The LeanScale Podcast · Episode 55

How to Build a Growth Plan Your Board Will Actually Approve

Anthony Enrico (LeanScale) and Guillaume Jacquet (Vasco) on reverse-engineering ARR, unit economics that pass the board, and killing reforecast hell

Guillaume Jacquet · Co-Founder, Vasco · Vasco Hosted by Anthony Enrico
Published Updated 00:55:45 48 min read 9,625 words
Forecasting Revenue Operations GTM Strategy Sales Compensation Demand Generation
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Executive Summary

The one-paragraph brief, extended

Why this conversation matters — and who should spend the hour.

Planning season arrives every October, and for most venture-backed companies it turns into the same slow-motion disaster: a macro goal drops from the top ('grow 60%,' 'double,' '3x'), someone is told to turn it into an Excel model, and then the storm starts — copies of the spreadsheet multiply, finance pushes back, everyone lobbies for their initiative, and the plan finally gets approved in February or March, a full quarter into the fiscal year and already out of sync with reality. In this Vasco x LeanScale webinar, LeanScale co-founder and CEO Anthony Enrico and Vasco co-founder Guillaume Jacquet lay out a framework for building a growth plan your board will actually approve — and, more importantly, one that keeps the whole company rowing in the same direction as reality changes.

Anthony brings the operator's playbook. Before founding LeanScale — a fractional RevOps firm for PE- and VC-backed companies — he was VP of RevOps at three venture-backed companies, including one where he led RevOps through a ~$500M exit. His half of the session is a live walkthrough of a growth model: everything anchors to ARR, and you reverse-engineer the ARR goal into an 'ARR bridge' (current ARR + new ARR + expansion − churn/contraction) and then into the funnel and headcount inputs required to hit it. The core discipline is that once the model exists, you stop arguing about whether the MQL or pipeline target is right and instead argue about which input is wrong — conversion rate, sales cycle, ramp time, average ACV. The target becomes mathematical.

The subtle killers get the most airtime. Nothing trips up a growth model like the sales cycle: leads don't close the month they arrive, so a two-quarter cycle means Q3 bookings need pipeline built in Q1 — and moving that one assumption can swing required pipeline from $5.4M to $9M, or from 54 SQLs to 90. Ramp time should never be shorter than the sales cycle, which forces you to hire ahead (11 reps in Q1, not 6). Compound ramp and cycle together and the ability to hit the year is largely decided in the first three to four months. Anthony's biggest warning: don't assume efficiency improves while you scale — hold conversion rates flat until you reach a level of maturity, or the plan quietly breaks.

Guillaume owns the strategic layer — budget, unit economics, and the board. His central reframe: your CEO and CFO have a boss called the board, and the board doesn't read the sum of your initiatives; it reads unit economics balanced against growth to decide whether you can graduate to the next round. A plan that fails that stress test gets rejected no matter how detailed it is internally. That makes fluency in the investors' language (growth rate, CAC payback, gross revenue retention, magic number) the thing that earns RevOps a strategic seat. He also insists unit economics should degrade as you invest and then grow progressively into the target — a suspiciously perfect green line reads as fiction — and that benchmarks (VC-published win rates, 4–5x quota-to-OTE) depersonalize the argument by making it 'you vs. the market,' not 'you vs. me.'

The finale is about making the plan a living system rather than a spreadsheet that resurfaces at quarter-end for another six-to-eight-week 'reforecast hell.' Build scenarios instead of new spreadsheets; report to plan live so everyone shares one source of truth; split core business from new bets so the board doesn't panic over blended metrics; and use a daily sales-tracker email as a forcing function (in Vasco's customers it hits an 85% open rate). Both operators land on the same anti-silver-bullet thesis: there are no growth hacks — 1% better every day compounds to 37x over a year — and the buttoned-up plan itself becomes an asset that lifts valuation and trust in a fundraise or exit. Who should listen: founders, RevOps and finance leaders, and CROs who want planning to stop being a painful annual ritual and start being a scalable operating system.

Key Takeaways

13 things worth stealing

The load-bearing ideas, each with the business implication and who should care.

01

Planning fails because the plan lands a quarter late and already obsolete

The ritual is predictable: a macro goal drops from the top, someone turns it into Excel, spreadsheet copies multiply, finance pushes back, and the plan is finally approved in February or March — a full quarter into the fiscal year, when reality has already changed. You've approved a plan that's out of sync before the ink dries.

Why it matters: Build the plan in a shared, living model instead of dueling spreadsheets, so alignment happens fast and the plan stays current as the business moves.

FoundersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
02

Reverse-engineer the ARR goal so the target becomes mathematical

Everything anchors to ARR. Instead of setting an MQL or pipeline target as 'last year plus 30%,' you take the macro ARR goal, work backward through the funnel and resource inputs required to hit it, and let the math produce the targets. The conversation shifts from arguing about the number to arguing about the assumptions behind it.

Why it matters: Stop debating whether a pipeline or SQL target is 'right.' Debate the inputs — conversion, sales cycle, ramp, ACV — and the connected model tells you how to get there.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesFounders
03

The ARR bridge has three moving parts, not one

Current ARR + new ARR + expansion − churn/contraction = target ARR. Most teams stop at new logos and forget that expansion can take pressure off new business, while churn — even 1–3% — compounds painfully as you scale and can force you to sell more just to stand still.

Why it matters: Model expansion and churn per segment. Strong net retention relieves the new-logo number; weak retention silently widens the gap you have to fill.

RevOps LeadersCustomer SuccessRevenue Executives
04

Nothing trips up a growth model like the sales cycle

Leads don't close the month they arrive. If it takes two quarters to close, the pipeline for Q3 bookings has to be built in Q1. Moving that one assumption swings the plan dramatically — in Anthony's example, from $5.4M to $9M of required pipeline, or from 54 to 90 SQLs.

Why it matters: Pin down your real sales cycle before setting any pipeline target, or you'll set demand-gen goals that arrive too late and send the team on a 'death march.'

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersMarketing Leaders
05

Ramp time should never be shorter than the sales cycle

A rep isn't ramped when training ends — they're ramped when they're building pipeline, closing deals, and fully productive. If a full cycle takes a quarter, a rep can't be productive sooner, so you hire ahead of the number (11 reps in Q1 instead of 6) to have them ramped in time for later bookings.

Why it matters: Front-load hiring to the ramp-plus-cycle math. Underestimating ramp is one of the most common reasons back-half targets get missed.

Sales LeadersFoundersRevOps Leaders
06

The whole year is largely decided in the first three to four months

When you compound ramp time and sales cycle, the ability to hit the annual number is nearly locked in the first three to four months — that's the window in which pipeline must be built and reps must be hired and ramping.

Why it matters: Treat Q1 pipeline build and hiring as make-or-break. Don't plan on a back-half miracle to recover a slow start.

Revenue ExecutivesRevOps LeadersSales Leaders
07

Expect efficiency to hold, not magically improve, while you scale

Anthony's most common pushback from CEOs is the belief that conversion rates will climb as the company grows ('we did 30% last quarter, shouldn't we hit 40%?'). When you're building the airplane while flying it, he cautions keeping metrics flat; you earn efficiency gains once you reach a level of scale and maturity.

Why it matters: Plan with flat efficiency assumptions. Baking in optimistic conversion improvement is a quiet way to build a plan you can't hit.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
08

Count every cost, not just ad spend, or the CFO kills the plan

'All sales and marketing costs' means the fully loaded people cost — AEs, sales engineers, technical sales, CS, account management — plus marketing acquisition and allocated overhead like laptops and facilities. Leaving costs out is where CFO pushback starts.

Why it matters: Trickle every relevant P&L line back into the model so your unit economics survive the finance conversation and hold up under scrutiny.

Revenue ExecutivesFoundersRevOps Leaders
09

Your CEO and CFO have a boss — the board — and the plan must pass its stress test

The board doesn't read the sum of your initiatives and drivers; it reads unit economics balanced against growth to judge whether you can graduate to the next round. If the plan can't be sold to investors, the CEO and CFO reject it back to you — which is exactly where a strategic operator can shine.

Why it matters: Build to the metrics the next round demands (e.g., >100% growth to Series A, CAC payback under 18 months, GRR ~85%) and speak the investors' language to earn a real seat at the table.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
10

Unit economics should degrade as you invest, then grow into the target

You hire reps and spend on marketing before the results arrive, so economics naturally dip when you invest and improve as ROI lands. The board wants a credible path to the milestone — a trend that grows into healthy economics — not a perfect green line every quarter.

Why it matters: Show the trend, not perfection. A suspiciously flawless plan reads as unrealistic; a believable ramp into strong economics builds trust.

FoundersRevenue Executives
11

Benchmarks depersonalize the argument

VC- and PE-published benchmarks — win rate around 30% at $10–100M ARR, a 4–5x quota-to-OTE ratio, conversion rates by deal size — turn a fight over your assumptions into a comparison against the market. A rep asking $200k to bring $400k is a 2x ratio, well below the norm, and the benchmark makes that case for you.

