Why B2B SaaS Businesses Need To Combine Their Product Data and Financial Metrics

For B2B SaaS businesses today the challenge is no longer about collecting data.

Instead, the challenge is about connecting data from different sources so your team can ask meaningful questions—questions whose answers enable you to build an actionable, data-driven strategy.

Your product data and financial metrics are two key pieces of that puzzle, and combining them can help you unlock tons of juicy insights into how your product actually generates revenue and how you can most effectively deploy budget to drive the biggest impact.

The benefits of combining product data and financial metrics

For self-serve SaaS businesses—where customers can subscribe and unsubscribe on their own, without interacting with your sales team—product and financial metrics are typically connected from the get-go.

Think of Netflix as an example on the consumer side: customers click on a button to subscribe and their subscription status gets updated in Netflix’s product database. That’s the same database where product data like searches, additional purchases, cancellations, and in-app behavior are stored.

With product and financial data stored together, the Netflix team can easily ask and answer questions like:

• Are people who watch a particular show more likely to renew?

• Should we make more big releases with big stars like Sandra Bullock?

• If we do more of that—is it going to drive new subscriptions? Or drive subscription retention?

• How does usage frequency correlate with retention, LTV, and revenue?

In other words, combining product data and financial metrics means you can unlock the relationship between your product and your commercial success.‍

And there are a lot of powerful benefits to that, enabling your team to…

• More effectively reduce churn and encourage revenue-driving usage by developing a deeper understanding of how product features and customer usage drive retention, upsells, churn, and more

• Power product-led growth (PLG) initiatives and build a data-backed product roadmap

• Prioritize and allocate resources to the product lines, features, and campaigns you know will positively impact revenue and provide the highest ROI

Why so many B2B SaaS companies still don’t do it

When customers buy by talking to someone on your team—a sales rep or customer support agent—that’s when product data and financial metrics tend to get a little more disconnected.

• Financial details like revenue, contract start and end dates, contract ramp-ups, number of seats purchased, and more usually live in your CRM

• Multiple roles (purchasers versus end users, for example) come into play

• All of that data is often separated from your product database, data warehouse, and analytics tools

With data siloed across disparate systems like that, you can’t very easily ask and answer questions about what drives commercial success.

Questions like:

• Is there a certain number of active users in an organization that correlates to higher NRR?

• Is there a feature in your product that, when used, makes someone more likely to upsell? To buy another product? To add more seats?

• Does high/low usage in the first 6 months accurately predict churn?

• Is the new feature that you had hypothesized would drive a bunch of cross sells actually driving those cross sells?

• Do customers who have more creator seat types tend to have better renewal rates? More consumer seat types?

Answering those questions requires you to somehow unify your product data with the data that lives in your CRM or accounting system. It’s a hard thing to do, so in our experience, many teams just don’t.

But that makes it impossible to truly understand or measure the impact of your product itself on your commercial success:

• You can’t be product-led

• You can’t find the activation point (Aha! moment) when certain usage behavior correlates with longer retention, higher LTV, upgrade conversions, referrals, and more

In other words, you can only look at things you think might correlate with retention, churn, upsells, etc.—like industry and firmographic data.

‍You’re effectively flying blind as to where to allocate your limited budget and other resources, despite having all the data you need to make those decisions more deliberately.‍

Subscript can help make unifying product and financial data a whole lot easier

Here’s the good news: there’s an easy way to unify even the most siloed product and financial data into one analytics tool, with Subscript.

An analytics platform built for B2B SaaS finance teams, Subscript allows finance leaders to look at product usage data in relation to their subscription metrics. Simply connect your key data sources (like your CRM, invoicing/billing software, and general ledger) to our platform, and all your SaaS metrics are calculated automatically:

• ARR
• Churn
• Net revenue retention
• CAC
• LTV
• ARPA
• And more

With your product and financial data together in one, unified source of truth, you can dive deeper into customer cohorts and more to find your best customers and better understand how your product drives revenue.

It’s that easy.

Want to learn more? Request a demo here.