ICONIQ GTM Metrics for Board Meetings

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's SAS Talk with the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC.

And I'm Growth, better known as Ray Reich, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit.

And I'm CAC, better known as Dave Kellogg, independent consultant, EIR at Balderson Capital, and the author of Kelblog.

And together we are the Metrics Brothers.

So we are back today, just the two of us, Ray. Uh, I thought maybe Nick Mehta would be lurking around again.

No, I think he's busy right now, back evangelizing customer success, talking about Taylor Swift, and getting ready for the Pittsburgh Steelers draft.

Okay, well, fair enough. Hey, I saw a recent post from Iconiq which provided an essential GTM board deck slides template. Did you check that out, Ray?

I did. I tell you, Dave, I wish I had this years ago because one of the biggest time sucks I encountered as a go-to-market leader, a CRO, was I had a CEO who asked for different slides on our go-to-market metrics every quarter. And it was board meeting whiplash every quarter. And then the board said, what about that chart you showed last quarter?

Well, you know my slogan, Ray. Templates build trust. To me, standard templates are actually the beginning of a trust-building process. So it's, it's actually quite detrimental in my mind to have the template itself constantly changing.

In fact, I think you actually did an article on this in Kellogg and even had a podcast you did with CJ Gustafson talking about kind of the best board slides, right?

Yeah, I've done several blog posts on board decks, board slides, the first, at least the first 3 slides of a board meeting, etc. And in fact, yeah, CJ and I had a real fun episode where we talked about Basically board meetings, yeah.

Okay, well, I can't wait to get into it, but first, let's hear a word from our presenting sponsor.

The Metrics Brothers is proudly sponsored by Benchmarkit, the B2B AI and software industry's largest, broadest, and most contextualized benchmarking index. Dave Kellogg and Ray Groth Wright have put the Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus for the remainder of 2026. All episodes we have ever recorded are still available on your favorite podcasting app. You can reach Dave at Kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn at Ray Reich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers podcast.

Okay, Dave, so we're talking about the iconic growth essential GTM board slides. And you can go to Iconiq Capital and search for Essential GTM Board Slides. It's a 23-page report. And I actually really like the concept of having this template specific to GTM metrics, Dave.

Yeah, I think it's a great concept. By the way, it's a pretty recent work. It was published in December 2023. And like most of Iconiq stuff, look, in general, I think Iconiq is producing some really good material. I don't think it's perfect, as I know you don't either. And we're going to go through it and we're going to point out the good and the bad of this thing. But overall, I definitely would pay attention to the stuff they're publishing. It's quite good. And there's a lot of startups that could benefit from looking at this deck.

Yeah, I'm not going to go into all the detail of what's in it right now, because we're going to cover kind of the majority of the slides that we think really merit it. But there were a couple missing things, Dave. And the thing that jumped out, and once again, overall, it's a great template and a good starting point. There were no what I will call financial efficiency metrics, things like what is your CAC ratio or CAC payback period, or even what my CAC is. And they didn't even have cost per pipeline, per opportunity, or per dollar. And there was nothing on CS efficiency. So I think it's missing some things, Dave.

Yeah, it's funny, in their desire to be GTM-focused, they may often kind of almost forgot the point of GTM, which is to do all this cost efficiently and produce a good CAC ratio and a good NRR and a good GDR. So, um, high revenue per employee. Then there's a whole bunch of financial metrics and they don't really dovetail into them, uh, that they focus, you might argue, almost myopically on some of the GTM metrics. But, but, but to be fair, they call it a GTM template. But, but I, but I hear you as well.

So for those of you following along on audio only, if you're at your computer, etc., go ahead and pull up this report, the GTM, the, the Essential GTM Board Slides, and we're going to go to slide number 5, Dave. And this is The overall GTM scorecard. And I know we spoke about this before we are recording this episode. What's your high-level feedback on the scorecard?