Why it matters: Anchor assumptions to published benchmarks to defend or challenge a plan without making it about you versus a specific person.

RevOps LeadersSales LeadersRevenue Executives
12

Make the plan a living system: scenarios and live progress-to-target

Instead of spinning out a new spreadsheet every time reality shifts, build scenarios for sensitivity analysis and report to plan live. Split core business from new bets so blended metrics don't spook the board, and use a daily sales-tracker email as a forcing function — in Vasco's customers it hits an 85% open rate and becomes the single source of truth.

Why it matters: Instrument the plan in software with a daily cadence. It collapses reforecasting from a six-to-eight-week ordeal into a fast adjustment and aligns the whole org on what's actually working.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesSales Leaders
13

There are no growth hacks — 1% better every day compounds

Silver bullets make good stories, but the real lift is compounding small improvements: better messaging, better coverage, a better demo. One percent better every day is roughly 37x over a year; one percent worse is near-total loss. Visibility and rigor also lift valuation and the quality of investors and exits you can attract.

Why it matters: Invest in the operating engine and daily improvement. The buttoned-up plan itself is an asset in a fundraise or exit, not just an internal artifact.

FoundersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
Frameworks Discussed

10 named models

Every framework Jimmy names, defined and time-stamped.

The ARR Bridge

06:07

Model your target as current ARR + new ARR + expansion − churn/contraction. New ARR is new logos (and new contracts with existing customers); expansion and churn both come from the existing base.

Most teams model only new-logo ARR and miss the two lines that compound hardest. Strong expansion takes pressure off new business; churn — even a few percent — grows more punishing at scale. Getting a solid, segment-level read on each line is what lets you build a credible bridge from today's ARR to the goal.

Reverse-Engineered Growth Model (Top-Down + Bottom-Up)

12:10

Take the macro ARR goal and reverse-engineer it top-down through funnel metrics (net retention, SQL-to-close, sales cycle, MQL-to-SQL, average ACV) and bottom-up through the resources and team (CS capacity, quota/performance, ramp time, cost per SQL, salaries) required to hit it.

The model makes the target mathematical: instead of asking whether an MQL or pipeline number is 'right,' you align on inputs and let the connected math produce the outputs. Anthony walks a simple one-segment version, then notes real companies stack multiple 'mini growth models' by segment and geography and add them up.

'Which Input Is Wrong?' Alignment Method

19:23

When executives challenge the outputs (reps, budget, pipeline required), don't defend the outputs — send them back to the inputs and ask which specific assumption they'd change: conversion rate, sales cycle, MQL-to-SQL, expected performance.

This keeps the debate on the drivers you can actually reason about and prevents endless argument over headline numbers. Once the inputs are agreed, the outputs follow automatically. Anthony notes it usually takes a few meetings and 'a couple of yelling matches' to lock the inputs.

Sales-Cycle-Driven Pipeline Timing

14:47

Because deals don't close the month a lead arrives, the length of the sales cycle dictates when pipeline must exist. A two-quarter cycle means the pipeline for Q3 bookings has to be built in Q1.

This single assumption swings the plan more than any other: in the live model, a shorter cycle drops required pipeline from $9M to $5.4M and from 90 to 54 SQLs. Get it wrong and you send the team on a 'death march' — asking for bookings the pipeline timing can't support.

Ramp Time ≥ Sales Cycle (Hire Ahead)

17:28

A rep is 'ramped' only when building pipeline and closing at full productivity — not when training ends. Ramp time should never be shorter than the sales cycle, which forces you to hire ahead of the number.

If a full cycle takes a quarter, a rep can't be fully productive sooner, so you hire 11 reps in Q1 instead of 6 to have them ramped in time for later bookings. Combined with the sales cycle, this is why the year is largely decided in the first three to four months.

The Board's Unit-Economics Stress Test

33:31

The board evaluates the plan not as a sum of initiatives but as unit economics balanced against growth, judging whether the company can graduate to the next funding stage. If it fails that test, the CEO and CFO reject it back to you.

Understanding this reframes RevOps' job: build to the metrics the next round needs (growth rate, CAC payback, gross revenue retention, magic number) and speak the investors' language. That fluency is what turns an operator from a plan-builder into a strategic partner with a seat at the table.

Grow Progressively Into Your Unit Economics

41:56

Because you invest in SaaS before results arrive, unit economics degrade when you invest and improve as ROI lands. Plan a trend that grows into the economics the board wants — not a perfect green line every quarter.

A flawless plan reads as fiction; the board expects volatility and wants a believable path to the milestone. Bonus rigor: split unit economics by channel, because channel drives resource allocation — reallocating from a weaker channel (e.g., outbound) to stronger ones (partnership, inbound) lets you spend less for the same result.

