What’s all the hype about the Magic Number in B2B SaaS businesses?
The answer is simple: It’s a metric that can help you measure your business’ sales and marketing efficiency compared to your spending.
But why is it important for B2B SaaS businesses?
In this article, we’re going to answer all these questions about what is the SaaS magic number, its significance in B2B SaaS businesses, and more.
A study by Ruler Analytics shows that 59% of SaaS leaders track customer lifetime value and customer retention rate whereas 56 measure customer acquisition cost:
Image via Ruler Analytics https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/insight/tracking-saas-metrics/
What metrics are you tracking to determine the efficiency of your marketing efforts?
By the end of this article, you will have understood why the SaaS magic number is important for measuring your sales efficiency.
As stated above, the SaaS magic number is nothing but just a key metric to help you track your business’ sales efficacy. It’s more than customer retention, monthly or even annual recurring revenue.
Mainly the SaaS magic number helps you harmonize revenue growth with your sales and marketing budget.
This way, you can know whether your sales and marketing efforts are helping you generate more revenue for your business.
Besides, the insights you get can help you avoid overspending and underspending.
The SaaS magic number is a vital KPI for determining the profitability of your B2B business.
Why?
It can help you understand how much revenue you’re generating for every dollar you spend on acquiring new customers with your sales and marketing efforts.
Invest in a good sales CRM such as Copper CRM to manage your sales process effectively. According to SmallBusinessHQ, sales CRM can help sales team in email tracking, task automation, effective data management, and easy access to management.
This allows you to optimize your sales and marketing efforts and reduce the overall customer acquisition, customer expansion, and conversion rate optimization costs.
Here is a summary of the importance of the magic number for your B2B SaaS business:
In this section, we’ll talk about the magic number benchmarks you need to know for B2B SaaS businesses. We’ll also discuss how to improve the magic number so keep reading to learn more.
If the magic number is below 1, your business's customer acquisition costs for a one-year timeframe haven’t been met.
This is also an indication that the revenue you generated in one year is lower than the amount you spent on your sales and marketing campaigns.
Note that, different numbers below 1 can indicate diverse levels of concern.
For instance, if the magic number is between 0 and 0.5, your customer acquisition is highly inefficient. This means you need to stop investing in sales and marketing because something is not working.
If your number is between 0.5 and 0.75, your customer acquisition is a serious concern thus you need to find out what’s not working.
If the magic number is above 0.75, your customer acquisition is highly efficient so you can continue in your sales and marketing campaigns to attract new customers
If your magic number equals 1.0, you have met your sales and marketing costs for a one-year timeframe but your gross expenses aren’t met yet.
A magic number of 1.0 shows that you’re on the right path and have demonstrated that your product is fit for the market.
At this number, you should focus on scaling your sales and marketing.
Magic Number Above 1
At this number, your sales and marketing efforts are sustainable. This tells you that you should be confident with your sales and marketing spending.
You can also scale your sales and marketing functions, and invest more in your B2B SaaS lead-generation campaigns through digital advertising, SEO, content marketing, etc.
If your magic number is below 1, here are the tactics to improve it:
If your magic number is below 1, you can either reduce your sales and marketing spend or find effective channels of promotion.
For instance, you could reduce your online advertising spending and instead focus on SEO and content marketing.
For B2B SaaS businesses, customer churn is a key metric to track.
But why?
That means that if people are canceling their subscriptions then your monthly recurring revenue suffers.
As a rule, you need to reduce the churn rate as much as you can by improving customer service, investing in an easy-to-use subscription billing solution, enhancing your product, etc.
The SaaS magic number is a vital metric for measuring the efficiency of your sales and marketing across multiple campaigns.
Combined with other SaaS metrics, it can help you launch an effective strategy that enables you to grow your business without overspending.
Author Bio - Reena Aggarwal
Reena is Director of Operations and Sales at Attrock, a result-driven digital marketing company. With 10+ years of sales and operations experience in the field of e-commerce and digital marketing, she is quite an industry expert. She is a people person and considers the human resources as the most valuable asset of a company. In her free time, you would find her spending quality time with her brilliant, almost teenage daughter and watching her grow in this digital, fast-paced era.
