Bijan Moallemi of Mosaic on Taking Financial Storytelling to the Next Level

[00:00:00] Bijan Moallemi: We can’t share something that makes sense to us that’s in the language of finance, we actually have to present things at an altitude that a CEO who’s coming from a totally different meeting on a totally different topic is gonna be able to quickly wrap his head around. And so, we definitely stumbled along the way, but I think really helped hone that skillset of storytelling and not just presenting data. 

[00:00:45] Joe Michalowski: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Role Forward podcast. My name is Joe Michalowski, and this episode is brought to you by Mosaic, a strategic finance platform that transforms the way business gets done today. Unlike most episodes where I introduce a guest, today, we have a different kind of episode.

[00:00:58] For the first time, we are going to be playing a session that we were lucky to be part of in October 2022. We joined RevOps Squared, Ray Rike, Ben Murray, the SaaS CFO, as sponsors for their event called SaaS Metrics Palooza, and they were nice enough to ask us to, to run a session and we decided to do it on financial storytelling and presenting your SaaS Metrics for strategic decision making.

[00:01:20] Joe Michalowski: And during that session, we had our CEO, Bijan Moallemi, talk about really what it means to do financial storytelling as opposed to traditional financial reporting, talked about the customer service mindset in the finance function, and how finance can be a growth catalyst for the business by taking on these kinds of roles.

[00:01:38] So, I’m gonna pass it over to the recording from that session, I just wanna say thanks to Ray Rike, uh, to RevOps Squared, to everybody that was involved in that session for letting us be part of it. I hope you enjoy the session, as always, thanks so much for listening, we’ll talk to you on the next one.

SaaS Metrics Palooza and Bijan Moallemi Introduction

[00:01:51] Ray Rike: Our next guest, Bijan Moallemi, is the Founder and CEO of Mosaic, and previously he was the Senior Vice President at Palantir, a company that we’ve all probably heard and read many stories about, and today as the CEO of Mosaic, a platinum sponsor for the first annual SaaS Metrics Palooza, Bijan’s gonna be talking about storytelling and finance, how to present SaaS metrics for strategic decision making. Bijan, welcome to the first annual SaaS Metrics Palooza.

[00:02:24] Joe Michalowski: Thanks so much, everyone, for joining another session of the SaaS Metrics Palooza, my name is Joe Michalowski, I’m the Director of Content here at Mosaic, and just wanna say, right off the bat, thank you to Ray, thank you to RevOps Squared for putting on this awesome event,

[00:02:37] really cool to be part of, like, the definitive SaaS Metrics event, it’s something that’s near and dear to the hearts of everybody here at Mosaic, uh, we’re just happy to be part of the event. So, I know we’ve spent some time today and in previous sessions talking about kind of the quantitative side of SaaS metrics, we’ve talked about CS metrics you should track,

[00:02:57] Joe Michalowski: we’ve talked about what matters to CROs, we’ve talked about various benchmarks that you should track and everything else that goes under the, the SaaS metrics kind of umbrella. And all that’s critical, but where Bijan and I wanted to take this conversation was kind of next step in sort of the importance of translating those numbers into insights the business can actually understand.

[00:03:15] And so, like I said, really happy to have Bijan here, our Founder and CEO, I’ll pass it over to him to, uh, give a little introduction of himself. 

[00:03:22] Bijan Moallemi: Thanks, Joe. And, yeah, also wanted to, uh, give a big thanks to Ray, the RevOps Squared team, really excited to, to spend a few minutes chatting with everyone today.