Benchmarks as Depersonalizers

39:10

Anchor and stress-test assumptions against VC/PE-published benchmarks (win rate by ARR band and deal size, quota-to-OTE ratios, funnel conversion rates) so the conversation becomes 'you vs. the market' instead of 'you vs. the person.'

A 60% modeled win rate signals over-optimism; a 10% win rate signals a driver to fix. A rep wanting $200k to bring $400k is a 2x quota-to-OTE ratio against a 4–5x market norm. Benchmarks give assumptions weight and remove personal friction from the debate.

The Living Plan: Scenarios, Live Progress-to-Target, Core vs. Bets

42:38

Replace the static spreadsheet with scenario modeling for sensitivity analysis, live progress-to-target reporting, a core-vs-new-bets split, and a daily sales-tracker email that becomes the company's single source of truth.

This collapses quarter-end 'reforecast hell' (six-to-eight weeks, obsolete by the time it's live) into fast adjustments. Splitting core business from new bets stops the board from halting the whole engine over blended metrics. The daily tracker forces one shared dataset — in Vasco's customers it reaches an 85% open rate.

1% Better Every Day

48:22

There are no silver bullets. Compounding small, daily improvements — messaging, coverage, demos — is what drives real growth: 1% better every day is roughly 37x over a year, while 1% worse is a ~97% loss.

Both hosts converge on this anti-growth-hack thesis. The operating engine, not a single big move, makes growth predictable, fast, and efficient — and the visibility that discipline produces materially improves valuation, investor quality, and exit outcomes.

Best Quotes

19 lines worth clipping

Pulled verbatim. Copy or share any of them.

“When we raise capital as a VC-backed company, there's that capital clock that is ticking, and you make sure you go fast and you don't have a lot of trial and error.”
Guillaume Jacquet 00:41
“You approve your budgets and your plan in February or March, which is almost already a full quarter inside the next fiscal year — and the reality has already changed. So you've approved a plan that is already obsolete and out of sync with reality.”
Guillaume Jacquet 02:26
“The quick shortcut for your valuation, the quick shortcut to where you are in your growth stage, always gets condensed to ARR.”
Anthony Enrico 05:28
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, trips up a growth model more than factoring in your sales cycle.”
Anthony Enrico 14:47
“Very often there's this magical sense that people will close leads that come in within the same month. But if your sales cycle is three months, you need to generate those leads in January, February, March — otherwise you're sending your troops on the death march.”
Guillaume Jacquet 15:27
“A ramped salesperson isn't one who's been through training — it's when that salesperson is building pipeline, closing deals, and being fully productive. And ramp time should not be shorter than your sales cycle, because the math just doesn't make sense.”
Anthony Enrico 17:28
“When they challenge and push back, you go back to your inputs and say: tell me which one of these inputs is wrong. That's the only conversation we should be having — and then we'll talk about the outputs.”
Anthony Enrico 19:23
“The biggest pushback I get is that CEOs and founders expect these metrics to be getting better while they're getting bigger. When you're building the airplane while you're flying it, I'd caution you to at least keep it the same.”
Anthony Enrico 20:49
“If you compound ramp time and sales cycle, you realize the ability to hit the year is almost decided within the first three to four months.”
Guillaume Jacquet 21:35
“You stop arguing about what the right target of MQLs or pipeline is, and you move directly to how do we get there, knowing it's all connected. The target of the company becomes mathematical.”
Anthony Enrico 24:27
“It's an exercise of being accurate, not pushing higher or lower.”
Guillaume Jacquet 25:51
“Most people forget that your CEO and your CFO have a boss — and that boss is called the board.”
Guillaume Jacquet 33:31
“If you understand the language of the board, you can talk that language to the CEO and the CFO, and you get a seat at the table that is way different.”
Guillaume Jacquet 35:32
“You want to grow progressively into the unit economics the board wants to see. You don't want a perfect line of green all the way through your plan, because that doesn't exist and nobody is expecting it.”
Guillaume Jacquet 41:56
“There is nothing worse than a plan that sits on a spreadsheet on the side, that you reopen at the end of the quarter to see whether you hit — and then go through a reforecasting hell that takes six to eight weeks and is already obsolete by the time it's live.”
Guillaume Jacquet 43:15
“The real lift is getting one percent better every day. One percent better every day is 37x growth at the end of the year; one percent worse is a 97 percent loss.”
Guillaume Jacquet 48:22
“There are no growth hacks — I haven't seen one, at least. It's showing up every day, pouring a hot cup of coffee, getting to work, making things better, and being intentional.”
Anthony Enrico 49:48
“Don't underestimate the power of having all this buttoned up when you go through a fundraise or an exit. The visibility alone has tremendous value — it builds trust.”
Anthony Enrico 50:30
“You spend more time arguing about the data than about what to do about it. That daily digest of progress to target is a forcing function — and then you as RevOps don't become the enemy. The email is the enemy.”
Guillaume Jacquet 53:23
Practical Advice

What should you actually do?

