Norwest B2B Sales & Marketing Benchmark Report

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's 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, EIR at Balderson Capital Independent Consultants and the author of Kelblog.

And together we are the Metrix Brothers.

And we go together like Statler and Waldorf.

Dave, are you referring to the famous Muppet hecklers? Those curmudgeons in a balcony who express their grumpiness with sarcastic glee? I don't think our audience knows anyone like that. Do you?

Well, you, you resemble that remark, old boy.

Oh well, I tell you, I always loved the Muppets. And as a child, especially that Statler and Waldorf recurring bit that went like this. That was wonderful. It's terrible. It's a complete waste of time. I loved every minute of it. Sound familiar? Yeah.

You're describing a, a Metrics Brothers episode or a benchmark report, right?

Well, that is often how we react to certain benchmark reports. So maybe today I would like to cover this report that it feels a little bit like it. It's the Norwest B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report.

Yeah, and this report is like a bottle of wine in some ways. It's got a little bit of age on it. It was published back in November. I wish we found it sooner, to be frank. It was published back in November. The data was fielded back in August. But nevertheless, it's a report we want to put on your radar because they do it annually and it does contain some interesting insights and it's quite informative. So, but before we dive into this report, let's hear a word from our 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 @kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn @rayreich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers Podcast. And by the way, if you would like to be a sponsor of the Metrics Brothers Podcast, go ahead and send us an email at metricsbros, that's M-E-T-R-I-C-S-B-R-O-S, @benchmark.ai to learn more.

Metrics Bros, we sound like the Dutch Bros coffee shop, right?

Yeah, well, we are high octane and caffeinated today, David.

Oh, oh.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the report we're going to cover in today's episode. So it's from Norwest. We talked about it. It was published in November 2025. One of the things I liked about it was it wasn't just Norwest's own portfolio. 77 companies were from Norwest's portfolio, Or maybe we should say 77 respondents, and 100 were from other third-party VC and PE-backed companies. The other thing I really liked was the participants were pretty evenly split between marketing, which was 40% of the respondents, sales, which was 42%, and 18% had both sales and marketing. The other thing I liked about it was several of the benchmarks, they actually showed their year-over-year trends from their '24 report to this '25 report. So overall, I like the breadth of the benchmarks that were covered in the report, Dave.

Yeah, I like this report too, Ray. And I have to say, I like Norwest as a firm. I've got some friends there, including Scott Bichuk, who's a partner. So, so I know some people there and I like the firm. I like this report. I wish we'd found it earlier. Like I said, it was fielded in August, published in November. It's long. It's 102 pages. One unique thing, and this didn't surprise me for Norwest, it's got contact information on it. And if you mail the person, she actually mails you back, which I thought was very cool because I had some questions about some of their questions and I was able to quickly and easily get answers to them. Because we like Norwest so much, we're going to do tough love. So we're going to talk about what we like about the report, but we're going to talk about what could be better. And a few of those things for me, Ray, are first, the data is better than the summary. A lot of these benchmark firms and benchmark— I think this is produced with a third-party firm. They love to put this introduction in that, in my mind, adds negative value. So if you're going to write an introduction, make sure it's got positive value. Here, there's an argument. Look, I stopped reading this thing before I got to slide 32 the first time, right? Because there was so much wordy, imprecise slides. that I stopped. And then at slide 32, I came to life again. I've got more tactical critiques, Ray, but before you— do you have any other high levels? You're in the biz, as they say.

Yeah, well, one of the things, I mean, and we're going to talk about this when we talk about marketing budgets as a percent of revenue, they use company size ranges, which I'm okay at. The ranges make sense to me, right? But then they put very specific whole numbers for the marketing spend. I'm like, Well, if you're a $5 million company or a $15 million, $860,000 could be a world of difference in how much of your revenue you're allocating to marketing. So I'd like some of the mixing of ranges and numbers.

