is that there are a lot of benchmarks that VCs and P publish everywhere. Here we have a periodic table that is being published and refreshed every year by inside partner and you can see clear brackets to which for inside partner great looks like. So here they say well you're within 10 to 100 million of typically your win rate should be 30%. And if you were to click there, they have different levels based on your typical deal size. But if your plan has a 60% win rate, then that means probably that, you know, you're you're being too optimistic or that you're not bringing enough velocity. On the other side, if it's 10%, you can argue, well, you know, maybe we have a problem here. Maybe this is a driver that we need to focus more on in order to get more efficiency. Um, same thing with setting up quota. If you give a quota of 2 million to a rep, you're paying a 100k, it means that maybe you're living in a delusion, right? But if someone tells you, I want to be paid 200k to bring, I don't know, 400k of AR per year. That's a 2K 2x sorry, quota to OT ratio, which means that they're only bringing twice what the cost organization and that's way below the benchmark. then you can come back and say well we can't do that because that's not sustainable because the market typically insists of on having uh a quot to ratio of of four to 5x. So they are amazing those benchmarks at depersonalizing the conversation on you and the person but more putting it to what the market says scrape look like. I encourage you as well to look at those benchmarks from a conversion metrics perspective. Um, and we have some benchmarks that we can share with you. Um, so based on your deal size, what is a good rate for lead to MQL, MQL to SQL, SQL to SAL, what what is a great win rate? And when you put your assumptions in that model and you're being challenged or you want to challenge the assumption, then you can refer to those in order to bring a little bit more weight into the argument. For those who want uh you can scan that QR code. We've actually compiled all those benchmarks and assembled them into a spreadsheet that we believe gives a very nice sense of reality. So you can access those and use them in your planning season. Um they're going to be great way for you to you know have a have kind of a point to put your first assumptions to your model but also uh defend it or challenge it uh to the rest of the organization. Um now I want to touch on something very important. We've thought talked about unit economics but you have to invest in SAS before you get the results. You hire your reps now but they produce results afterwards. You spend in marketing now and the hope that the revenue is going to come afterwards. So it's normal that as you invest more you see your unit economics degrade naturally. So what you really want to see is not a perfect line of unit economics that is green all the way through your plan. You want to grow progressively into those unit economics that the board want to see. So you want to build a plan that is going to show a path to getting to the milestones. Not something that is always perfect and always on every quarter because that doesn't exist and nobody's expecting that. So we've understood the importance of unit economics. why they matter and how the investors and the board are going to be looking at your plan from a macro perspective. Now, of course, what you will want afterwards is to build that cadence and that comes with scenario modeling and then also reporting to plan. So the scenario modeling is really making sure that you have the main plan but instead of every time spinning out a new spreadsheet in order to change the plan. Um and this is where I really encourage you actually to to try to to put the systems and the infrastructure in place is to build scenarios in order to understand various variation and sensitivity analysis of the inputs that you have. And as if you build that cadence, then as you reforcast, it's going to be a little less of a hell and it's going to be a little more easy and fast to adjust based on reality. Um, and also what you absolutely need to do is to have a cadence where you report to plan almost live. There is nothing worse than having that plan on a spreadsheet that sits on the side and then you reopen it at the end of the quarter, see whether you hit or not and then go through again a reforcasting hell that takes you six to eight weeks uh becomes live after the beginning of the next quarter and is already obsolete as you close uh the the next quarter. So building that cadence, it's what going to align the entire company around the plan that you've built, but also align everyone's understanding of what's working and what's not working so that reforcasting becomes a breeze. Um, and this is where we encourage you to really like move away from spreadsheet misery and potentially like equip yourself with the right tools and softwares in order to automate this. Um, live progress to target. So you want to have some kind of live dashboards that from the plan that you've sold to the board and that you've agreed upon with the executive you're measuring progress to target almost every day if possible live and that becomes the single source of truth that your company operates on. And when this happen everybody starts to get a common understanding of what's working, what's not working do we have a problem of MQLs from marketing? Do we have a problem of close rate? where are the bottlenecks? So when comes time to actually adjust, move away uh allocation from a certain channel to another, everybody already has a common understanding of the bottlenecks and the leakages and you don't have to go through the end of the quarter and the beginning of the next one to try to align again everyone on what truth is because they've seen it for the previous quarter. Building that operating guidance of live progress to target is absolutely essential and you'll see if you implement that with your organization the alignment that it gives is just phenomenal. Bonus point if you can split that between your core business and your new bets. That's what Anthony has kind of shown in the model is that we've seen one layer but it's more complex version where you have the core business and your forecast and then you have the various bets. You decide to enter another market. You decide to go up markets and try to get enterprise deals and so on and so on. Well, as you have those new bets that you're building up, uh, well, they're not going to work instantly. If you go up market and you try to go enterprise and you wear you know SMB, it's going to take time before you get a credibility brand and you know up market typically means lower um lower um uh conversion rates, win rates and longer sales cycle. If you aggregate everything together, well at the macro level the board is going to say well we have a problem and conversion rates are going down and sales cycle are going up. What's happening? Stop. Stop. Change everything and so on. But if you split and you say no no no on the core business everything's running well we're on the grid but on the new bets we have some of them that are paying off some of them that are we're we're refining and some of them that are not working then decision making process becomes much more rational and the board and the executive feel that they're in control because they understand where to scale where to accelerate and where to divest rather than put everything in jeopardy and put the entire revenue engine to a halt because they don't know what's happening right so split sitting in the right motions is essential. A little trick that we have um is if you really want to get um the alignment that there is a kind of a forcing function that you can do which is