The playbook, split by the seat you sit in.

Founders

  • Anchor every plan to a clearly defined ARR number — and if you run any consumption/usage-based revenue, spend the meetings up front to define what ARR even means for you before you model anything.
  • Look at least two years out: what you plan for next year depends on what you want to do the year after, because you'll be ramping resources in the back half for the following year's targets.
  • Treat the buttoned-up plan as a fundraising and exit asset — the visibility and intentionality it signals can materially affect your valuation and the investors and exits you can attract.

RevOps Leaders

  • Reverse-engineer the macro goal into a shared model so targets become mathematical; when challenged, send people back to the inputs ('which one is wrong?') rather than defending the outputs.
  • Model the full ARR bridge — new, expansion, churn/contraction — per segment and geography as stacked 'mini growth models,' not a single blended line.
  • Stand up scenario modeling and a live, daily progress-to-target view so reforecasting is fast and the org runs on one source of truth instead of competing spreadsheets.
  • Learn the board's language (growth rate, CAC payback, GRR, magic number) so you can translate the plan for the CEO and CFO and earn a strategic seat.

Sales Leaders

  • Nail your real sales cycle before setting any pipeline target — it swings required pipeline more than any other input and determines when pipeline must exist.
  • Define ramp as fully productive (building and closing), keep ramp time ≥ sales cycle, and hire ahead of the number so reps are ramped in time for later bookings.
  • Remember the year is largely won in the first three to four months; front-load pipeline build and hiring instead of banking on a back-half recovery.

Marketing Leaders

  • Translate the model's SQL and pipeline needs — and their timing — into demand-gen targets; a two-quarter sales cycle means Q3 bookings need pipeline built in Q1.
  • Size the marketing budget from average cost per SQL (overall spend ÷ opportunities created if you lack channel-level attribution), and get to channel-level unit economics so you can reallocate spend to the channels with the best economics.
  • Use pipeline-coverage math tied to your conversion rate (roughly 4–5x at a 25% win rate; more like 10x if you convert at 10%) instead of a blanket coverage rule.

Revenue Executives

  • Count every cost — fully loaded people (AEs, SEs, technical sales, CS, account management), marketing acquisition, and allocated overhead — so unit economics survive the CFO conversation.
  • Build the plan to pass the board's stress test: the metrics the next funding stage requires, balanced against growth, not the sum of internal initiatives.
  • Plan unit economics to degrade as you invest and grow into the target; a perfect green line reads as unrealistic and erodes board trust.
  • Split core business from new bets in reporting so the board can see where to scale, refine, or divest instead of halting the whole revenue engine over blended metrics.
Operations Takeaways

By function

The same conversation, filtered for RevOps, pipeline/marketing ops, and customer ops.

Revenue Operations

  • Anchor to ARR, reverse-engineer the rest. Everything hangs off a clearly defined ARR target; work backward into funnel and headcount inputs so targets are mathematical, not negotiated.
  • Argue inputs, not outputs. When executives push back, send them to the assumptions — 'which input is wrong?' — and let the connected model recompute the outputs.
  • Model the full bridge, by segment. New + expansion − churn/contraction, stacked as mini growth models per segment and geography, not one blended line.
  • Respect timing. Sales cycle and ramp time decide when pipeline and hiring must happen; the year is largely won in the first three to four months.
  • Run it live. Scenario modeling plus a daily progress-to-target view replaces reforecast hell and gives the whole org one source of truth.
  • Speak board. Fluency in unit economics and the next round's metric bar is what turns RevOps from plan-builder into strategic partner.

Pipeline & Marketing Ops

  • Pipeline timing follows the cycle. A two-quarter sales cycle means Q3 bookings need pipeline built in Q1 — set demand-gen timing off the cycle, not the calendar.
  • Coverage is a function of win rate. Derive coverage from conversion: ~4–5x at 25%, ~10x at 10%; SMB 3–4x, enterprise 5–10x — not a blanket multiple.
  • Size marketing budget from cost per SQL. Overall spend ÷ opportunities created gives a rough marketing budget when channel-level attribution isn't in place yet.
  • Get to channel-level economics. Channel drives resource allocation; reallocating to better-economics channels lets you spend less for the same result.

