Visible Blog

Digital Currency Group Monthly Update Template With the price of Bitcoin surging and digital currencies taking center stage on major news networks many companies in the space are having difficulties separating their growth with industry growth. Our friends at Digital Currency Group are one of leaders in the digital currency/blockchain space. Their portfolio of companies has accounted for an impressive 70% of industry funding to date. As the industry continues to grow the team at DCG put together an investor update template for their portfolio companies to use. With the appeal of blockchain/digital currencies at an all time high the template is aimed to allow founders to separate their success from that of the entire industry. At DCG, as investors and company builders, our skill is our ability to recognize patterns. Without clear data and insight, it’s very difficult for us to guide and support our companies. More importantly, the old adage, “top of mind, tip of tongue” certainly holds true. The more companies share with us, the more we are able to support them, and the more we can tell everyone in our network about the great things they’re building. – Meltem Demirors in “The Next Round: How to Build Growth Stories with Data” The DCG Template below is broken into 7 sections that give investors the information needed to help companies as much as possible. In addition to the 7 sections DCG offers 3 key points for sharing information with investors and stakeholders: Keep it simple and short – bullet points are easy to read Be extremely specific Include charts where you can Check out the DCG Template Here >>>

Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) have become a major trend in SaaS companies over the last couple of years. Why the shift to the new framework? I have two thoughts. 1) The way organizations sell and market their products are different and 2) business software continues to look more and more like consumer software. We’ve scaled Visible to hundreds (soon thousands) of paid customers with a lean team through adopting a Product Qualified Lead framework. Disclaimer: Product Qualified Leads may not fit into every business and organization as some solutions may require intensive initial implementation or for strategic reasons the end-user never gets to try the product. Typically these are high ACV products. Regardless of your business, I hope you still get some value from this post and takeaway parts you want to use in your own processes. My goal is to get you walking away thinking how a Product Qualified Lead framework can increase efficiencies cross sales, marketing, customer success and finance, and product. The “old” way If you’ve attended any sales or marketing conference, seminars or training sessions you’ve likely heard someone beat the BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) drum. It is a matrix provided to make sure you are spending your resources on the right leads. It looks something like this: Paired with the BANT framework is usually the idea of the Demand Generation funnel. It looks something like this usually: Both of these frameworks work off one another. Typically you’ll have marketing initiatives to drive leads. This might be paid advertising, webinars, downloadable content or having business development representatives (usually called BDR’s or if you are fancy “Solutions Consultants”). Once you get a download, opt-in, etc you’re likely to consider that person a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) where they might be nurtured with a steady drip of content, get contacted by a Inbound BDR to qualify them some more, etc. This is where you are trying to understand the BANT for a lead to see if they should be moved to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Then you might have an Account Executive accept the SQL to do their own qualification, provide a demo and truly understand the lead’s BANT. If the AE accepts the SQL it will likely be converted to an Opportunity, worked and hopefully closed from there. Now there is nothing wrong with this framework at all. It’s deployed by tens of thousands of companies and for metric/forecasting junkies it provides a great way to measure ROI across all of your activities. However, if you layer a PQL framework into your current you can allocate resources even more effectively across your business in addition to have another growth lever to pull. What are Product Qualified Leads? Product Qualified Leads are potential leads using some version of your current product that take some sort of action. Typically this is some sort of trial or freemium experience. Defining PQLs are ultimately up to you as engagement for every business is different. E.g. Slack’s magic number is 2,000. Slack knows that if they can get you to send 2,000 messages there is a great chance they’ll get you as a customer. At Visible, our PQL criteria is as follows: Connected 2 or more data sources Created 1 chart Published an Update Invited a colleague If you do those actions, there is a 90% chance we will get you as a customer (if not within the trial then within 90 days). With most frameworks, testing and iterating is crucial here to get you to zero in on your PQL qualifications. E.g. our original PQL definition was just one data source but found our customers value bringing in multiple data streams so wanted our PQLs to reflect that. Improving Marketing You likely nurture your leads based on who they are and what they have downloaded. Shouldn’t you do the same with PQLs? What about prospects who are not yet a PQL? Can you effectively drip them helpful content while they are on a trial? The answer is yes to all of the questions. If you have a definition of your PQL there is no reason why you shouldn’t have dynamic product marketing to go alongside it. E.g. if a lead has taken actions A & C but not B. I’d make sure that your email is geared towards making sure they do B. Whether it is social proof from a customer case study or an AE calling to offer a hand. Hint: Intercom + Segment is great for this. Improving Sales PQLs can help in a lot of areas in your selling organization. The biggest impact (in my opinion) is around where AEs can dedicate their valuable time. Demo Conversion: According to Tomasz Tunguz, “When the sales team calls PQLs, customers typically convert at about 25 to 30%”. If you are calling on customers who are already PQLs this is a great way to have a more meaningful conversation. They have already had a chance to use your product, will have specific questions and overall be a much more engaging conversation. Hubspot and Openview touch on “In Product Hand Raisers” in Why Product Qualified Leads are the Answer to a Failing Freemium Model stating that “Hand-raisers can convert at 2x-4x the conversion rate of traditional MQLs.” In Mitch Morands’s post, “MQLs are DEAD! Enter the PQL “Product Qualified Lead” = 10X+ revenue impact” he states that PQLs convert 10X+ more revenue than MQLs I’d argue “Need” and “Timing” are identified in BANT through PQLs. You can quickly see how they are engaging with your solution and typically your trial with have a some sort of end date. How many times have your AEs sat a demo where they prospect said “This is awesome, hit me back in 9 months when we are looking to deploy. I’m just doing some research right now” Improving Product & Engineering Getting your team rallied around PQLs will help prioritize the product roadmap, create focus within the product and make sure your onboarding is buttoned up. Related: Check out our new Contextual Help Guide we just launched to help new trialers get to PQLs faster. Improving Customer Success & Support There is a great proverb that relates to customer success and product: “If you catch someone a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime” By focusing on PQLs, we make sure our customers can get in and use the product from when they sign up. If they get stuck we make sure we have a great knowledge base, help resources and more. If they are really stuck, we are always happy to get a quick screen recording or demo setup with a customer. This has mentality has created less customer support issues which means our median response time is 5 minutes. It also lets our customer success team be proactive to help leads get into a product qualified lead state. Improving Finance There is no shortage of ratios that PQLs can help improve. Customer Acquisition Cost, Time to Close, Lifetime Value, Trial to Close %, etc. Focusing on creating PQLs will help all of your metrics become more attractive. Bottomline PQLs provide a great way to align everyone in your organization. The product team gets to focus on building a great product, the sales team can spend their team on highly qualified leads and the marketing team can dynamically nurture leads. Don’t ditch MQLs, SQLs or your current process. Just try segmenting them with PQLs to increase conversions in all parts of your business. Try it out and track it as a metric in your Visible account 😉 Up and to the Right, Mike & The Visible Team