Yeah, there's a lot of that stuff. And again, if they ever want to call us, just call and we'll be happy to do this critique in detail with you live. But to the extent some of our audience, Ray, are marketing people who make reports as collateral/content marketing, Yes, you should never do dollar figures in buckets. Like, it should just be percent of revenue. If you're trying to say, what's your marketing budget as a percent of revenue, not like how many dollars, because I don't know the composition of the bucket, as Ray was pointing out. They do stuff like 52% of the companies where less than 50% of the opportunities are sourced by marketing do schmumble. And that's like one too many layers of percent of a percent, right? Another one was of the companies whose increased revenue forecast, 20% have 3 or more use cases in production, whereas 37% have 1 or 2. Well, is that a massive difference? It seems like an arbitrary breakpoint. And later I'll give you an example where if you sum those 3, they look identical, but if you break them, marketing looks way ahead of sales, right? So, so it can create kind of false information. You know, the percent of a percent, they do funnel conversion rates bucketed as well. So 13% of the people are in the 31 to 40% conversion rate bucket for stage to stage.

Right.

And I think that's again, very— the one nice thing about that chart is it lets you see the distribution of conversion rates, which is kind of cool. But if you look at any given bucket, I think it's really hard. So this is tactical critique. We'll get out of it. A couple of positives. One, they do provide questions a lot, but sometimes they forget to provide answer lists, right? They did a marketing priorities question that we'll come back to, but then they showed you the top priorities, but they didn't show you the multiple choice. And you have to show that stuff.

Yeah.

And my favorite weird thing was they had an odd answer choice of like, who's your backing, PE, VC, or both? And that's just a weird question in my mind, right? Because if you're both, to me, it means you're PE, right? It means you did a couple of venture rounds that didn't work and a PE firm bought a majority or a huge slice of your company. The other way to say it would just be to simplify it by saying, who's your primary backer, VC or PE?

Yeah.

But this notion of being backed by both, I mean, yeah, there's some crossover firms, yada, yada, but I just think it's not a good practice and I think it muddies up the data interpretation.

Yeah, I've never asked a question, who do you like better, marketing, sales, or both?

Yeah, it's a little bit that way. It's a little bit not, to be fair to them, but more is than isn't. But overall, we think this thing's got good bones. It's worth your time to go read it. If you don't like the intro, just skip to page 32. It gets a lot better there if you're a data nerd. And, uh, and back to you.

Yep. So let's get to the first real data, and that's on page 9 of this report. And it's talking about marketing budgets, and they show marketing budgets, which I like, from '23, '24, and '25. And they segmented them by company size, you know, $5 to $15 million, $15 to $25 million, etc. At the end of the day, what it says is smaller companies We're seeing some dramatic decrease in the amount of marketing spend. An example for companies under, well, from $5 million to $15 million, it decreased from $3.3 million in 2023 down to $825,000. So what is that like? Uh, I think it's almost a 75% decrease. But then as companies got bigger, $25 to $50 million, $50 million to $100 million, It was slightly down, but not down nearly as much. So my insight on that was, I've already said I didn't like mixing the ranges with specific numbers. And by the way, Dave, those numbers, we didn't know if they were even medians or averages. So it further muddled the issue for me. And then the last thing is, I don't know why they started this report with marketing as a percentage. of revenue? Because it's like, how valuable was this data to me as an operator if I was trying to inform any decision-making?

I didn't understand your last point there because, Ray, they're actually not— at least on slide 9, they're not showing marketing as a percent of revenue. Uh, at least I can't see it. They're actually just showing marketing budget in dollars by revenue bucket. So I'm not sure where you're coming from there. Did you want to clarify? No, you're right.

They show revenue ranges and then the actual marketing budget. And I kind of said that's marketing budget as a percent of revenue, but it's really not.