So a couple of things. I'm going to speak to the tables on the slides. So this is a table that shows, you know, ending ARR, net new ARR, year-over-year ARR growth, NDR, net magic number, net new ARR per sales and marketing FTE. So financial metric and then LTV to CAC ratio. Overall, look, I like that they're including multiple quarters. Personally, I produce these charts with trailing 9 quarters. Second, I show absolute performance. They're wasting a lot of column space on planned deltas. I might show planned delta only for the current quarter, the quarter we're talking about. For history, I care less about planned performance. I just want to know how much we did or what we did. I think there are some improvements we could make to this. In terms of the rows, ending ARR, yeah, that's what it's all about in the end. Look, they're making a mistake here that investors often do, which is, most of these metrics are done on a net basis. They're doing new ARR net. They're doing magic number on net new ARR. They're doing productivity per sales and marketing or GTM employee. Interestingly enough, they call it GTM, but they only say sales and marketing here. By the way, Ray, I found another asymmetry. They're doing it on net new, and that's a mistake. Look, I think the argument in favor of this, as Ray talked about, is they're calling this GTM, and their definition of GTM is sales, marketing, and success. So they have this desire to include churn. Interestingly enough, well, I guess they're going to say that customer success counts in sales and marketing employees. So let's just say they have this view. And look, I do think customer success belongs in GTM, but I don't think these metrics need to be done on a net new basis. I think, in fact, most people, when I work with them, they want to look at new ARR, right? They want to look at magic number for new ARR, not net new. Net new is more of a financial investment, right? It's about the business. If we're trying to understand the GTM machine, i.e., the sales and marketing machine, which is what most people care about most, then we should be doing this stuff on new ARR, not net new ARR.

Totally agreed with that. The other thing I would say is, I know nor you or I are big fans of the magic number. I would replace this with the CAC ratio, which really shows you how much does it cost to bring in a dollar of new ARR compared to sales and marketing expense. But here's one thing, Dave, that I really got to call out. They said you should always include the formulas for these metrics. I agreed. I know you believe that. But then they showed net dollar retention and they used a formula method versus a cohort method, which I think is really dangerous.

Well, first, actually, so they both validated their point and made a mistake at the same time, right? That demonstrates why it's so important to show how you're calculating things. And actually, I like stylistically how they did it in the small font and lighter shade. But yeah, I disagree with the— I think we both believe that NDR is definitionally a year-over-year cohort-based metric and they're using kind of a So, don't like that. But the bigger point is well taken, put the definitions on the slide, and I actually like how they've handled it here.

Now, I'm gonna go to slide 6. And though I like this, I'm not sure it's relevant to all the metrics that every other slide is. That is, it's the ICP. Who is the ICP? The target, the okay, and do not target. But none of the metrics are based upon ICP versus non-ICP. And I would think that quarter over quarter, unless you're changing your ICP, this remains consistent. So I don't see the purpose of this slide.

Yeah, I think this is appendix material. I think startups are wise to be highly focused on their ICP, to have a written definition of their ICP, to have what I call a concentric circle ICP, which is what they have here. This kind of notion of bullseye. Here's what we're shooting for. Here's one ring out. Here's 2 rings out. Don't go go there, you know. So I like that. In terms of how ICONIQ defines the ICP here, they've got most of the key elements— what industry, how big is the company in size or revenue, where is it located geographically. They've got an economic buyer, which is good. They suggest a size segmentation on employee count. So I like how they're approaching it. They've left out one critical thing to me, which is use case, which is a lot of these products can be used for different things, and some use cases are much more strategic than others. But in general, yes, it's a good thing to be focused on. Yes, it should be in the appendix, not a quarterly GTM template.

Now I'd like to move to slide 7, kind of, you know, we have a lot to cover here in 20 minutes. This is the ARR funnel and it's looking at 5 quarters of actual, actual. So trailing 5 quarters. Yeah, I know you like 9. And then they do a forecast for the next 4 quarters. So I love that. A couple of things that jumped out at me though was new versus expansion and how they manage churn. Dave, you want to double-click on that?

Yeah. So first, this is a super knit, but I hate the way they mention quarters. They go Q2A, Q3A, which is not bad. I prefer 3QA because we separate the 2 numbers with the letter. But the thing I found really confusing here is they put the month end date of the quarter. So when you look at this, depending on which row you look at, you're not sure if you're looking at quarters or months. So I would personally show one the other, but not both. Don't give me a chance to confuse myself. In general, I think this is a good template. I've also published on my blog a version of it that's my favorite. But I think they make a mistake here. The terminology, and a lot of people are vague about this, but they have new logo ARR as a category and expansion ARR as a category. Okay, those are pretty standard. They sum them to what's called gross new. The visual on the chart doesn't make it obvious it's a sum. They bold it, but personally I'd underline it to show I'm summing. Um, but in any case, I don't like the term gross new. I would just call it new ARR. Yeah, that new ARR comes in 2 flavors: from new logos and from expansion. On churn, it gets even more confusing because they list downsell. Okay, shrinkage or downsell, people call it pretty standard. Then they say logo churn, which is almost always a count-based metric. It's a number, but they're showing ARR churn from lost accounts. So again, terminology— and look, when you're defining a template, terminology matters. So I would personally call it I call it churn from lost accounts, churn from shrinking accounts. Other people call it downsell and churn from lost. But, but, but those are more standard terms.