Customer Operations

  • Net retention relieves new business. A base you expect to grow (positive NRR) takes pressure off the new-logo number; a shrinking base widens the gap you must fill.
  • Churn compounds at scale. Even 1–3% churn becomes materially harder to overcome as the top line grows — model contraction and downgrades explicitly.
  • Right-size CS capacity. Aim for roughly a 20x cost-to-carry ratio per CSM; dipping toward 10–15x signals an inefficient CS operation.
Metrics Mentioned

The numbers, with context

$10M → $20M ARR
Doubling example

The working example throughout the live model — 'doubling always sounds good to the board' — reverse-engineered into the funnel and headcount inputs required to hit it.

20–25% (mid-market/enterprise); 30–40% (SMB)
SQL-to-close-won benchmark

Rough conversion benchmarks Anthony offers when teams lack their own data; the demo assumes 25%.

$5.4M vs $9M pipeline; 54 vs 90 SQLs
Sales-cycle impact on pipeline

Changing the sales cycle from one quarter to two moves the required pipeline build earlier and larger — the single biggest swing in the model.

25%→30% cuts Q1 SQLs 90→75; a 5% miss the other way pushes it to 113
Conversion sensitivity

Small changes in conversion accuracy dramatically change how much pipeline you must build.

~20x cost-to-carry healthy; below 15 or near 10 = inefficient
CS capacity ratio

Benchmark for how much revenue a CSM should carry relative to their cost.

11 reps in Q1 (2-quarter ramp) vs 6 with instant ramp
Ramp-driven hiring

Because ramp time can't be shorter than the sales cycle, you hire ahead of the number to be ramped in time.

4x healthy / 5x 'sleep at night' at 25% conversion; ~10x at 10%; SMB 3–4x, enterprise 5–10x
Pipeline coverage

Coverage should be derived from your win rate, not set by a blanket rule.

$2M ARR in ~18 months; >100% growth; CAC payback <18 mo; GRR ~85%
Seed → Series A gate

Illustrative example of the metric bar a plan must clear to graduate to the next round.

~30% at $10–100M ARR
Win-rate benchmark

From a VC-published SaaS 'periodic table' of benchmarks; a modeled 60% signals over-optimism, a 10% signals a driver to fix.

4–5x
Quota-to-OTE benchmark

Market norm; a rep asking $200k to bring $400k is only 2x, well below sustainable — the benchmark depersonalizes the pushback.

1% better/day ≈ 37x per year; 1% worse ≈ 97% loss
Compounding improvement

The anti-growth-hack math: the operating engine and daily gains, not silver bullets, drive growth.

85%
Daily tracker open rate

Open rate of Vasco's daily progress-to-target email across its customers — evidence of how strong a forcing function a daily digest becomes.

Entities

Companies, people & tools mentioned

Auto-extracted and linked into the knowledge graph.

Companies

VascoRevenue Planning Software

Co-host of the webinar; the growth-planning platform where the growth model lives, powering scenario modeling, unit-economics tracking, live progress-to-target dashboards, and a daily sales-tracker email that reaches an 85% open rate in its customers.

00:00 · 12:46 · 54:34Company →
LeanScaleGTM Operations

Anthony's fractional RevOps firm for PE- and VC-backed companies; does growth modeling for its customers and manages the full revenue tech stack. Anthony was VP of RevOps at three venture-backed companies (leading RevOps through a ~$500M exit) before founding it.

00:16 · 04:09 · 20:02Company →

People

Anthony Enricohost

Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast.

Co-FounderProfile →
Guillaume Jacquetguest

Co-founder of Vasco, the growth-planning platform; former founder focused on making SaaS growth predictable, fast, and efficient.

Co-Founder, VascoProfile →

Tools & software

Methodologies referenced The Bowtie ModelMEDDICBANT
Related LeanScale Services

Where this shows up in the work

Forecasting & ARR Definition

Define a raise-worthy ARR and build a reliable consumption forecast across finance, data science, and go-to-market.

The episode is a clinic on building a defensible growth model and a raise-worthy ARR definition — core LeanScale forecasting work.

Fractional RevOps

Embedded, field-facing RevOps leadership and execution — the operator model Jimmy describes, delivered as a service.

Anthony's field-operator model — building the plan, managing the tech stack, and translating for the board — is exactly what LeanScale embeds as fractional RevOps.

Consumption & Usage-Based Modeling

Quota design, hunter/farmer structures, and unit economics for usage-based businesses.

The unit-economics rigor and the need to define ARR when revenue is consumption-based map directly to LeanScale's usage-based modeling work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers

Generated from the conversation, marked up for search and AI extraction.