Oh God, no, no, that's the problem. In fact, that's the problem statement, Ray, which is, as you point out, you know, $825K is a lot of money for a $5 million company. It's a lot less money for a $15 million company. And I don't know which is which or how many of each they have in these buckets. So don't love the methodology on this. The other nuance on this kind of chart when you go across years is companies can skip buckets. I don't think that breaks anything, But just bear in mind, a given company that was in the $15 to $25 million bucket, hopefully a year or two later is in the $25 to $50 million bucket. So it's not a cohort view. Like, you might, if you look across those years, think you're looking at a cohort. You're not, right? You're looking at snapshots of like, okay, companies of this size range in 2024 spent this much on marketing. So I do think this is a hard to interpret slide. Look, I get the message and I just, I kind of agree with it almost in spite of the data, which is, yeah, marketing budgets are under pressure. Got it. Agree.

Well, speaking of that, that is the second topic, and it's on page 11, and it's the top challenges impacting go-to-market and revenue growth in 2025. Now, this is where misery loves company, maybe, but what they did was they showed the top 6 responses. Now, to your point earlier, They were given, I think it was like 10 responses that you got the feedback from. So they just showed the top 6 and the top 3 were interesting. Positioning our product as a must-have, you know, 44% of the participants said that was an issue and that's up 6% from last year. Crowded category. Well, if it's a crowded category, that's the second most common issue was at 33%. You better be good at positioning your product in your company, right?

Yeah.

How do you stand out from the crowd? And then the third biggest challenge was longer sales cycles. And this was at 43% of the participants said that was an issue, and that's up from 30% the previous year. So my insights on that is, you know, the brand is becoming even more important as you try to differentiate your company and your product, and it's harder to achieve, especially with all the AI noise.

Yeah.

And I was surprised that some other, maybe what I thought would be common answers weren't made available, like not able to prove the value, not able to show real ROI. That really wasn't anything that was provided as a potential answer. So I, and quite frankly, you know, the other one that wasn't there, Dave?

Well, I'm going to say it, pipeline, but the, so, but Ray, most importantly, you wouldn't even know that if I hadn't emailed Renee and she hadn't very kindly answered me. Right? Because unless it's in the document further back and I never found it, the only way I knew what the list was— and there are 14 items on the list, not 10— was, uh, by mailing the person listed in the report, Renee Cohen, and she mailed me back. Um, and look, the problem with these lists are 14 is getting long. Look, as a survey designer, you want the list to be long enough to be comprehensive but short enough that the person can kind of grok it all at one time, kind of in their context window. The next thing you'd like it to be is not overlapping. You want it to be kind of mutually exclusive, exhaustive taxonomy, just to go back to math class. And this is not by any means exhaustive. They left out pipeline, which— so you may look at a list of marketing priorities and go, wow, why isn't pipeline on there? Because it wasn't on the list. You couldn't pick it if you wanted to. I'm not even sure they had an other. They had none of the above. But to me, I don't think they had another, right? So, These questions are only as good as the list. And when they do this thing next year, I hope they put it in front of more practitioners. I hope they go for like a 10-item list, not a 14-item list. And I hope they try to get kind of mutually exclusive exhaustive. So I've covered all the things that could reasonably be there, and I'm not having trouble figuring out which box I click because they, you know, crowded market and positioning arguably right there are kind of two sides of the same coin, to your point. Okay.

You ready to move on to the next topic?

Yeah.

Okay. So this is pages 12 and 13 of the report for those listeners following along. And basically the, I think it was slide 12 says 66% of the respondents reforecasted revenue over the last 12 months and 43% actually reforecasted increased revenue. Which was down from the previous year, where 48% reforecasted, and 23% of respondents decreased their revenue forecast, and that was up from 18% the previous year. And I should have not got stuck on this, Dave, but I did. It's like, well, people are always changing their forecast in quarter, but what this meant was that they changed their plan. And maybe it was after a quarter, maybe it was mid-year, but it's how many companies actually Modify their plan and budget in the middle of the year, right?