sending a sales tracker every day. It's a simple email that shows progress to target to everyone leadership included in the company. And when that happens, they see an email that is measuring what the company is looking at in terms of performance. And that has a tendency to be kind of a gravitational pool where everyone has the same understanding of what's happening within the company. Are we having enough leads? Where do they come from? The MQLs and so on and so on. And it's very hard to impose a single source of truth in most organization. This is a way for you to get there because that email is read by the CEO, the CFO, and the CRO. So everybody is going to be willing to work on your data set and not the one that they've compiled on the side because they're going to know that this email is how their performance is going to be measured on a daily basis. So a little tip to implement this. Um and finally Anthony like I'm always hearing silver bullets the thing that we did that changed the trajectory of the company the thing that we did and then we went from zero to X. The reality is that once you build the real revenue engine and the metric model, it's all the little improvement that compound every day that have a manifing impact on your growth. And it's easier to talk about the great things, you know, that you've done and that we're kind of, you know, mini silver bullet, but the real real lift is when you get 1% better every day. And 1% better every day is a 37x growth at the end of the year. and 1% worth is 97% lost. So, it's really about building that engine and trying to fix improve a little bit of a better messaging, a little bit of a better coverage, a little bit of a better demo. And you realize that those improvements they compound and from something that sounds impossible, 3x of growth, it start to become inevitable. Um so yeah because in companies basically revops like Anthony our our goal is to help you make your growth predictable fast and efficient and I think that's the jobs to be done of of revops uh in the world. So with this uh we're going to be opening up to Q&A. you have the QR code to download the guide, but uh hopefully you found um a few useful frameworks and tips that you can use during planning sessions so that it's a little bit of less of a hell than it used to be in the past. Yeah. And while um while some of the questions are coming in um couldn't agree more with the 1% better every day, there are no growth hacks. There's no I haven't seen it at least and I've seen some really successful companies go through all those phases. it it's showing up every day, pouring a hot cup of coffee, getting to work, and making things better and being intentional. Um, and the one thing I'd also add too is don't underestimate the power of having all of this buttoned up when you go through a fundraising or exit process. The sheer fact that you have this level of visibility and intentionality in how you're growing could mean a tremendous amount on your valuation and the type of investors you can attract and the type of exit you could have. So just the visibility alone has tremendous value. It builds trust and we've been sitting in many board meetings and being adviser to so many companies and very often the board doesn't expect you to be perfect. But if you don't have the answers, this is where trust start to erode and this is where it becomes more complex. If you come equipped with the right data and the right answer, you build that trust with the board and you can continue operating in a much more smooth way. We have a question from John. Um, not directly related to planning, but have you seen any good ways to make CRM data entry easier or more automatic so sales actually does it? I could probably take that one. Um, since Leanscale, we're involved in really managing the entire revenue tech stack. Um, one is just making your CRM cleaner, more intentional, giving guidance. Sometimes you have 20,000 mandatory fields and it makes it difficult. So try to trim down to get the most efficient ones. And then um there are a few tools out there. Epa is one I can I can speak to where they will connect your emails, your calendar. So all of that um interaction gets automatically logged in your CRM and as well as uh taking your video recordings and then automatically filling in things like medic or bant whatever your qualification is. So that way you know your opportunities or deals are meeting the qualification criteria without your sales team needing to lift a finger and type it all in. So few other tools and everything but it couple basics and that removes a lot of judgment calls and becomes much more systematic. So yeah, great advice. Uh there's a question from Monica. How do you build a culture where reps and marketers own their numbers instead of seeing plans target as just a revops thing? Do you notice a big change in accountability with the live reporting view? Um, I do see a lot of accountability that rises up the minute you have that live view and that live view is distributed every single day to the leaders of the organization because then there is that forcing function where the numbers are updated every single day and your performance is being measured on those numbers uh and viewed by the entire organization. So surfacing the numbers by itself creates a lot of accountability and it also removes the ability from people within the organization to assemble the data that's going to make them look good. We've all seen that a lot of time you have sales, marketing and customer success coming with different data that tells a completely different story. And this is where when you run into QBR or WBR, you spend more time arguing about the data rather than what to do about it. That sales tracker, that daily digest of progress to target is really a forcing function that works miracle in order to align everyone on this. And then you as revops, you don't become the enemy. The email is the enemy. You're there to help them make the numbers better. And that kind of changes um the narrative. Yeah. I can't say how many times I've been in a meeting where you show a pipeline number or something, someone goes, "That number's not right. That one's wrong." Um because you're only looking at the data maybe once a month or something. But absolutely getting in that daily rhythm, daily habit, then you're cleaning the data every day as you go. Um, it's huge. And yes, Monica, you you're asking the question that feature is available in Vasco. And just to give you a a little fun fact, um, daily emails, like you know how many emails people receive every day, the feature of daily emails progress to target. The open rate in our companies that are using Vasco is 85%. So the open rate of an email received every day is 85%. That kind of gives you an idea about how you know a forcing function this becomes in the organization. All right, I think we are at time. Anthony, thank you so much. Um I think it was a session packed with a lot of content. Um and I hope it was useful for everyone. Um, do you have any concluding remarks, Anthony? I just appreciate the time and can't emphasize enough doing the growth model, basing it in your unit economics, and making sure you have a good understanding of how you're going to achieve a company's goals. I can't tell you what that can also do to your culture, your team, and everybody's there to win, and this is such an important component of that. So, and I really appreciate everything you all are doing at Vasco to give a home and a platform for the arguably one of the most important aspects of the business to live in. Um, and really really excited about all the features and everything you're pumping out too. So, thanks for having me and um, thanks for everything that you do.