Logo—

this is a misuse of logo churn. Logo churn is a word. And finally, when they sum it, they sum it to a thing called gross churn. And it's not obvious from the numbers of this table, which I know is only an example, that it actually is a sum. It's not bolded like gross new. But, but personally, just call that churn ARR. That, that why make it complicated? So there are some nits on this thing, but again, we're trying to review a template and templates are all about nits.

Yeah. And I would say anybody who's looking at this, be careful on the top section. There's a lot of rounding, doesn't always make sense. So I would not look at it for the purity of the numbers. It's more of the categories that they're tracking.

Yeah.

And for that, it's a pretty good chart. I like it. It's pretty similar to the one I produce. Again, another nit, Ray, but they, they use different nomenclature for saying year over year. I think I've seen 3 different nomenclatures. Like, I've seen YOY, I've seen Y/Y, and I've seen YY, right? And again, consistency reduces confusion.

And they don't have my favorite, YOY, but that's a whole nother thing, Dave. Let's move to the next one.

Yeah, that's what I use. Yo!

Let's look at the next one, logo. Now, this is the logo funnel. You know, I don't know how important that is for a board-level slide.

Yeah, it depends in my mind, Ray. Uh, some businesses might care a lot about logos, um, particularly if you're trying to spin up a new segment. They're going to care about segments, whether you want to measure it by dollars or logos is a separate question. But, but here they're breaking out logos by size segment, SMB, mid-market, enterprise. That's perfectly valid. But, but the, the whole point, and this is the conceptual point, segment analysis means you use the same template and apply it to different segments. That, that, that's the beauty of segment analysis. The template doesn't change. I create an ARR waterfall of dollars or an ARR logo fall of logos. I create a way to I split it, and then I show that for the whole business, then I show it for SMB, then I show it for enterprise. Because I might have a condition, for example, that I'm doing really well in enterprise, but struggling in SMB. So I care all about those metrics, right? Whether it be customer acquisition costs or net new ARR, but I care about them only for the SMB part of the business.

Agreed.

You know, Dave, can you believe we've only got 7 minutes left? So, you know, the next slide, slide 9, This PLG and channel funnel, and I like the fact that they're trying to look at things by channel, but I don't think it's that good of a metric slide that we need to talk about today.

Yeah, I'd skip it, given the interest of time as well.

And the next one, slide 10, is logo velocity, and it shows about the new logos, but it only shows roll number and it doesn't show churn by logos, etc. It's just actual new logos. It doesn't even show up by segment, Dave.

Yeah, not a big fan of this. Again, if your business cares about logos, look, there's only one case where I know you can care about logos, when all your customers look the same. If every— if you sell one product, which is a $5K subscription, and everybody either buys that product or not, logo is effectively a proxy for ARR. And it might even be— or actually ARR is almost a proxy for logos. So it might be more direct just to look at logos. So if you're in that case, if you sell one thing at a constant price and everybody buys it, then it's arguably simpler to analyze your business on logos. The other place I like logos are on opportunity generation, but we'll get to that later.

Yeah, and the other thing I would say about consistency, this is the first slide where they do it by month versus by quarter. So if you're presenting to board, you should be very consistent on it, on the time periods you're doing.

I agree. Either your cadence is month or quarters. Yeah, you got to stick with it.

And the next, the next slide, I really like it. It's the retention and churn slide. It shows line graphs of your net, your NRR, Your GRR, and then on the bottom it shows NDR by segment.

Yeah, they're showing by month where I'd probably show up by quarter, certainly for enterprise, and see prior comments. But this would be a dandy chart if they were using a proper definition of net, net retention and gross retention, which they're not. But, but in any case, yeah, it's a good chart. I'd definitely put this in any template.

Okay, so now we're on slide 12, which is really showing retention and churn by cohort, time-based cohort. Dave, I know you liked it, but should it be here in the main part of the Yeah, so look, I'm a big fan of including cohorts.