How do you build a growth plan the board will actually approve?

Anchor everything to a clearly defined ARR target and reverse-engineer it into the funnel and headcount inputs required to hit it, so the plan is mathematical rather than negotiated. Then make sure it passes the board's stress test: the board reads unit economics balanced against growth to decide whether you can graduate to the next funding stage. Build to the metrics that stage requires, count every cost, and show a believable path — not a perfect line — into healthy economics.

What is an ARR bridge and how do you reverse-engineer an ARR target?

An ARR bridge models your target as current ARR + new ARR + expansion − churn/contraction. New ARR is new logos and new contracts with existing customers; expansion and churn both come from the existing base. To reverse-engineer the target, you start from the ARR goal and work backward through funnel metrics (net retention, SQL-to-close conversion, sales cycle, MQL-to-SQL, average ACV) and the resources needed (reps, CS capacity, ramp time, marketing budget), so the required pipeline and headcount fall out of the math.

Why does the sales cycle matter so much in a growth model?

Because deals don't close the month a lead arrives, the sales cycle determines when pipeline must already exist. If it takes two quarters to close, the pipeline for Q3 bookings has to be built in Q1. Changing this one assumption can swing required pipeline from roughly $5.4M to $9M and from 54 to 90 SQLs. Miss it and you set demand-gen and bookings targets the timing can't support — sending the team on a 'death march.'

How much pipeline coverage do you need?

Derive it from your conversion or win rate rather than using a blanket multiple. At a 25% conversion rate, roughly 4x coverage is healthy and 5x lets you sleep at night; if you convert at 10%, you need closer to 10x. As a rough guide, SMB motions run about 3–4x and enterprise about 5–10x. If your coverage requirement looks extreme, that's often a signal to fix the conversion rate before adding more pipeline.

What unit economics does a board look at when approving a plan?

Typically net growth rate, lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, CAC payback, LTV-to-CAC, net revenue retention, gross revenue retention, and efficiency metrics like ARR per employee, sales cycle, conversion rates, and the magic number (net new ARR per dollar of sales and marketing spend). The board reads these balanced against growth to judge whether you can graduate to the next round — so the plan must clear the bar that funding stage requires.

Why do CFOs and CEOs push back on growth plans?

Because they have a boss — the board — and they won't go into your line-by-line initiatives when they present it. The board evaluates unit economics balanced against growth, so if a plan can't be sold to investors as a credible path to the next stage, the CEO and CFO reject it back to you. Often the pushback isn't about a specific driver; it's that they know the plan won't survive the board's stress test.

How do you avoid February 'reforecast hell'?

Stop treating the plan as a static spreadsheet that resurfaces at quarter-end. Build scenarios for sensitivity analysis instead of spinning out new spreadsheets, and report to plan live so everyone shares one source of truth and can see where the bottlenecks are in real time. Splitting core business from new bets and sending a daily progress-to-target email turns reforecasting from a six-to-eight-week ordeal into a fast adjustment everyone already understands.

What quota-to-OTE ratio is considered healthy?

The market norm is roughly 4–5x — a rep should carry a quota several times their on-target earnings. A rep asking to be paid $200k to bring in $400k of ARR is only a 2x ratio, which is well below sustainable. Using the published benchmark depersonalizes the conversation: it becomes 'this is what the market says great looks like,' rather than a negotiation between you and the individual.

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00:00Welcome: the Vasco × LeanScale planning webinar 01:49Why planning season becomes 'reforecast hell' 03:00The five parts: top-down and bottom-up 04:09ARR as the North Star target 06:07The ARR bridge: new, expansion, churn 09:29Timing performance: seasonality and ramp 12:10Live growth-model walkthrough 14:47The sales-cycle trap 16:43Team, quota, and ramp-time inputs 18:47Aligning the plan: 'which input is wrong?' 20:49The efficiency-while-scaling pushback 21:35The year is won in the first 3–4 months 24:27Reverse-engineering makes targets mathematical 26:30Multi-segment models and planning two years out 27:54Q&A: pipeline coverage 30:14Budget and unit economics: count every cost 33:31Why the board rejects your plan 36:07Graduating to the next round: the metrics that matter 38:30Channel-level economics and benchmarking 41:56Grow into your unit economics 42:38Scenario modeling and reporting to plan live 45:50Core business vs. new bets 47:451% better every day compounds 49:48Closing: no growth hacks; visibility wins fundraises 51:13Q&A: automating CRM data entry 52:39Q&A: building a culture of accountability 54:34Wrap-up
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00:00Welcome: the Vasco × LeanScale planning webinar