There is quite a bit of controversy over when and how to send your pitch deck to potential investors. Some investors will tell you to send the pitch deck as soon as possible, others will say send a teaser deck, and some will say wait until you have a meeting with partners to send your pitch deck. No matter how you decide to send your pitch deck, we’ve laid out a template for sharing your pitch deck for when you’re ready.

Every six months I usually say something along these lines to our awesome product team… “I just went through our on-boarding flow, I think we could be doing a better job. How do we let customers help themselves but also not leave them with a completely blank slate? Can’t we make signing up more frictionless? What if they never know XYZ exists?” Improving Our SaaS Onboarding Our team goes to work, we make some great improvements and then six months later I go through our sign up flow again. Rinse & Repeat. This time around, our team spent days researching what the best companies are doing. We read their blog posts and looked at how they tackled the problem. Then a funny patterned emerged. Whenever we tried out their latest sign up and on-boarding flow, in almost every instance, it was totally different to their most recent blog post about how they improved it! We realized we weren’t alone. When we started to ideate on our new on-boarding flow we created a list of things that we didn’t want. In particular: We didn’t want an on-boarding experience that a user just clicked rapidly through to get to start using the app. We didn’t want to have to draw cute arrows for the user to find out where things were. We didn’t want to have a bunch of fake & dummy data populate their instance only for them to have to delete it. Our goal was simple: Provide help when the customer needs it and get out of the way. Today we’re excited to launch our new Help Guide available to current customers and new triallers. To enable our new on-boarding and help guide just click “Help Guide” in the bottom left of your navigation on Visible. From the right our guide will slide out and give you tips, tricks, GIFs and videos. The best part? It is contextual. Depending on where you are in the app we will will show you relevant videos, GIF and links to our knowledge base to make sure you are getting the most from Visible. For example, if you are in Updates and open the help guide we will show you a quick 2-3 minutes video, give you an overview of the section and a list of related features you can take advantage of with GIFs and links to our knowledge base. I’m hoping that if you are reading this blog post in six months and sign up for Visible, our on-boarding and Help Guide are still here for you! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions email hi@visible.vc. Up & to the right, -Mike