[00:03:30] Bijan Moallemi, uh, Founder and CEO at Mosaic. We’re a strategic finance platform, really trying to build next-generation tech for, for CFOs. A little bit about my background. I’ve actually been in the finance space since I got into the workforce, spent two years at Qualcomm doing corporate FP&A, got really fortunate in late 2011 to join Palantir, right at phase of hyper-growth,

[00:03:51] Bijan Moallemi: joined the company when it was a hundred, met my future Co-Founders, Joe and Brian, there, and we spent a good almost seven years there building and scaling the finance org, seeing the company grow from a 100 folks to more than 3,000 and along that journey, I think the first seed for Mosaic was planted, had a really hard time trying a lot of those legacy tools in the space,

[00:04:11] ultimately built a technical finance org to solve a lot of the problems that, that we were facing in order to get the business, the data that they need. Post that, each of us went on to lead finance functions to kind of build things over from scratch, I was the, the CFO at Piazza, and that’s when the light bulb really clicked.

[00:04:28] We realized, hey, a lot of the work that we were doing at Palantir turns out it’s quite ubiquitous, and all, all companies need some of this help. And so, that was really the genesis behind Mosaic, having been a practitioner for the past decade, trying all the tools out in the space, really feeling like there was an opportunity to bring an innovative next-generation solution to the market.

[00:04:48] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. Well, obviously, just really great to have your perspective here, Bijan, but, you know, it’s so, like I said, so close to what we do every day is just trying to help people understand their numbers a little bit better. So, it’ll be fun to talk about this one, um, 

[00:05:00] Bijan Moallemi: Definitely.

[00:05:00] Joe Michalowski: I wanted to give a quick agenda of kind of what we’re gonna go through. These sessions are, are quick. So, we got three main pillars here that I’m gonna be kind of guiding Bijan through some questions on. First one, kind of this idea of financial reporting versus financial storytelling, like, where that line is and what the difference is. We’re gonna get a little bit into the how you might do that on a day-to-day basis by getting into a customer service mindset for your finance team.

[00:05:22] And then, lastly, kind of going through some examples of what you can do with your metrics to not just say, “Hey, here’s what we’re seeing, month over month, quarter over quarter,” but how to actually use those to be a growth catalyst in your business. And then, we’ll throw it to some Q&A, and we’ll have a good time answering some of those questions. But for now 

[00:05:38] Bijan Moallemi: Perfect.

[00:05:38] Joe Michalowski: I’m going to stop sharing my screen so everybody can look at just me and Bijan’s lovely faces so we can have a little chat. Yeah, didn’t wanna overdo on the slides here, just wanted to really have a nice chat with Bijan about kind of, you know, your experience of, of what you’ve done in the space. So, like I said, first pillar, we’re gonna go through financial reporting versus financial storytelling, big thing that you’ve mentioned separates, like, strategic finance functions from kind of the ones that get labeled that a number cruncher stereotype is being able to tell the why. So, can you just, like, define kind of the difference between traditional reporting and this idea of financial storytelling?

Financial Reporting vs. Financial Storytelling

[00:06:15] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah, definitely. So, when I think about my role as a, as a former CFO, or really anyone who’s, who’s watching, right? Like I, I love Excel and Google Sheets as much as anyone, or the next gener, generation solutions out there like Mosaic. But, ultimately, I, I don’t build models for myself, I build those models, I build those analyses for folks across the org, right,

[00:06:35] it’s, it’s my job to enable folks across the org, empower them to better understand their area of the business. And so, in order to do that, what storytelling really means is more than just putting together an analysis, that’s the start, but where things get fun and interesting, and where I really enjoy spending my time, is then having the opportunity to take a step back,

[00:06:58] put yourself in the shoes of who you’re delivering that model to, that analysis to across the org, and helping them paint the picture around why the data that I’m showing you actually matters. So, for me, I think number one, you have to be presenting that data in a way that makes sense to your audience,

[00:07:15] keep in mind that a lot of the things that I may have context on as a CFO, other folks across the org may not. And then, it’s also trying to make it actionable as well, right? If I give you data 60, 90 days after you can do something about it, that’s not really very helpful. So, presenting the data in a way that folks can understand and make it in actionable such that there’s an impact that, that, that then can be driven across the business.

[00:07:40] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, I remember, uh, you’ve told me before there’s, like, this, this holy grail moment where you get to, like, preempting questions that people are gonna ask and, and I really like that, but there’s obviously challenges to doing this, like, really easy to sit here and say, like, “Yeah, everybody should be getting to like the ‘why’ behind their numbers,” and really telling these stories, but if it was so easy, everybody would do it.