Yeah. So look, reforecasting is an odd, arguably loaded term. I mean, one, yeah, you're supposed to forecast frequently. You don't make a forecast once and then, you know, well, guess we can't forecast it again this week. Normally you make a weekly forecast. Some people might do daily forecasts. Certainly people do quarterly forecasts for annual things. So forecast is a— you're always reforecasting on the one hand. The clue here to what they were talking about, Ray, was on slide 13 in the chart. where they said, yes, we decreased our new revenue target. And the word target to me, you know, yes, we basically— they're putting the word target on the chart on the right. So to me, when you change the target, that's not a reforecasting, that's a replanning. And now let's, you know, I'll take corporate euphemisms for $500, Ray. Why do people talk about reforecasts in that light? The issue is because they want to do a plan change but don't want to ask the board. That's the number one use, the number one cynical use of the term reforecast I've seen is, hey, are these numbers up against the plan? Oh no, they're not against the plan. They're off the June reforecast. Well, what the hell is that? There's an operating plan in place. And the issue is, if you had a better process, you would've said, board, we're not gonna make that plan. We want a new plan. So you would answer with, no, that forecast is against the June, the mid-year plan revision, right? But instead they're saying it's against the mid-year forecast or the October forecast. So that's what I think they're using here, but it's sloppy language. It is indicative of a problem, but, but all this, man, gets in the way that what I think they're saying is, in my word, a lot of people increase their plans in 2025. Yeah, which is actually pretty cool because usually mid-year plan revisions are down, not up.

Yeah, everything is in, you know, has to be in context. So Dave, what the numbers said to me were almost twice as many companies are increasing their revenue plan versus decreasing. They went into the year with a very cautious and conservative revenue and expense plan, and that's why so many could increase it mid-year. But at the same time, even though people— my assumption— more conservative, 5% more actually decreased the plan mid-year. So you go in conservative and you're decreasing. To me, that's problematic for the industry.

Got it. I'm going to go back to this chart here, Ray, just to point out how I— and this is a lesson in how to interpret benchmark reports. But if you look on slide 13, they say, uh, yes, we do. By the way, I— this reminds me so much of one of the founders I work with. He was an MIT PhD in engineering, and he comes to me one day and he goes, Dave, I've figured out sales. Let me tell you what sales is. Sales is this: yes, we can't do that. That was his definition of sales, that you always say yes to a question, but you say, yes, we can't do that. Um, and this is— this survey question, both answers are yes. It's like, yes, we decreased our revenue target. Yes, we increased our revenue target, right? Which is like, yes, we can't do that. So, so I think it's a poorly phrased question. And just mathematically, Ray, they told us already that they're segmenting into 3 buckets: VC-backed, PE-backed, and both. That's not the segmentation on this chart. Warning sign 1. And then warning sign 2, you tell me how the blended average of 23 and 26 is 23 and how using those same weights, which would put almost all the weight on the 23, produce a blended average of 57 and 35, that's 43. Like, something's not working here in the math. It's just like, I, I don't want to dive into the rabbit hole, but there's, there's something wrong in the math behind this chart.

Yeah, well, let's move to a chart that to me was much easier to understand and highly relevant to what's happening in our industry. And on page 18 and 19, it's talking about renewals ownership, and it basically says customer success They owned 29% of the time own renewals in 2025. That's down from 56% in '23. Sales, AEs, now 59% of the time they own renewals, and that's up from 33% from 2023. And the dedicated renewals team, a little bit of an up and down, but it's at 12%. So what this says to me is threefold. Customer success, number one, is becoming more of an onboarding product adoption. Customer satisfaction organization, not a revenue-centric organization. They're one step removed. Hopefully satisfied customers are using a product, retain more. And second, because expansion revenue is becoming more and more important to ARR growth, and often CS teams haven't been great at it, sales teams are like, hey, if I gotta sell the expansion, let me own the account and I'll do the renewals and expansion motion. Maybe in parallel or in some type of order. And then the third, and this I know for a fact from our benchmarking research we do with Gainsight, GTMs have been asked to reduce costs. And one of the organizations that's had to reduce costs most has been customer success. They were at like 8 to 10% of revenue 4 years ago. They're down to about 3 to 4% today, Dave.

