👋 Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter! Every week, I share cases, personal stories and frameworks for GTM leaders and RevOps.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve reflected over our company Growblocks. It feels like we’re reaching an inflection point.
RevGenius featured us as one of the next 50 GTM Startups.
We’re now an official partner of Winning by Design!
We’ve also partnered with Union Square Consulting and Cremanski & Company.
GTM Partners featured us in a product spotlight. Read it here.
And finally, we’ve welcomed lots of new wonderful customers!
But there’s something else I’ve reflected over.
There’s a decision-making crisis in SaaS today.
We’re all being bombarded with “Growth at all Costs is over. Now it’s about Profitable Efficient Growth.”
What this really means for most of us is that we can’t trust the old “true and tested” playbooks anymore. There’s a massive pile of discarded playbooks seen by the sheer amount of VP Sales, CMOs, and VP CS sitting on “the bench” right now - as Pavilion puts it.
This also means the “been there done that leader” sitting in the meeting calling the shots quickly and confidently is not there anymore. Everyone who did it has been fired - and the rest aren't that confident anymore.
So, what should help us through this shift? Logic and data, right? Let’s unpack that.
Unpacking logic and data
Logic? For many of you, this will still be the Excel-driven top-down “logic” as in “let’s hit a CAC:Payback of 12” or “we need to get to the Rule of 40.” All this logic really originates from investors.
But that “logic” does not help anyone to change operationally and achieve those metrics.
And then, Data? Gartner says 84% of BI implementations fail. And it’s not because someone on the team can't write SQL in a data warehouse. The reason is that businesses can’t agree on simple metric definitions and don’t trust their own data.
That’s unfortunately also true for teams that actually managed to roll out BI.
So every leader ends up building their own dashboards in their own “trusted” data silos to steer their team by something - anything, really. Does this map to my other leaders or to my financial plan? Don’t know, don’t care. I need to hit my number. Go away, mister “Know-it-all RevOps.”
So how the actual f*** are we supposed to make the right decisions?
First, you need to use revenue architecture as your logic, and then you simply need a solution to work with the data.
But there are three things that are preventing folks from getting there.
First: Most solutions today simply don’t solve the problem. Many still suffer from the occasional “where did you get that number from?”, a symptom of no shared language or standardized way of working with data.
Second: There’s little to no self-serviceability with data. Even smart leaders persist to use the wrong data fields, resulting in the wrong reports and insights (I’ve been there). And with BI they have no chance at surfacing any data themself.
Third: Even if folks have solved the first two, there’s just zero context. You’ll find that they’ve created 12 other dashboards and 5 spreadsheets with 8 tabs to manage other data points and insights.
But what if you could have a shared language and put the power of data in the hands of every GTM leader? What if they could create their reports, diagnose issues, and run all their meetings with accurate data—all in one place?
All the while connecting every metric back to the Revenue Architecture Logic sitting in the background helping leaders to understand how their siloed metrics map back to the overall bow-tie model.
Well, I guess you know where this is going.
Today, we’re releasing a massive upgrade that’ll close the loop, so you can use data and logic to make the right calls going forward.
Introducing Advanced Metrics
Funnel metrics rarely live on their own. A drop in leads will influence opportunity creation, which impacts closed/won deals. That’s easy to understand, right?
But what metrics are influencing your GRR? How does your quota play into your revenue target? And what needs to be done to lower your CAC:Payback?
Funnel metrics are only the start. To diagnose your GTM performance, you need to see every metric. Now, we’re introducing 100s of standardized SaaS metrics, so you don’t need to run ad hoc calculations in a sheet. You can finally bring everything performance together in one place.
This is important because the regular bowtie metrics speak to very granular performance - but they’re directly connected to metrics such as GRR, Magic number, CAC:Payback, and more.
Now, on top of your funnel data, you’ll have access to:
Performance metrics: Team-level insights for marketing, sales, and CS
People metrics: See and analyze performance of individuals
Efficiency metrics: Monitor metrics your C-Level and board needs like LTV:CAC
When you’re working with these bigger efficiency metrics, the devil is in the details. You can put up a good magic number, but if you don’t know what is making it happen, then you’re not going to be prepared to talk about it to anyone.
I’m a fan of Growblocks’ approach because it lets you have both. You’re going to have the right efficiency metric at hand, and you’ll be able to help people talk through what’s happening to calculate that and impact it.
Having those efficiency metrics alongside funnel projections almost teaches people that if they get more opportunities and you close them, your CAC:PB goes down. 0
-Mallory Lee, Union Square Consulting
You absolutely can't run your business off of one or two core metrics. But at any given time, there are probably between 15 and 36 metrics that you have to keep track of.
And when I say keep track of, I mean you know how that metric was performing and you know what the risk indicators are on that metric.
And you can't just have this simple view of how things are going if you oversimplify your business to make it easy. What ends up happening is that you obfuscate details that are really critical. And we might make a really bad call that results in total failure of the business.
-Lindsay Cordell, GTM Partners
Metric Library: Get a shared language
“Where did you get that number from?”
Hearing that question in a GTM meeting was one of my worst nightmares when I was in RevOps.
Having access to every SaaS metric isn’t worth much if you’re facing a lack of data trust. With our metrics library, we’re (almost) eliminating those questions for good.
What is the Metric Library? A collection of all SaaS metrics, definitions, calculations & data sources - ready to use.
Now you’ll be able to:
Search your metrics
See their definitions
See how they're calculated
Know where their data is sourced from
The metric library is going to give Growblocks customers the ability to quickly observe the right metrics for them, and understand their business on a whole new level.
No questions asked. No fuzzy math. It’s all right here, clear as day. So that people can be a little more honest about the state of their business.
- Lindsay Cordell, GTM Partners
I think a proper metric library is just a really good way to increase the data fluency within an organization so that everyone can be on the same page.
A lot of people will just nod and smile when you say CAC payback, and they don't know what you're talking about.
Having that common understanding, and having everyone speak the same language, I think is way more important than some people give it credit for.
- Mallory Lee, Union Square Consulting
Dashboards: Enable self-serve insights
How many times have you been in a GTM meeting where every VP uses their own dashboards?
While they’re great to show performance within their own team, these dashboards are useless when it comes to GTM performance.
They don’t speak to each other
Conversions between each can be a nightmare
They don’t relate to revenue
And if you want to change them, you’ll need 2 weeks and a data scientist
Now, with Dashboards, we’re keeping everyone aligned with the same numbers.
Add your GTM metrics from a trusted library with one click.
Easily filter by market, motion, segment, and more so you can see what matters.
Have it connected across your entire funnel
And instantly add/remove metrics with one click; no data team needed
I love the dashboard approach. And I think the hardest part, as you guys have seen, is just aggregating these disparate sources. And putting them together in a way that isn't Tableau, that's going to be really powerful because it just puts more capability in the hands of people who don't want to go and code this stuff.
-Mallory Lee, Union Square Consulting
At the end of the day, we’re really excited about how these new additions will help GTM teams make better decisions.
Want to see these features for yourself? Book a demo here.