Again, I think I'd show these by quarter instead of month for any kind of mid-market or enterprise business. But this is appendix material, Ray, to your point. There's no way this chart with this level of detail would be in the main material. It should be in the back. So if people have questions— one way to say it is this chart answers questions, it doesn't ask them. So shove it in the back. If somebody has a question provoked by something in the front, They can flip back here and hopefully answer it looking at cohorts.

Okay.

Now, if we move to slide 13, I must admit I almost got ill when I saw this because it's about win-loss analysis. That's good. But then they conflated win-loss of new logos versus upsells versus renewals. What I've always done is on a win-loss analysis, I say, okay, here's my new logo, here's some big wins, and here's some big losses. And then I would move to Renewals. Here's some big wins on renewals, here's some big losses, and then I'd move to expansion. Some big wins, some big losses. What say you?

So, so I, I, look, I, to me, there's— I have a simple take on this, which is wins and losses are about deals, uh, i.e., opportunities. And I feel like in this section they're trying to do it at the customer level, not the opportunity level, and that's wrong. What gets won or lost is an opti. And yes, I care whether it's a new logo or an expansion, Opti, but maybe not that much. If I'm cross-selling a big division, the sales cycle feels a lot more like a new logo than it does like expansion. And yes, finance may call it expansion if I win, but for all practical purposes, it's a new deal, right? So I care about, like, as an incidental column, whether it's new logo or expansion. But what I really count is I want you to tell me about the opportunity. What's it for? What's the use case, which is not covered here, right? Okay, where did I find it? They put opportunity source here, which is fine, people usually ask. Probably should put a footnote on attribution, lest people get the wrong impression. But overall, I am a huge fan of win-loss analysis. I actually saw a company once that had a whole win-loss analysis section that only did wins. So don't do that. So, you know, I would have one slide on wins, one slide on losses, for sure. I would probably include rates as they do. I think they have 3 or 4 slides on win-loss, and the last one includes win rates, which is good. I have a Kellogg blog on that where we talk about broad and narrow win rates, which is an interesting concept. But overall, yes, win-loss should be in the deck. We should separate wins and losses. And for losses in particular, we want to understand reasons and we want to understand what they did. Did they buy somebody else? Did they stick with the status quo? Kind of who'd we lose to?

Yeah.

And then on slide 16, which is the win rate versus competitors that you said you really liked. And maybe they just don't have it in a template, but if my win rate against a competitor goes from 70% down to 45% in a quarter, I want to have some narrative on what's going on. And I don't know if you think it should be in this slide, but since I send board decks before the board meeting, I want to have a little bit of a narrative here.

What do you think?

Yeah, clearly, I think you want to have callouts on this kind of slide where you talk about any big changes. And in their example, they've got quite a big change. The other thing on this, which you just need to be careful of, is head-to-head win rate versus was in the deal. There's a big difference between competitor D being on the long list of 7, not making the cut to 2, and then us losing. Did we lose to competitor D? Not really. Did we lose a deal in which competitor D was involved? Yes. So at some companies I've worked with, we have a kind of post-shortlist Uh, we call it head-to-head win rate, um, which is another important concept.

Cool. Okay, let's go to slide 17. It's basically a high-level snapshot of pipeline and as it grows, but they show it by stage and they show it by month, but then they do show pipeline coverage, which is a good thing. What jumped out at you here, Dave?

So I make a chart on Kellogg called the pipeline progression chart, and I prefer it to this for a bunch of reasons. Uh, first, this is done by Month, and I think most people should go by quarter. Second, it doesn't show any kind of coverage. Well, they do in the, in the bottom, you can't see the coverage visually. I'm not a big fan of the chart here because if I want the expected value of the pipeline, I can just get it, right? Just give me the number. Don't maybe kind of gut it out by looking at the stage composition, which is what this begs you to do. So not a huge fan of this chart. By the way, you see this chart all the time, so a lot of people make it. I would advise those people just go look at Kellogg for pipeline progression chart, which actually provides you with more of the information you want when you're thinking about the pipeline. Yeah.

And then the next slide, slide 18, even though I don't agree with what they call it, they called it pipeline execution. I'm going to execute the name. To me, it's a pipeline waterfall chart, but I really like the waterfall chart.

Yeah, this is a great chart. This is what happens to pipeline. Here's what we started with. It got bigger because deals expanded. It got bigger because stuff got pulled in. It got bigger because we created some new ones along the way. And then it got smaller because stuff slipped out, deals shrunk, deals got lost, deals got won. Um, I think it's a great chart.