Techstars Investor Update Template In the “Minimum Viable Investor Update”, Jens Lapinski, Managing Director of Techstars METRO, lays out 3 items that he finds most useful in his portfolio company updates: Cash flow / P&L top line summary Major changes / developments Problems the CEO is struggling with and wants help on We created a Visible Update template based on the Techstars Investor Update so you can get necessary information to your investors in a quick and professionalize manor. Check Out the Template Here >>>

An Investor Update Email Template for Potential Investors Often regarded as a periodical duty, fundraising can often get buried behind day to day tasks of a CEO. By treating fundraising as a recurring task, you’ll be able to stay on top of your fundraising at all times while keeping potential investors engaged. Jason Lemkin often compares fundraising to a sales funnel and lays out the following 3 duties: Meet as many good, new VCs and investors to the top of the funnel as you can, every week, every month, every quarter; Nurture those VCs over time, so when the time comes to raise another round, some of the prospects are pretty far down the path of wanting to invest; and Make sure your existing investors are your champions. That they are singing your praises. With endless amounts of content for updating current investors and finding potential investors we wanted to see how we can help with, “Nurturing those VCs over time“. By sending over a quick email on a monthly basis to potential investors you’ll be able to build a relationship and pique their interest when it comes time to fundraise. How exactly do you keep potential investors engaged? We have found it best to send out a short update on the state of the business and industry. Share a promising metric or two showing strong growth in the business and any significant wins/improvements. If possible, address any concerns with the industry, team, product, etc. that you have discussed in the past with numbers. Hundreds of emails land in investor’s inboxes so be sure to include a quick snippet of what your company does and any personal notes. By committing to future fundraising efforts now, you will save countless hours when you are ready down the road. You can find our Update template for nurturing potential investors below. As always, If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so.

A Weekly Email Template for Marketing Leaders Marketing is one of the most measurable aspects of a business. With vast data points, it is important to hone in on what truly matters and rally your team behind those key metrics. This week, we have put together an Update template intended for marketers to “report up”. Whether that be a marketing representative to manager or manager to executive, our Marketing template is intended to be standardized across the team to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Key Metrics Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs. Some of our favorite marketing metrics include Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Cost (check out this video to use formulas to create CAC in Visible), and these 5 metrics for “reporting up”. TL;DR A quick recap of any major milestones, concerns, and figures from the last period. Always a good idea to piggyback off of any product updates, metrics, projects, concerns discussed at previous meetings/updates. Now Content and Campaigns Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Funnel Review A funnel is a quick way for all parties to quickly digest your marketing conversions and inbound marketing efforts. The metrics used in a funnel can be customized to any business as well. Make note of any interesting leads or trends that have noticed over the previous period. Customer Stories Reflect on the past period and share any relevant quotes from customers; good and bad. What is going well? What is not working? Feedback to certain emails? etc.

“Most organizations still believe in the perfect sales and marketing delineation: This is where marketing generates leads for sales, sales development reps then qualify these leads, to create opportunities that salespeople hopefully turn into revenue… The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our CUSTOMERS.” – Jill Rowley – Founder, #SOCIALSELLING As the modern buyer continues to become more informed it is more important than ever that your sales and marketing teams are aligned. It is vital that companies share the right information, at the right time, to the right person. At the end of the day, the marketing teams role is to enable sales to close more deals. A good place to start? Consistent and clear communication between sales and marketing. This week, we put together an Update template for marketers to share with their team, managers, etc. and most importantly the sales team. The template is intended to be shared on a regular basis and lead to conversations to improve different aspects of your pipeline. If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so. Key Metrics “Enablement means something different in every company,” Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, said. Find the metrics that are relevant to your team and continue to share and reiterate. Get your team behind the data and constantly communicate with the sales team to find areas for improvement. Keep in mind, our template has popular sales enablement metrics in place but can be changed to your organization needs. The team at Hubspot suggests using Lead-to-Customer as your North Star. Last Week’s Efforts Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Is always useful to include any success stories from reps or potential customers from the past week to help make sure everyone is getting the most out of new content. This Week’s Efforts A quick breakdown of content and changes for the upcoming week. Briefly highlight the goal of the content and where/when it should be used. Most importantly – leave a place for the sales team to offer feedback and share the sentiment from the buyers they have been talking to.