Okay. So, Look, my take on this chart— I'm sorry, I didn't actually know you did benchmarking work with Gainsight. Gainsight is one of my customers too. I work closely with the CEO, so, uh, that was a surprise. Like, uh, but good, good for you. I'm a big believer in customer success, and this slide makes me sad. I think it's good data, it's a good question, it's clearly asked, the answer is clear, but we see renewals drifting away from customer success. A little bit more than drifting, uh, 56 down to 29. And I'm sad about that for a couple of things. One, it removes customer success's direct link to revenue, right? Kind of makes them indirect. Oh, we can make them happier, more adopted, and happier, more adopted people tend to renew more, but it's indirect. Second, it reduces their organizational power as a result. And by the way, when they go to sales, I always worry that everybody loses this migration because now sales is distracted, right? So sales isn't just out getting new logos. So again, it depends on your opportunity. If your opportunity is largely expansion with existing customers, maybe this is the right way to do it. Much it's universal, but I'm saying in general it makes me sad because, because I like when customer success has power because it generates what I consider to be a healthy dynamic tension in the org. Specifically, if your sales organization is overselling and your customer success org is just an onboarding and kind of helper-hugger org, your CEO may never find out, right? Whereas if your customer success person has a number, usually a much bigger number than the head of sales. They have a lot more organizational power, and they can say, one of the reasons I'm missing my numbers is that this guy is selling capabilities we don't have. And as I always tell CEOs, design your organization for the conflicts you want to hear about. So I want to hear about that conflict. So I like when customer success— because the answer was always, oh, customer success, they're not really that nature. Well, like, go make them that nature, right? Like, if they're a bunch of onboarding people, yeah, they're going to be uncomfortable having a renewals conversation. But, but go make them that way because you're going to lose visibility into overselling, um, if you put everything under sales.

Agreed. You know, we got 2 more metrics we really want to cover here. So here's one, and as my marketing brother, I really want you to opine on this. And it's slide page 21, and then they show the same chart on page 61 again, and it's MQLs. The scoring models are collapsing. And basically what it says is that MKL definitions, 30% say it includes high-intent interest. Well, that sounds good. We're now focused more on people who have high intent, but at the same time, and I want to go to the slide itself, so I'm not— Dave, sorry about this, but it says that using a scoring model to measure the demographic fit and engagement level which I would also hope is high intent, 55% were using that scoring model 3 years ago. It's down to 25%. And then the other thing is anyone who fills out a form, 16% are still saying, hey, anybody who fills out a form is an MQL. So that's some of the data, but I'm really concerned about the move away from the scoring model.

Yeah. I mean, MQLs are a mess. I'm pro-MQL. I feel like MQLs are like guns. Here we go, we're gonna get political now, right? We're going all in. Uh, they always say, what's the NRA say? Guns don't kill people, people kill people, like with guns. To me, MQLs don't kill people, you know, MQLs don't kill CMOs, CMOs kill CMOs with MQLs, right? That, that, that the MQL is a means, not an end. You completely didn't get that joke, I could see. But, um, that MQLs now have a bad name, and it's a shame to me because it shouldn't. You never should have been celebrating MQLs. You never should have been popping champagne over MQLs or paying people MQLs, nor should you ignore them, right? And the inability to get this fairly obvious thing right is frustrating. But, you know, first, anybody who thinks anybody who fills out a form is an MQL is like, I don't know where you've been for 20 years, but like, you clearly missed the memo. And And I get— look, MQL is supposed to be marketing qualified lead. Basically, marketing did what marketing can be reasonably expected to do. Like, we could check that they're not a student or an analyst. We can check that they're not a duplicate. We could check that they're not in Albania if we don't have sales coverage in Albania, right? We could check that if we only sell telecoms, that they're in the telecom industry. These are things that you can reasonably expect to do without getting on the phone with somebody. That was kind of it, right? And whether or not it was a good lead, Remember, it was inner ring of ICP, outer ring of ICP. Scoring, I'm all for, but scoring to me is not definitional to MQL. It's an MQL if it meets a certain number of binary tests that says, yes, this is worth somebody getting on the phone to go ask them really important questions. And yes, today, thanks to intent data and scoring models, we could even hand it off as a high-priority MQL or a low-priority MQL, like, hop right on this one, or don't. But I just think people conflate the definition of an MQL. It should be pretty simple. It's a milestone step we want in our reporting. It should be a number of very simple yes/no binary tasks so we could go, yes, is an MQL, pass it down the line. No, isn't an MQL, throw it to nurture. And somehow we have made this unbelievably complicated. So anyway, over to you, Ray. I know there's one more you wanna hit.