[00:07:59] So, I’m curious, like, what, what some of those challenges are? Like, why is this not something you can just do every day? 

[00:08:05] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah. I, I think the big thing is the technology in the office of the CFO hasn’t necessarily caught up, and in the background, you’ve got all these different SaaS-based tooling that’s kind of fragmented the business ecosystem, right?

[00:08:18] The data that you need to be strategic as a CFO lives in 5, 10, 15, 20 different places, depending on the size and complexity of your org. So, by default, if you’re doing work manually in Excel or Google Sheets, you’re spending a lot of time pulling down data, cleaning data, mapping it, moving over your Vlookups or other formulas, potentially fat fingering, hopefully not fat, fat fingering your, your formulas.

[00:08:43] But when you’re doing that, and us in the finance suite, we’re typically juggling many different responsibilities while trying to do all this work, you don’t always have the time to actually take a step back and have the opportunity to start to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and understand and paint the picture for the why.

[00:09:03] So, I think a lot of it is actually misalignment between the needs of the function and the lack of modern-day solutions out there that are helping solve and, and scale folks in the finance org. 

[00:09:16] Joe Michalowski: It makes a ton of sense, I know, like, when I’m bogged down in tasks that, you know, are more, like, admin or things that don’t feel like high value, like, it’s just time-consuming,

[00:09:24] that’s just, that’s all it is, and, you know, I kind of wanna round out this first pillar. I don’t want you to have to throw anyone under the bus, but I know you’ve got some horror stories about how this has played out in real life. So, whether it’s from the Palantir days or from any other job, like, can, can you give me one story about how, you know, maybe being a better storyteller could have helped you out a little bit. 

Financial Storytelling Example

[00:09:47] Bijan Moallemi: Definitely, definitely. I could share plenty here, but let’s land on the, the first one that I think has been seared into, to my brain as well as, as Joe and Brian’s, we got a really unique opportunity as Palantir was scaling where we would get time with, with the CEO directly.

[00:10:04] And, of course, we’re a growing business, that time was very limited, and the work that we were doing, some of those models, those analyses, we’d be doing kind of very greenfield frontier work, working on data sets that had never been really looked at before, and trying to derive as much insight and value as we could for the business.

[00:10:22] And so, gosh, dozens and dozens of times, no joke, we’d be working on something for, for weeks at a time, feel really proud around the work that we’d done of a five-minute window to present some of that work, and within 30, 45 seconds, our CEO, Dr. Karp, would pull out a red pen, tell us, basically shred our work to pieces around why he couldn’t understand it and kind of what he is looking for,

[00:10:48] take us out of his office, and we’d be kind of left sulking, walking back to our office trying to figure out, “Hey, we were so proud, we know all the work made sense, but what actually wasn’t resonating with them,” and so, I think for us, we kind of learned the hard way very quickly. You have the audience of a CEO who’s contact switching hundreds of times throughout the day,

[00:11:09] we can’t share something that makes sense to us that’s in the language of finance, we actually have to present things at an altitude that a CEO who’s coming from a totally different meeting on a totally different topic is gonna be able to quickly wrap his head around. And so, definitely kind of got thrown into the deep end there

[00:11:26] and it was the best way to learn, we, we definitely stumbled along the way, but I think really helped hone that skillset of storytelling and not just presenting data.

[00:11:34] Joe Michalowski: Got me out slightly, I’m, I’m glad I, but you’ve never done that to me, Bijan, I, I’m not sure if you’ve done it to anyone else in Mosaic, but it’s a terrifying story to think about.