Engage Your Team With This Weekly Sales Report At a high-growth startup, sales operations and processes can often take a back seat to closing deals and growing the business. Regardless of the resources you have available, it is vital to be able to “self-manage” and lay the groundwork for a strong sales process and culture. With that being said, we put together an Update Template that can be used by the first sales hire or by a team of 100 BDRs. Check Out the Template Here >>> Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs (check out these 3 other metrics to track) . With that being said, there are a few things to keep in mind when putting together a reporting template for your sales team: Acknowledge the report, good or bad, to give your reps the motivation to send reports moving forward. Build a cadence with your individual reps and keep updates succinct as well as comparable (make sure to share the same metrics in every report). Just do it! Get feedback and iterate. Make sure to send over feedback to continue to tailor the format and content.

Today we are beyond thrilled to be releasing improvements to our Google Sheets Integration and to announce that we are now a Google Cloud Partner. Our application is now available to the Google Cloud and G Suite ecosystem. What are the improvements? Many of our customers using our Google Sheets integration restructure, manipulate or change their Sheets files over time. Previously it was tedious making sure these changes were reflected into your Google Sheets Dashboards and Updates. Our release today allows for intelligent mapping. As your Sheets change we will understand if rows are moved up, down or removed and automatically reflect those in your Visible account. No action is needed on your part. If you make larger changes to your data set like renaming metrics we may prompt you with a question to make sure we are correctly updating metrics. We will give you the option to fix that in Visible without having to connect & reconnect your connection. E.g. lets say you rename New ARR to New Annual Recurring Revenue. We’ll prompt you with a message similar to the following to let you train the integration further: All you have to do is hit “Yes” and be on your way: What’s next? Google Sheets is our most popular integration, expect to see some more improvements in the coming weeks. We want to make it as easy to get your KPIs and Metrics into Visible. We’re also working on a great resource to make awesome Google Sheet Templates available to our community. If you want a sneak peek check out our Google Sheet Template Library! Up & to the right, -Mike & The Visible Team

While there are countless number of investor update templates the “Fill-In-The-Blank” template below from Micah Rosenbloom, Partner at Founder Collective, was right in line with the best practices we have seen. (You can find the original Founder Collective post using this link). We created a Visible Update template so you can fill-in-the-blanks and have your next investor Update out the door in just a few minutes. TL;DR A quick recap of any major milestones, concerns, and figures from the last period. Always a good idea to piggyback off of any product updates, metrics, projects, concerns discussed at previous meetings/updates. Key Metrics Take a deeper dive into your “Key Metrics” that you have defined and report to your investors. Make sure to keep they key metrics you are reporting consistent from update-to-update. Be sure to mention any changes to the key metrics you are reporting (how you are calculating, renaming, etc.). Fundraising If you are actively fundraising be sure to include any details, asks, and supporting documents here. Learnings Since Last Update Follow up to any of the major discussion points from your last update or meeting. How did marketing campaign X end up performing? What did you learn from any product updates? Etc. What I Feel Good About Include any major wins or significant gains in your key sales/marketing metrics. What I Am Freaked Out About What is keeping you up at night? Be sure to mention any major concerns that your business is facing. This could be anything from frustrations with hiring to a change in the market. What I Need Help With Arguably, this is the most important section of the Update as it allows your investors to step in and help with their experience, network, etc. At the end of the day, your investors are there to help you and are missing a valuable resource if you do not make the asks.

With Q3 wrapping up in a few days, we put together a Pre-Board Meeting Update Template that you can share with your board to help you make the most of your meeting time. By sending over a quick packet before your next meeting it will allow everyone to have time to prepare and come ready to discuss the topics that truly matter to the business. VIEW THE TEMPLATE HERE >>> For the sake of simplicity, we broke our Update Template into 5 major sections: Overview of Previous Quarter A quick overview of the previous quarter. How did you track against your goals you set at your last meeting? Big Wins? Concerns going into Q3? Key Metrics A high level overview of the key metrics you have been sharing with your investors/board. Make sure to include any key events/descriptions for your data over the past period and leave time to discuss any questions at the start of your meeting. Agenda Preview the agenda and schedule for your upcoming meeting. Use input from previous meetings and 1-on-1s to set the agenda and make sure the time will be useful for everyone involved. We suggest checking out Sequoia’s template for a board meeting to get started. Topics of Discussion Offer an overview of the major issues you would like to tackle during your meeting; “working time”. Without throwing too much information at your investors give them the proper data, questions, asks, etc. that will allow them to ponder the issue beforehand and come to the meeting ready. Meeting & Financial Documents Include any necessary financial and meeting documents prior to the meeting. Always a good idea to include financial statements and documents/presentations for your meeting. VIEW THE TEMPLATE HERE >>>