And then slide 19, they call the pipeline generation chart. And there's nothing more important than showing how effective you are at generating pipeline. And they broke it down into— maybe it's the Four Horsemen, you know, outbound, inbound, channel. But it's kind of structured a little weird to me where everything's upside down, where they have totals of a particular channel When I say channel, up top, and then the subcomponents below it.

Yeah, it's kind of sloppy. If you're trying to publish a template, there's things that— look, the intent is great. You want to show kind of pipeline by pipe source. Their pipe sources are outbound. They're mixing— normally I separate AE outbound from SDR outbound because they're very different activities. They don't really have— this chart kind of implies that SDRs only do outbound, which is definitely not correct. They're a huge part of inbound. They conflate partners and channels, right? To me, the more broader concept is partners, and channels are partners who resell, right? So they've made that confusing. I think they just wanna put partners there and say partner 1, partner 2. And then referrals, I'm not sure that's generally accepted as a pipeline source. I think I'd probably put it as inbound, right? I heard about you, so I went to your website, and I captured you inbound. So look, my bigger point of this chart is they're wasting all kinds of column space with doing Plan relative performance for history. Again, I want to show actuals by history. I could lose 2 columns per section by just saying, here, you know, we generated 15, 18, 20, and just show the numbers. And then for the current quarter, I want to see them relative to plan. But yes, everybody has a chart like this, and you should.

Okay, we're gonna wrap up here in 2 minutes. The next slide, slide 20, is an eye chart. It's about leads and funnel conversion. And Beyond— to me, it's an upside-down funnel. It's just too much for a board meeting.

Yeah, everybody's got one of these, and the goal should be to have as few rows as possible, not as many. So you don't have to include every stage. You can skip stages on your conversion rates. And they're missing the most important thing to me, which is cost data, which is overall cost per opportunity generated by this machine. They get into attribution by showing channels, which can be a very slippery slope. So personally, I'd Lose that whole last section and put in a little bit of cost data at the bottom.

I love it. I love the cost per opportunity. You know me, I love cost per dollar pipeline too. Last one, and as a former head of sales, I love this one, but it's sales capacity and productivity. Dave, up top they have the bookings target, the actual bookings, and then sales capacity, which I call productive sales capacity. There's no numbers on the chart. I don't know what my target was versus what I actually delivered on this chart.

Yeah, the chart's a mess. I think they're trying to argue the numbers are down below, but even the numbers are only just percentages. So look, the intent is really good. I think the idea of tracking capacity is very good, and very few people do it. Everybody tracks basically plan performance, right, which they're calling target here. People build these productivity models, but they don't often enough compare what we actually sold to the productivity model and how the productivity model compares to plan, because sometimes you're upside down. I've signed up plans that are bigger than my productivity model, right? Because I think I've got a big deal coming. And conversely, right, normally we want to be the converse, where plan is less than the productivity model, right? And it's also less than quota. But so you kind of have 2 layers of cushion. So I like the intent here, the execution is kind of a mess, but it's a really good idea to track capacity as well as actuals as well as plan.

And there are a couple more slides here that go into some detail on Sales capacity and productivity at a rep-by-rep level. So that's pretty nice. Not sure you want to do this at a board meeting. It's slide number 22. But it's good that they're tracking it to show what the productive capacity is and then what the attainment is by rep.

Yeah, this is relatively similar to a chart I have called the rep ramp chart. As usual, they're creating column noise, which— because they're putting 2 rows. Basically, they're splitting columns in half, saying here's what they sold. and here's what they sold as a percent of plan. That actually gets in the way cognitively looking at the data. So to me, I would just put what they actually sold, period. I could make a separate version of this chart if I cared about attainment, but attainment's not really the point. If we know what the quotas are, we know what the attainment is anyway. So, so I think they've taken a good chart, very similar to what I call the rep ramp chart, and they've kind of screwed it up by, by shoving attainment in next to productivity. What we care about this chart is productivity. How much do the people sell?

Totally agree. So that's our breakdown here of the iconic Growth Essential GTM board slides. I recommend everyone to do a search for the Essential GTM board slides and take a look at this while you're listening to this episode, Dave.

Yeah, well, thanks a lot, Ray.

Thank you so much, CAC. Talk to you next week.

See ya.

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Ahem.

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