Yeah, I wanna talk about page 60, 'cause I am not only the benchmark guy, right? I'm one of the metrics brothers, and I talk about metrics to almost every one of my clients all the time. And it basically looks like—

They love that, right? I'm sure they just love that, don't they?

They do. So page 60, top KPIs to measure marketing success. The dollar value of opportunities was number 1. 56% of companies said that was a marketing KPI. Number 2 was MQLs, not revenue, right? Not pipeline generated. But the number of MQLs, number 3 was the amount of closed deals, not revenue, number of closed deals, and then net new leads, 30%. So the thing I walked away from this is I always say marketing should have revenue as one of their top, at least lagging indicators. And there's no revenue or new revenue in the top 4 or 5 here. Yeah.

Yeah, it's— so first, I like this chart. Slide 60 is what we're talking about. It's looking at funnel metrics for a number of steps down the funnel, uh, cut by company size. So I think it's one of the more useful charts in the deck. Um, they do include all cohorts on the, on the end, and those aren't cohorts. See, did we do that episode already, different of segment versus cohort?

We have not done it yet, Dave.

Oh, we've not done it yet. So this is an example of where we need to do it because they're not talking about cohorts. It's a misuse of the word cohort. That should be all segments, right? Those size segments to the left are not cohorts. Good example of something that couldn't be a cohort, because as a company grows, if you want to segment it by size, it's one cohort over time, but you're in different size segments as time passes. But we'll cover that in an upcoming episode. I think, Ray, I understand where you're coming from. I think you're a little too religious there. I'm fine on having marketing get measured on Opportunity count. And the question is, what does get measured on mean? I think the primary metric should be, hey everybody, let's go get— personally, I like count better than dollars. Let's go get this many opties this quarter. We need 57 new opties. Let's go get them. And then I put people's bonus on ARR anyway. So, so yeah, they're, they're, I don't know if they're measured on it, but they're paid on it. But, but, but the, the thing that I want people cheering as they go up Pork Chop Hill is let's get 47 opportunities, right? Not let's win this many deals, because marketing doesn't win deals, right? Marketing makes opties.

Yeah, but even the number of opportunities in this chart on page 60, 61, it's only 24% versus opportunity value at 56%, right?

Yeah, we're talking about pipeline. Basically, opportunity value is pipeline, right? So they're talking about pipeline versus optee count. It's— that doesn't surprise me. More people measure pipeline than optee count. So, and by the way, pipeline is the number one metric, so yay, you know, we got something right here. Um, if color shading is top, then it's the number one metric. But I just like count. I think we've already done episodes on this, on why I like count preferred to dollars.

Yep.

I prefer count to dollars. So, we won't drill into it here. But I hear where you're coming from, Ray. And I just want to be clear, there's this distinction of measure success versus bonus versus what I call rallying cry, right? And to me, OptiCount should be the rallying cry. It should be the OKR. And then your bonus plan should be annual on ending ARR, in my mind, at least if you're the CMO. We could talk about further down the org later, but in my mind, everybody around the table on the executive suite should just be paid on one thing, ending ARR.