[00:11:42] Brutal, but fair, I mean, like, when you’re that busy, like, that, that’s just the, the efficiency that you need. So, cool that you learned so much from it, um, obviously led you to starting Mosaic and being able to do that, and I think it’s a good way to transition into kind of this, the second pillar that we’re gonna talk about, which is, like, this customer service mindset,

[00:11:58] Joe Michalowski: and I know it came from your days at Palantir, but it’s kind of, you know, if we just talked about the what and the why of storytelling, this is more, like, the how, like, what does this look like on a day to day basis. So, I know you had that unique experience at Palantir, I’m curious, can you just tell me the background of this, like, customer service mindset idea that I know came from, from your time there.

What Is the Customer Service Mindset?

[00:12:19] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah. So, it was definitely something that our, that our CFO preached from day one, and it’s really around putting yourself in the shoes of your audience. And so, for us, a customer inside of finance could be anyone across the organization that needs our help or needs our data, that could be an intern all the way up to

[00:12:39] Bijan Moallemi: Dr. Karp, our CEO to Peter Thiel, someone on the board, literally anyone that, that actually needs data or information from us, and as I mentioned in kind of my horror story a second ago, the biggest thing is really putting yourself in your customer shoes, trying to help them bridge the gap between what they know and don’t know, and giving them data that is gonna make sense to them, right?

[00:13:04] I think oftentimes on the finance side, it’s tough to realize that whoever we’re dealing with across the org, including most CEOs, they’re very good at marketing, very good at sales, everyone’s kind of got their peak, but for the most part, folks aren’t necessarily gonna have that deep finance expertise.

[00:13:22] And so, we’ve got these very complex topics here in finance, how do you kind of demystify these things that are, are considered a black box and make them easier for our audience to, to grasp? One of the books that I, I love reading and try to read it once a year or so around this topic is actually Setting the Table,

[00:13:42] it’s a book by Danny Meyer, the, the famous restaurateur, and the, the big thing for him is how do we really anticipate the needs of our customers and make sure that everything we are doing, we are just going above and beyond for, for that customer, and I think that’s a mindset that’s definitely served us well at Palantir, and a mindset that, uh, we constantly talk about here at Mosaic as well. I mean, I’ve been doing content with this company for almost two years now, and it, it’s basically been the core theme of everything we’ve ever wanted to say about this finance role, and one thing that I really like, we’ve talked about, like, this kind of fact that finance has a unique perspective of the business.

[00:14:25] Joe Michalowski: I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about finance’s, ability to see all these different corners and, like, kind of the job it is to translate those numbers because you have a perspective that maybe, like, someone like me in marketing doesn’t. 

[00:14:38] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that’s absolutely right, when I think about strategic finance and what that is, it’s really sitting at the intersection of all the different data sets across the organization.

[00:14:47] And so, there is a lot that you see, but again, it’s very important to keep in mind that as I’m working with you and marketing, Joe, or someone across sales or engineering, the context that they’re gonna have is not necessarily the entire context that I’m gonna have, especially if I was the one doing the work and building a model or an analysis.

[00:15:07] So, again, it kind of comes back to properly setting the table, helping frame things in a way that your audience is gonna be able to understand and then make actionable to, to drive change and effect across the business. 

[00:15:21] Joe Michalowski: Makes a ton of sense. I think, uh, one thing I wanted to do here on, on this chat, was to try to make things as, as kind of practical or, or actionable as possible, and it is coming up on planning season, I hope nobody in, in the audience that’s listening kind of cringes as they think about it coming up, I know it’s 

[00:15:38] Bijan Moallemi: All finance folks are cringing right now. 

[00:15:39] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, exactly, just small wins, it’s okay, they’re gonna get through it, and I’m wondering, I don’t wanna put you on the spot, but I’m wondering if there’s an example you can give of, like, maybe some planning season, maybe it’s, like, revenue planning at this time of year, a good finance team that is able to kind of do what you’re talking about, have this customer service mindset versus, like, you know, in the past if it’s just, “Hey, I threw some numbers at people, and where do we end up?” I want to know what it looks like in, in practice here. 