As Q3 comes to an end, it is easy to get behind trying to close last seconds deals, make the right hires, or push product updates but it is vital to stay organized for your Q3 board meeting. A board meeting is not something founders and CEOs should lose sleep over. If executed and prepared for properly board meetings can become an integral part of your company’s success. However, it is easy to lose focus and can easily turn into hours of tracking down data, reading bullet points off a slide, and losing grip of the conversation. To help lighten the load of board meeting prep we’ve put together a short guide to help have your ducks in a row before your meeting: Pre Board Meeting Reporting Being the CEO presenting at a board meeting it can feel like all eyes and pressure are on you. With sending over a structured report before the meeting you can turn the tables and put the pressure on the board to come to the meeting prepared. You never want to spring any surprises during a board meeting, by sending out the packet ahead of time you’ll avoid said surprises and set the expectation that everyone should come prepared. This will also give everyone a chance to read through the packet, request any changes and avoid tedious discussions during the meeting. “Sometimes, if someone asked about something and clearly hadn’t done their homework, I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s in the board pack.’ That’s the most damning thing that can happen to a board member — realizing that all of their peers prepared for the meeting and they didn’t.” – Jeff Bonforte (Former CEO of Xobni) With that being said, it is important that you supply the board with the correct information in a timely manner. Most founders/CEO have found it best to send over their pre-meeting report/packet at least 4 days in advance. Make the report comprehensive and relevant. This can include financials, wins, losses, near term concerns, plus goals for the next quarter. Putting together a pre-meeting report can be a long process (and probably should be) as you reflect on the past quarter and lay out your vision for the next quarter. Putting the time in will be worth it as it will save precious time and allow you to discuss what truly matters. Be on the lookout for a pre-board meeting Visible Update template early next week! Set an Agenda Lets face it, getting a group of people in a room to stay focused is next to impossible. To make the most of your time, lay out an agenda and stick to it! We have found that most board meetings should last anywhere from 2-4 hours. Below you will find an example agenda from the team at Sequoia Capital: Read Sequoia’s guide for preparing a board deck/agenda here. Ideally, if you sent over your metrics and data beforehand you should be able to shorten the time needed to discuss specific metrics. This will allow to focus on what truly matters over the next quarter; fundraising, hiring, product improvements, etc. Not a bad idea to include your agenda when sending over your board report/packet as well as your board deck. Related Resource: Crafting the Perfect SaaS Board Deck: Templates, Guidelines, and Best Practices 1-on-1 Meetings If you are able to carve out time with each of your board members beforehand to discuss any topics one on one – do it! No need for a lengthy discussion but board members will appreciate being kept in the loop and offering input in setting the agenda. If you have any previous asks left hanging now would be a good time to address those. Additionally, this gives you an opportunity to feel out how certain members feel about different topics and votes so you can be prepared to answer any questions and avoid surprises. Provide Solutions Take a look back at the previous quarter and ponder your wins, losses, product updates, etc. and have answers ready to any questions you might face. Instead of an in-depth product review it might be most efficient to focus on any of the improvements you made over the last quarter and why you made them. This way you can avoid countless product requests being thrown around from people who are likely not even using your product. If your sales were down in July, why was that? If your churn was high in August, why was that? While it’s never fun to look back at losses from the quarter it will make your life much easier to have an answer and solution moving forward.

