Escape the trap of chasing top-line revenue. Instead, make contribution margin (revenue minus COGS, ad spend, and discounts) your primary success metric. This provides a truer picture of business health and aligns the entire organization around profitable, sustainable growth rather than vanity metrics.
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With AI enabling precise control over media spend, key performance indicators are changing. Brands now move beyond simple Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to more sophisticated metrics like incremental ROAS and contribution margin, reflecting a new emphasis on profitable growth rather than just volume.
The operating model for SaaS has inverted post-2021. Previously, growth came at the cost of declining efficiency ('200% headcount to grow 100%'). The new benchmark is to achieve hyper-efficiency at the margin, demanding teams grow revenue at double the rate of their headcount expansion.
The 'MQL death cycle' is over. Forward-thinking marketing organizations should align around Net Annual Recurring Revenue (Net ARR) as their ultimate measure of success. This metric, which combines new customer acquisition with retention, forces a focus on the entire customer lifecycle and proves marketing's contribution to sustainable business growth.
Everyone obsesses over Net Revenue Retention (NRR), but Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) is the real indicator of product health. GRR tells you if customers like your product enough to stay, period. A low GRR signals a core problem that expansion revenue in NRR might be masking.
Most business struggles stem from a misaligned or forgotten North Star Metric (NSM). A successful framework aligns the entire company by ensuring all OKRs ladder up to a single, durable NSM, with KPIs serving as health checks for those OKRs. This creates a clear hierarchy for decision-making and resource allocation, preventing strategic drift.
A common OKR failure is assigning teams high-level business metrics (like ARR) which they can only contribute to, not directly influence. Success requires focusing on influenceable customer behaviors while demonstrating how they correlate to the company's broader contribution-level goals.
Audit your revenue streams to distinguish 'busy revenue' (high-effort, soul-sucking work) from 'aligned revenue' (energizing, sustainable systems). Focusing on growing aligned revenue, even if it means restructuring or eliminating profitable but draining streams, is key to a sustainable business model.
The most durable growth comes from seeing your job as connecting users to the product's value. This reframes the work away from short-term, transactional metric hacking toward holistically improving the user journey, which builds a healthier business.