[00:16:05] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah. Let, let me see if I can come up with a quick anecdote here. So, we’re here late 2022, it’s right around the time that, obviously, folks are thinking about Q4, probably also zooming a bit out and thinking about 2023. So, let’s say for example, we as a business, we’re trying to double our revenue over the next 12 months.

[00:16:25] To me, being more strategic as a thought partner to your CEO, to your VP Sales is, we know we want to double, now, let’s actually break it down and talk about kind of the levers that we have and what it’s gonna take to get there. So, I’d wanna put a bunch of information in front of that group of folks,

[00:16:43] there’s obviously, probably more than one way to double, right? Number one is, we have a general sense of how much a rep can carry, we could go hire a bunch of reps and just based on that, grow our new business and, um, inherently double revenue. May be tough, we don’t know what our sales cycles are, we don’t know what our rep ramp is, so that’s one option, but the answer probably isn’t, “Hey, let’s just go hire a bunch of reps.”

[00:17:08] That’s gonna be quite, quite costly to the business. The second option is, “Hey, let’s continue to invest in our product line, and let’s find a way to grow our existing customer base, let’s, instead of selling for, for 25%, sorry, 25K, let’s grow our ACVs to, to 50.” If we haven’t ever shown revenue growth, that’s probably not realistic, but hopefully, all the work that we’re doing on the R&D side of the house, that, that is a possibility.

[00:17:35] And then, the third level lever, kind of similar to the second one is, we have an existing customer base, how can we start to drill down into some of those retention numbers and try to maintain and grow that customer base? So, the answer in reality in terms of how are we gonna get, how are we gonna double the business is probably a blend of all three.

[00:17:54] Bijan Moallemi: So, I, I’d wanna show my customers, in this case the VP Sales, and our CEO, all the data that goes behind some of these assumptions, I’d also wanna paint the picture of what is realistic and what is not realistic, right? So, for each of those, what is kind of the upper and lower boundaries of what is reasonable?

[00:18:12] If we’ve only ever hired three sales reps, and my model says we need to hire nine, probably not realistic. We’ve only grown ACVs by 10%, could we double ACVs next year? Probably not. So, I think finance, again, can start to preempt some of those questions and share not just one path, but multiple paths to getting to where the business needs to go by presenting data and stress-testing some of those assumptions that go into the data as well.

[00:18:38] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, I, I really love that, that anecdote because, you know, this event, and, honestly, like, a couple weeks ago we ran a webinar with Ben Murray and, and Ray Rike, and it was all about SaaS, uh, revenue growth efficiency metrics, and it’s really great to know the what and to kind of put that data, that second half of that anecdote,

[00:18:55] I think is really, really cool to hear, like, how, you know, I can just imagine like sitting down with all these people and, and kind of hashing out the best path forward because to your point, there’s never one right answer, and if you’re only focused on the what, like, what are the numbers? It just seems, like, hey, like, those are the numbers grow 10%, and we’re all set, but you gotta find that path forward. 

[00:19:14] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah, and, and on that note, right, it’s obviously super costly to get your CEO and your VP Sales in the room.

[00:19:21] And if you’re not able to do this, the path you don’t wanna go down is presenting something that doesn’t answer a lot of those questions, frustration in that meeting, and then a lot of work that you’re doing behind the scenes and a lot of times soaked up to iterate 3, 4, 5 times to get to that state.

[00:19:40] So, I think that’s the other element of the storytelling is being cognizant of the fact that you’ve got a limited window to care what’s going on and making sure that you’re maximizing, not just your time, but, but everyone’s time, and those interactions. 

[00:19:54] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, makes a ton of sense, and I, I, I’ve always really liked this package of, like, the customer service mindset, so I wanted to make sure that, that that was something we, we really hit on and really cool to hear it kind of play out in a practical sense.

[00:20:06] And I wanna take that even, even further in this third pillar that we’re gonna talk about, which is really, like, becoming a growth catalyst in finance ’cause that’s really the point of this is, like, to be a strategic partner to the business, you don’t want to just say, “Hey, here are the numbers, month in, month out.”

