This article is for revenue leaders and RevOps people who are frustrated with the inability to get trustworthy data to make smart analytical decisions.

Even if your sales and martech stack is a who’s who of G2 category leaders, your ability to manage can still be handcuffed by data inconsistencies, missing data, duplicate data or conflicting data in sales and marketing.

When growth flatlines for investor-backed tech companies, board members start pressing the CEO for answers...

“What’s going on?" "Can you get back on plan?" "How are you going to right the ship?”

CEOs and management teams often cite competition or business model challenges as culprits for slow growth. Other macro factors such as shifting market conditions, governmental bureaucracy, or economic downturns are sometimes blamed.

Rarely is poor data integrity mentioned as the reason for stalling out.

How the quest for simplification drove ignorance (not dissimilar to politics)

Lifetime Value / Customer Acquisition Costs (LTV/CAC) has long been a foundational metric to indicate the quality and health of a SaaS company’s business model. It is intended as a simple proxy for unit economics of a customer, or how valuable each customer is to a given company.

Unfortunately, inconsistencies in the way companies measure LTV/CAC and its oversimplification in considering the time value of money and cost of capital render it essentially useless in real-life practice.

Most early and growth stage SaaS companies squander precious time and expensive capital thrashing through sales and marketing approaches that constantly change without any reliable data to inform their decision-making.

According to venture capitalists, at least 50 percent of sales and marketing spend by growth stage SaaS companies is nonproductive, resulting in skyrocketing customer acquisition costs (CAC), shortened capital runways, depressed growth, and ultimately lower valuations.

This article isn’t about blaming sales and marketing people, because it’s (usually) not their fault.

This is about reframing the way SaaS CEOs and revenue leadership teams manage their investments in new customer acquisition.

Over the last decade, we’ve observed a number of major sales and marketing pitfalls that hinder software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies from reaching their growth potential.

Spewing, hand-waving and back-pedaling.

I can’t even count how many times across so many companies as CEO or Board member that I’ve asked questions looking for specific information to help guide important sales & marketing decisions only to have someone respond with a substance-free answer where useful information is indiscernible (all the while gesturing to add emphasis).

This combination is what I refer to as spewing and hand-waving. When I press a bit deeper the story changes, twisting and turning until it has no resemblance to what was originally proffered…back-pedaling if you will. If you're a CEO, CRO, or investor you've most certainly experienced those painful moments yourself!