Last week, we broke down the most popular days to send your investor updates. Check out the charts and data below for a quick refresher: The least popular date is the 30th of the month. When the page turns on the past month and updates/reports start flooding VC inboxes how do they view you? The Clockwork CEO The favorite CEO among investors (when it comes to monthly Updates ;). The “Clockwork CEO” has the same time on the same day set aside every month to sit down and crank out their stakeholder updates. The Clockwork CEO has likely created a rhythmic cadence with their investors and give them a “story” to look forward to on a monthly basis. The Weekend Warrior CEO The rare breed of CEO personas (We’re looking at you R.J. Taylor) the Weekend Warrior is one and the same as the Clockwork CEO. Setting aside their Saturday or Sunday morning to sit down and reflect on the past month likely before heading out with the family for the weekend. The Good Times CEO The “Good Times CEO” leaves investors feeling great about the company… until the next month when they receive no updates or news from the founders. After a big win or great product improvement the Good Times CEO Update will land in their investors inbox the next morning. Don’t get us wrong – we like to let the good times roll just as much as The Cars but investor’s offer their most value when you are struggling and have specific asks/issues from the previous period. The Non-Comparable CEO The “Non-Comparable CEO” sends over structured Updates on a regular basis but still leaves a big question mark in the mind of their investors. Switching, changing, and manipulating metrics on a monthly basis leaves everyone involved scratching their head as the next set of data comes rolling in. So how do you avoid misleading numbers? The Buzzer Beater CEO The “Buzzer Beater CEO” leaves their investors on the edge of their seats and always get their Updates across; even if it is the last second. As end of month tasks pile up, the dreaded investor update takes a back seat and is often missing major details and leaves dots for the investor to connect. The Missing in Action CEO The “MIA CEO” is the one that keeps their investors up at night. After the initial enthusiasm that comes with new investors, you find yourself in the “trough of sorrow” and have yet to send an Update after that first polished and optimistic Update. Believe it or not, most investors have made it through the “struggle” and are an integral piece in helping your company bounce back to that initial enthusiasm.

As the old adage goes, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” When building a startup, it is incredibly important to keep tabs on the metrics, data, and financials that keep your business headed in the right direction. Building your own templates and tracking resources can be time-consuming for a busy founder. Thankfully, there are countless free templates and resources to help you get started in just a few minutes. Check out a few of our favorite free Google Sheet templates to help you better your startup reporting below: An Open Sourced Financial Model for SaaS Startups In the 5th iteration of his SaaS Financial Model, Mike Simmons, the CEO of CredSimple, offers an open sourced Google Sheet template with explanations and resources for the components in the model; ranging from hiring, fundraising, and growth plans. From Mike himself: “I decided to create an open source template so that other founders can benefit from the work that we’ve done. In this project, I have tried to thread the needle between robust and not too complicated or specific. It has been tested by several investors and MBA interns and has proven to work well. But it is up to you to adapt it for your own needs.” Read more here. Runway and Cash Forecasting Tool From the original post by Taylor Davidson of Foresight.is: “This tool is used for forecast your cash and runway. It’s intended to be a simple model with easy inputs for expenses, revenues, and external funding, so that you can get a handle on burn, cash and runway quickly and easily. Input your revenues and costs, and the model will automatically create charts of your burn and runway (over 36 months), a summary of your operating expenses, and an optional sources and uses chart.” Ecommerce Google Sheet Template Dave Ambrose of Steadfast Capital lays out what they have found to be their most important Ecommerce metrics. A few of the major points in the template are the source for customer additions as well as the Contribution Profit (you can read Dave’s original twitter thread here). Read more on the model here. Related Reading: Our Guide to E-Commerce Metrics (with Google Sheet Template) Customer Lifetime Value Template There’s a reason why many experts insist Customer Lifetime Value (we’ll use LTV for short) is the most important metric for your startup. The data points you gather for the LTV formula can help assess the overall health of your company. Not only does LTV provide insight into the long-term trajectory of your startup, but it also gives immediate insight into specific areas that need improvement. Knowing how valuable it is to gain each customer is essential. We created a Google Sheets template that will allow you to plug in your unique numbers to calculate both your LTV and CAC. Read more here. Related Reading: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): A Critical Metrics for Founders Inside Sales KPI Template Every company should also know the progress of their sales team, the goals they need to hit and make sure management understands the return. Don’t forget about the intangibles either. Conner Burt, Chief Operating Officer at Lesson.ly, said the long-term prospects for sales reps can often be about more than just filling a funnel. “Your building a bench that you can use to promote sales reps to quota bearing sales people. That’s an intangible benefit.” With this in mind, we built a simple Inside Sales KPIs template for sales teams in Google Sheets. It is flexible so you can remove any irrelevant info, manipulate it or add anything missing that fits your process. Read more here. Key SaaS Metrics Template For SaaS companies, finding, tracking, and measuring your key metrics is key to success. In order to help you get started with the key metrics, we’ve put together a free Google Sheet template. Our SaaS Metrics Template automatically calculates your key SaaS metrics like MRR, ACV, churn, CAC, payback period, and more. Simply enter in your new customer data and the template will handle the rest. Related Reading: Our Ultimate Guide to SaaS Metrics Let Visible Help with Your Reporting Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days.