[00:20:20] It’s, “How do I use those numbers to help my business grow?” And so, you know, I put storytelling in the, in the header we call it that, but it’s such a buzzword. So, I think this is a good section to get practical. And so, I want to, I want to spend kind of the, the rest of the session talking about practical, real-world examples of digging deep into the metrics and using it.

[00:20:41] And so, that hypothetical about revenue planning is great, but do you have a, a story, again, like, from any of your past experience of how you actually played out this scenario and the result that led to. 

How to Get the Most Out of Your SaaS Metrics

[00:20:54] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah, yeah, definitely. There’s one that comes to mind, or early in the Palantir days where we were, were growing hundreds of, of folks here in the vast majority of the heads that we were hiring were on the engineering side and for, for the Palantir business model at that time,

[00:21:10] the lifeblood of the company was hiring very talented engineers to staff all the work that we had coming down the pipeline, and we knew that we could sign the deals, but if we don’t have the engineers to support those customers, then we’re, we’re in a really, really tough spot, and there was one point early in the year where we were doing a lot of the right things, top of funnel,

[00:21:30] the number of candidates getting into the pool looked really good, but the output, the number of folks hired, something was wrong, like, it, the mouth wasn’t quite adding up, and this has kind of been simmering in the background for a bit, but got to the point where this has kind of been escalated to the exact team, and this was one of the biggest issues that we were trying to figure out.

[00:21:50] So, what we ultimately did was we started, trying to figure out, “Hey, where does this data live?” It happened to live in, in Lever, our ATS system, and pulled that data down for the first time and tried to get a better sense of what exactly is going on, and not too unlike kind of your, your sales funnel,

[00:22:09] we had a recruiting funnel where there were various stages in the funnel, and we started to then break it down by the different engineering roles we were hiring for, we started to break it down by geography and location that we were trying to hire folks for, and found that there was a couple stages of that recruiting funnel where

[00:22:27] the pass-through raids from stage to stage were extremely low. So, ultimately, was able to present that data to our leadership team, came up with a handful of actions that we wanted to take to try to increase those path through rates, and again, this was something that had been plugging the team for years, but what I think we did really good job of there was taking this complex problem and presenting it in a way that was very, very easy to understand.

[00:22:52] And that ultimately led to a few different changes for those queues in those regions, we ended up hitting our engineering goals and, and had a really good year as a business that year. So, just one example, I think where just about any financial metric can be relevant for your business if you present the data the right way, and it’s more than just data, it’s, it’s more storytelling and sharing the why behind it.

[00:23:15] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, it’s such a cool story for this event because I, you know, at the top we’re talking about how there’s a lot of benchmarks for, I know there’s gonna be benchmarks for things like your, your CAC and your CAC payback, and rule of 40 and, like, these very, very much, like, company-wide SaaS, like, financial metrics, things like that.

[00:23:33] But at the end of the day, like, what we’re talking about is going a level deeper. And so, just a really, like, unique example, I think to be talking about kind of the, the hiring funnel as opposed to, you know, traditional example, which would be like, how do we plan our revenue for next year? So, I think it just speaks to how far-reaching, like a true strategic finance function, can be and how, you know, valuable those metrics can be if you dig into them deep enough.

[00:23:56] Bijan Moallemi: Definitely, definitely. 

[00:23:57] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. So, I wanted to, so, we’re, we’re running outta time here, and I wanted to, to roll it back to what the main point of this event is, which is SaaS metrics. And so, I wanna take the same idea, but maybe talk about some hypothetical examples of maybe just, like, a couple metrics that, you know, on the surface, if you just know a particular number or it’s difficult to get, like, the what, you know, you spend a lot of time getting the what of a certain metric and not getting the why behind it.

[00:24:23] I’m wondering if there’s a metric or two that you can think of where the example is, “Hey, here’s what you usually do, but go a level deeper, and that’s how you unlock the strategic value.”

