Metric Stack Klipfolio Inc.

In this podcast interview, Allan Wille and Lauren Thibodeau discuss tech company valuations with Ed Bryant, President and CEO of Sampford Advisors. Ed defines valuation as the price a buyer will pay for your business either by purchasing it outright or as part of a merger and acquisition transaction. He suggests the only way to learn the true value of your company is to actually go to market and get bids from potential buyers. He distinguishes between financial buyers (private equity, venture capitalists) and strategic buyers (companies acquiring other companies), noting that the lines between them are blurring due to strategic buyers often being backed by financial players.
We look at factors that influence valuation (scale, growth, profitability, and retention), with Ed stressing the importance of profitability for later-stage investors and acquirers. The conversation touches on the cyclical nature of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and how market conditions significantly impact the valuation environment. Ed also describes some common mistakes founders make, such as being overly focused on technology and not paying enough attention to key business metrics like growth and customer retention.
The interview concludes with Ed sharing his perspective on the current state of the market, describing it as a bifurcated market with healthy businesses receiving strong valuations while others face challenges. He predicts a recovery in 2024, anticipating increased activity and a positive market for software M&A transactions.
For those interested in current valuation trends, Ed suggests resources like Sampford Advisors' monthly market report, content from venture capitalists like Tomasz Tunguz, and content generated by the broader VC, private equity, and M&A communities.

Optimizing LTV to CAC at Unbounce
About Alex Nazarevich
Alex Nazarevich, Vice President of Growth at Unbounce, discusses his role and the significant changes he’s seen over the past year. With a background in e-commerce and digital marketing, Alex bridges the gap between these interrelated disciplines. At Unbounce, he leads two main teams: The acquisition team, which focuses on maximizing customer inflow through inbound channels, and the customer marketing team, responsible for customer engagement and rolling out tailored marketing strategies.
Alex has been overseeing the entire customer journey since starting at Unbounce a little over a year ago. Despite recent macroeconomic challenges, Alex emphasizes the importance of focusing on customer acquisition and efficiency, highlighting that the core objectives of his role remain constant even amidst change.
The Importance of LTV to CAC in Unbounce's Strategy
Alex Nazarevich emphasizes the key role Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost (LTV to CAC) plays in the company's strategy. He explains that LTV, the lifetime value, represents the average revenue generated by a customer over their association with the company. LTV is calculated by multiplying the average number of months a customer stays with the business by their average monthly payment. CAC, the customer acquisition cost, is determined by dividing the total sales and marketing expenditure by the number of customers acquired during a specific period.
Alex highlights the value of this metric in assessing the profitability of marketing efforts. In the context of a SaaS company, achieving an LTV to CAC ratio of 3 to 1, meaning $3 of lifetime value for every dollar spent on customer acquisition, indicates a profitable and scalable marketing strategy.
However, the importance of this metric extends beyond marketing. It serves as a North Star for various teams within Unbounce, fostering a common understanding and aligning goals across departments. By focusing on LTV, teams can demonstrate cost-effectiveness, which aligns well with how the finance team evaluates marketing strategies. Lessons learned from the LTV metric can also aid in discussions with the product team, ensuring upcoming features improve customer engagement and acquisition.
Alex points out that this metric is a part of his daily and weekly conversations with other leaders in the organization, emphasizing its role in driving strategic decisions and ensuring a unified approach.
Optimizing CAC at Unbounce
Alex reports a 35% to 40% year-over-year reduction in Unbounce's CAC. His team achieved this by focusing on areas they couldcontrol directly, leading to rapid, impactful changes without extensive stakeholder involvement.
Alex and his team thoroughly analyze spending, evaluating each customer acquisition channel's efficiency. They scrutinize SEO, paid search, social media advertising, and affiliate marketing. This approach helps them understand each channel's volume, conversion rate, and lead quality, focusing on their potential to become paying customers.
In calculating CAC for the LTV to CAC ratio, Alex includes all sales and marketing costs and divides them by the total number of customers acquired. His method puts value on organic channels, something marketers don’t always do. It also accounts for salaries, software costs, and SEO improvement efforts. This comprehensive analysis allows Alex's team to strategically target the acquisition of high-value customers.
Tackling Organic Channel Volatility
Alex speaks candidly about tackling the ups and downs in Unbounce's organic and paid channels over the last year and a half. When Alex joined Unbounce, he immediately zeroed in on the organic channel. He put the best people and tools on the job, determined to master this tricky channel.
Advancements in AI, like ChatGPT, level the playing field for everyone in SEO. But, Alex believes in the power of quality content. He's sure that genuinely helpful content wins

Today's guest is Greg Boyd. He's the VP of Customer Excellence at Uvaro, a company that helps people transition into careers in tech sales through subscription based education and networking programs. In his role, Greg is responsible for the end-to-end revenue generation and retention strategy for the business. Today, we're going to chat with Greg about how he and his team have moved the needle on Customer Return on Investment, first at Exonify and now at Uvaro.
"With return on investment, you can be academic about it. I always have thought about it as some sort of data-supported return on investment. You spent $100. You got at least $100 back. So you have the data to back. That's easy. But the way I've always thought about it is combining that with the feeling of value that your customer gets some. So return on investments always came down to this word of value. And I learned really quickly that I would have lots of customers that are happy to talk to me. I think I'm a nice guy. We're having a great conversation today. But ‘happy’ doesn't drive renewal, and it doesn't drive a deal. On the customer side at Exonify, we started to see that happiness does not equal value. And so understanding what is the driver of the return is what's going to be the driver of the growth that's going to come. When you're looking at the return on investment metric, a great way to look at whether they're getting value is: Are they growing?"
Greg has also shared with us an excellent article that outlines some of the topics he discussed in the episode. Learn why your customers avoid talking to you, and how to change that: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-your-customers-avoid-talking-you-how-change-greg-boyd-bwczc

In this interview, Allan Wille, CEO at Klipfolio, sat down with Johan Baltzar, co-founder and CEO of Steep. Klipfolio and Steep share the same vision. They believe in a new generation of analytics products that enable business users to work with centrally-defined metrics in a self-serve environment.
Their conversation explored the ever-evolving landscape of data analytics, the role of the semantic layer in simplifying data accessibility, the changing relationship between data teams and business users, metrics literacy, and the integration of semantic layers with existing BI tools.

Allan Wille, CEO at Klipfolio, sat down with Brian Kotlyar, VP of Marketing & Growth at Hightouch, a reverse ETL solution that makes data manipulation, extraction, and moving smooth, easy, and fun for data engineers. Their conversation explored the potential of reverse ETL, the pressing challenges of modern business intelligence (BI), and the exciting prospects that are emerging as AI meets data analytics.

Today we’re joined by You Mon Tsang, a 4 time founder and CEO experienced with both enterprise and consumer applications. You Mon is currently founder and CEO at ChurnZero, a company dedicated to helping subscription businesses battle churn. It’s appropriate then that today’s metric is Gross Revenue Retention, a metric that gets to the heart of churn.