Data & Insights

The RevOps Metrics That Matter for SaaS

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Defining your success metrics is the first step towards being able to prioritize and plan work that will make the most impact for your business. Just as important is identifying the vanity metrics that are doing nothing to indicate momentum or revenue impact. Here, we’ll talk about which metrics really are important for your SaaS company and revenue operations strategy.

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics are metrics that aren’t actually tied to revenue. Instead, their main purpose is to validate the existence of certain roles within an organization.

They’re pretty-on-paper, feel-good metrics that can be used as a way to “prove” the value of an initiative before it’s had any impact on revenue.

Some examples:

  • Number of followers on social channels
  • Open rates for an email campaign
  • Website page views

Sure, they may illustrate a level of interest in your content, but when your ultimate goal is revenue, these metrics all fall short.

The fact is, knowing how many people opened an email or visited a landing page has no bearing on whether those people will ever convert.

SaaS Funnel Metrics

MQLs and SQLs are metrics that have become engrained in our vocabulary as revenue operators. Internally, they may also be an important part of how you assess your funnel. Still, you shouldn’t make the mistake of seeing MQLs and SQLs as indicators of progress or success.

Using MQLs and SQLs as a way to evaluate the effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams is a recipe for misalignment. There is no magic number of MQLs that will ensure quality leads. There is also no number of SQLs that will guarantee higher conversion rates. Until you actually see revenue coming in, your focus should be less on individual team-based metrics and more on what you could be doing operationally to improve the health of your pipeline. Our RevOps Evangelist, Jason, was recently a guest on the B2B Growth Show, where he talks about key metrics for efficient revenue operations in more detail. 

Metrics in a Perfect RevOps World

Common incentives and shared success metrics are key when it comes to building a unified revenue operations team and combatting misalignment.

This means the vanity metrics that only pertain to the work of one team should be replaced by holistic, momentum-based metrics that your entire revenue team can rally around.

Indicators of real revenue impact–such as conversion rates, customer LTV, sales cycle velocity, and booked meetings–are big picture goals that every function across your revenue engine can work to influence. The result will be higher-impact work getting done and a renewed focus on your holistic revenue operations strategy.