Yeah. Well, the last thing I wanted to share, and it goes back to the introduction today—

That's one exception to sales. It should be new ARR. Sorry. Sorry, I had to exclude sales from that. Go ahead.

Yeah, I want to be Waldorf, the grumpy old man in the Muppets, you know, theater. Page 63. I just, I couldn't get over this. And basically what it says—

This is not— Ray's gone off script here. We're into bonus material. Oh yes, it's topic 7. Topic 7, but we only have 5. Keep going, Ray.

It's 45% of the respondents didn't know their customer acquisition cost. 41% didn't know their cost per lead. And 70% of participants with sales cycles greater than 6 months 70% didn't know their customer acquisition cost and 50% didn't know the cost per lead. How in the hell can you be an efficient revenue growth company not knowing your CAC or your cost per lead, Dave?

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I don't want to be negative here, but this is like the ignore this survey slide. Like, so 45% of the people, 45% of the people who filled this survey don't know what their cost per lead or what their CAC is. Now, so if this was a survey of CMOs, I would be very— or sales leaders, I'd be very suspect. Were there other jobs in there? Maybe the customer success people don't know it. Are there other GTMs, professional services in there? I'm not— it starts getting some— 2 things, Ray, serious questions about who answered this thing and serious questions about what department they worked in. Overall, I agree with your point. If you're in a marketing leadership position, you should know your CAC. And I don't see the question here, Ray. They're pretty good about having the questions, but would somebody answer, I don't know it, because they don't know if it's 2.54 or 2.0? Or are they answering they don't know it because they've never heard of it? If you could tell me the question, I could do a slightly better interpretation.

Yeah, sorry, they didn't leave the question here. It was kind of a paragraphical comment. So, okay, you think it's time to wrap up here now that I went off on my tangent?

I think whenever you say the word paragraphical, it means it's time to stop the episode, right? I'm not actually sure that is a word.

So overall, I liked how wide-ranging the report was across the GTM process. I liked the year-over-year trends. As I mentioned, the word reforecasting threw me off. I wish they'd do a little bit better job at clearly defining things. And pages 80 through 98 I think everyone should go read because they talk about how and where sales and marketing are adopting AI and the benefits. I think that's highly relevant even though we didn't get to cover it.

Yep, I've been control-Fing through this PDF, Ray, and, uh, that is the only slide with the word CAC on it, so the question is not in there. Um, so, so I have a feeling the question was, are you aware of your company's CAC or CPL? So yeah, overall I like this report. They have some work to do on it to make it better. If they're going to do it annually, which I think they are, they're going to be out in the market again in just a few months. So if you're from Norwest, give us a call. We'd be happy to give you an hour of free consulting to make this thing better, because, uh, overall you've got good bones on this report. It's worth reading, but, but there's definitely some improvements you could make.

And Dave, thanks for letting me be one of those grumpy old Muppet characters. It meant a lot to me.

You do it naturally, right?

Okay, bye-bye now, everyone.

Bye. The Metrics Brothers AI, SaaS, and More is a production of The Metrics Brothers Growth and CAC and a member of the Benchmarkit Podcast Network. By accessing this podcast, you acknowledge that the Metrics Brothers make no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided or the humor content of the jokes told. Ray? Information, opinions, and recommendations presented are, according to our spouses, probably wrong and provided for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered professional or, for that matter, unprofessional advice. We disclaim any and all liability for any direct, indirect, indirect, misdirect, incidental, special, ordinary, consequential, inconsequential, or other damages arising out of any use of, or God help you, reliance upon the information presented here. Ray Grothreich is based in New York City and available on X @rayreich. Dave Kellogg is based in Silicon Valley and available on X @kelblog. Schedectady, which is French for unspellable, is not our actual production location. Thanks for listening.