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Anatomy of My SaaS CEO Dashboard

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Growth-Stage SaaS CEO Dashboard Example from Married2Growth

I spent the last eleven years or so as a SaaS CEO — growing from $1M in ARR to $10M+. I’ve always been data-driven, but when I discovered live dashboards, it changed my day-to-day life. Metrics are important, but access to and visualization of key data are much harder to come by. So here’s the anatomy of my SaaS CEO dashboard.

Revenue

Revenue Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
In enterprise SaaS, I find anything less than quarters to be too lumpy for a CEO dashboard. I had analytics feeds and department-specific dashboards that were much more granular (real-time sometimes), but for the highest level stuff, I kept it to quarters.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
CAC is vitally important to me. It illustrated the overall capital efficiency of growth through the lens of sales & marketing efficacy. I like to look at most metrics over time — typically trailing eight quarters — for perspective and trends.

LTV (Lifetime Value)

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
Customer lifetime value (LTV) is another favorite of mine. It encapsulates ARPU (average revenue per unit) and retention/expansion trends into a mighty important number. Another way to look at CAC and LTV is as a ratio, but I preferred to see the dollars in my CEO dashboard.

Gross & Net Churn

Gross Churn and Net Churn Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
Churn is what we all work to minimize. I like to track gross churn (all losses) as well as net churn (gross churn minus expansion revenue). These two metrics really reflect on two entirely different things — unsatisfied customers (spending less) and uber satisfied ones (spending more).

New Contract Value

New Contract Value Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
Sales results are shown in arrears with my new contract value gauge. This is the aggregate sum of ARR (annual recurring revenue) booked within a quarter and an obvious way to see new business trends. Because contracts are typically annual, billed and paid in advance, new contract value also serves to foreshadow cashflow for the following quarter.

Pipeline

Pipeline Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
New contract value shows sales results in arrears, but pipeline is a forward-looking metric that helps frame expectations for the coming quarter. Pipe was also an early indicator of potential problems — providing a heads-up for needed sales & marketing investments or adjustments.

Customer Health

Customer Health Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
Customer health is a success metric that keeps tabs on ratings bubbled up from the CS team. These ratings all had norms that I knew and understood and ones that tracked to future churn. Anything that crept out of those norms raised flags for further evaluation.

Customer Growth Potential

Customer Growth Potential Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard
Expansion revenue is a big focus and a great offset for gross churn. Customer growth potential was useful from that perspective, but also because it reflected on customer quality and fit. Again, these numbers were normalized and anything outside of those norms was a flag for a deeper look.

Growth-Focused SaaS CEO Dashboard

Different companies have different priorities. My CEO dashboard was growth focused because that was our stage and objective. Important things like gross margin and expenses didn’t make it to my dashboard, because they weren’t current challenges. At our stage, we managed to percents of revenue for most of that and were highly predictable in the P&L.

In addition to the income statement exclusions, I also didn’t surface cash flow or balance sheet items to my CEO dashboard. Again, those were tightly watched, but not on a daily basis as they were also predictable and stable.

Another candidate that makes it onto many a CEO dashboard, but not this one, is ARPU (average revenue per unit). Again, in my case, that was due to stage and priorities. If our ARPU wasn’t stable and predictable, or if we were working to raise or lower it, it would surely be here. And any variance in LTV would lead to ARPU pretty quickly.

I’d recommend limiting your metrics to ten or fewer; including only those metrics that have significant volatility or variability; and only ones that align with current goals and initiatives. You don’t need a dashboard to watch paint dry.

A Note on Execution — Dashboard Tech

We liked our dashboards. In addition to my CEO dashboard, the leadership team had one, and there was one for almost every department. Links to them were posted in department-specific Slack channels and TVs showed them all over the office. I’m partial to Geckoboard for low-overhead business dashboarding. And I like Enplug for the TV/digital signage piece to reliably show those dashboards all over far-flung offices. There’s nothing worse than a black screen where there’s supposed to be insightful, motivational data.

And a (Hopefully Obvious) Disclaimer

All of these gauges are examples, not actual data on my company or any other.

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