[00:24:33] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple that comes to mind. So, I’d say the first one, especially for kind of early-stage businesses that are still trying to figure out their product market fit and go-to-market motions, would be rep ramp,

[00:24:45] it, and I think what’s interesting here is that you’re, you’re starting to blend multiple data sets, right? You’ve got your sales rep performance, which is gonna live somewhere, maybe your, your CRM or your billing system, and then you’ve got, “Hey, when did these folks start?” And kind of all the details behind the actual people that are gonna live in your HRAS system.

[00:25:02] Bijan Moallemi: And you think about, and you don’t quite have the product market fit that you have, or you haven’t nailed what that rep ramp looks like, there’s a really good chance that, you as an early stage business, you may actually be spending more money than you need to, may lead to reps that aren’t fully fed and ultimately are quite frustrated and, and leave.

[00:25:21] And then, on the flip side, let’s say you underhire, right? And the big thing here is, the time it takes to go find someone, train them, get them ramped up, it’s not a faucet that you can just turn on and off, like, these are, these have trickle-down effects that are gonna take three, six, potentially more, depending on how long it takes you to hire in your, your sales cycle.

[00:25:41] So, you aren’t able to hire the right amount of folks, you’re basically leaving growth on the table, and the change that you need to make today is gonna impact the rest of the year. And so, very important to have visibility into that metric, otherwise, it’s going to be really, really tough to ensure that you’re not overhiring or underhiring,

[00:26:02] given that it’s gonna take 3, 6, 9 months to see the effects of some of the, some of the changes that you’re putting into the business today. 

[00:26:09] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, it ma, makes a ton of sense, I know, uh, you know, when I was starting any finance context I had from Joji, Co-Founder, as a sales rep brand was always drilled into my head as like that perfect use case.

[00:26:21] I think we’ve got a, we’ve got a couple minutes, got time for, for one more, if you’ve got another example of, like, just one metric you can really get some strategic insight out of if you dig a little deeper than normal. 

[00:26:31] Bijan Moallemi: Yeah, yeah. So, the other one that I like to talk about is net revenue retention. And I, I’d say the difference here, right, is all of us here on, on this webinar, we probably know the definition, and what it means, it’s really easy for me as a, a finance leader to just, hey, throw it in a board deck, here’s our net revenue retention, 90%, 110%, whatever the number might be. 

[00:26:53] At face value, while that metric is helpful, there is a lot more insight that you can derive by breaking it down further and starting to slice and dice it by different segments of your business, whether that’s employee count, product line, geography, net revenue retention at face value isn’t actionable to the business.

[00:27:12] Bijan Moallemi: But if you go a layer or two deeper, I can start to understand, hey, my key three cohort in this product line happened to be higher. Now, what does that mean? Maybe there’s something inside of the market that is working really well for us that I can double down on, or the inverse, my net revenue retention is really poor in this cohort, happens to be this one product line or this one geography.

[00:27:34] Maybe there’s something that is not working for these customers in the product that I need to investigate. And so, I think, again, a great example of drilling a couple layers deeper to really start to present the data in a way that is actionable for the business. 

[00:27:49] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, I love that, and I think it, it’s a good way to round out our conversation, ’cause, obviously, every use case is so unique, and I think it’s a good way to get us into Q&A ’cause I’m sure, you know, there, you could ask any metric, and there’s probably a million ways to slice and dice it, depending on the use case.

[00:28:05] Bijan Moallemi: So, wanted to kind of wrap up that last pillar there, and I’m, I’m actually gonna pull up my, my slide, again, just to get to a, a conclusion here, and talk, you know, just about kind of what comes up next. So, first of all, Bijan, thank you so much for chatting with me during this, you know, really fun, learned a lot, and I think, uh, the audience will, too. So, thank you very much. Thanks. 

[00:28:26] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, their, you know, contact information here, follow Mosaic on LinkedIn, connect with Bijan, email us if you’d like, just wanna say thanks again to RevOps Squared and to the SaaS Metrics Standards Board for, for letting us be part of this event, it was really, really great. Thanks so much. 

[00:28:42] Bijan Moallemi: Thanks.