0:00 Thank you very much. I am extremely excited to be with you today. It's a topic that is dear to our hearts in revenue operation. It's how to build a growth plan that the board could buy. And here with me today we have Anthony. For those who don't know Anthony, Anthony is the CEO and co-founder of LeanScale. LeanScale is an amazing partner of Vasco. They're one of the best revenue operation agency out there in the world. They have amazing logos. I think what differentiates them really, Anthony, you can tell, is they have an expertise in P and VC-backed company. And we

0:41 know that when we raise capital as a VC-backed company, there's that capital clock that is ticking and you make sure that you go fast and you don't have a lot of trial and errors. And they really understand that world and they help you actually build all the foundations that your company needs in order to go from C to series A to series B and so on and so on. And they can act both as a strategic partner, but also they can get their hands dirty into the CRM in order to set those foundations. So Anthony, super happy to be here with you. We're going to kick it started,

1:12 but it's going to be a good one. Yeah, Gil, thank you so much for being here. I don't think I could have said it better myself and I am unbelievably passionate about the topic we're going to be going over today. And I don't think there's any platform in the world that facilitates this process better than Vasco. So thank you for having me. Really excited to dive in and can't wait to see what some of the questions are in the chat as well. Awesome. Okay, so it's planning season again. Typically it starts around October, beginning of November. And from what I can recall and the

01:49Why planning season becomes 'reforecast hell'

1:49 various boards, executive position that I had as a founder of a company, it always starts with some kind of macro goals that comes from the top. And that numbers feels always a bit arbitrary. You need to grow 60% the other year. You need to double your growth. You need to 3X your growth. And that becomes kind of the mark that the entire company has to work backward from. That mark is agreed upon leaders. And then someone within your organization then needs to turn that mark into an Excel model. And that's when the storm starts. A lot of conversation happen. We're talking about

2:26 alignment. Everyone who want to throw their initiative, everyone who want to have their say. And then as you go through that, the copies of that spreadsheet multiply and finance pushes back and so on and so on. And if you go through that loops, it always is kind of the same scenario. You go through an immense effort and in the end you approve your budgets and you approve your plan in February or March, which is almost already a full quarter inside the next fiscal year. And the reality has already changed. So you've approved the plan that is already obsolete and out of sync

03:00The five parts: top-down and bottom-up

3:00 with reality. And Anthony and I, we had a lot of experience with that and we believe there is a better way. And that's what we want to show you here. It's to build a plan that not only gets alignment, but also kind of aligns everyone around the table in a single direction in order to avoid kind of the defocus and the drag of time that this exercise can give. We're going to go through five parts. The first one, we're going to be unpacking what is the growth goal. And then we're going to be talking about kind of the two major pieces of every plan, which is the top down, reverse

3:36 engineering, that goal, and the bottom up, the staffing of people and individuals in order to really give ourselves the chance to hit plan. This is going to be covered by Anthony. And then afterward we'll conclude with some more strategic elements on reporting to that plan. And it's called budget and unit economics and why they matter. And in the end, how do you can apply and get continuous refocusing with scenario modeling and the ability to have a cadence to report to plan. So with that said, I'm going to end over to Mike to Anthony, who's going to go through the first

04:09ARR as the North Star target

4:09 parts. Yeah, I appreciate it. And before, before I kick off, just to give some reference, before starting LeanScale, I was actually a VP of RevOps for three venture back companies. One of them, I was a head of RevOps where we led through a $500 million exit and planning was key at all of them. But I had so many missteps in the beginning. And there are so many subtle things that can really, really trip you up when you're going through the planning process. And I saw some of the comments already too, like, Hey, how do we get leadership to look at the right data? How do we get the team

4:44 aligned? And I think a lot of those components are actually some of the more important ones is just getting everybody on the same page. And the growth goal and growth model and having a home for it to live in is an amazing way to do that and get everybody rowing the same direction. So if we go to the next slide, I think the main thing that we want to talk about, so most SaaS, AI, any venture back tech company, the North Star target is going to be annual recurring revenue. And even in companies where a lot of it is a consumption based model. So I think that's something to keep in

5:28 mind, you know, the quick shortcut for your valuation quick shortcut to where you are in your growth stage always gets condensed to ARR. So sometimes you may need a lot of meetings and definition building just to wrap your head around what ARR means for you and your company. Because when you have consumption based models, you may have to put some definition around that. But these are the major components that is going to anchor what your growth model is. And then everything else is going to be built around whatever this top target is. So typically, you raise money,

06:07The ARR bridge: new, expansion, churn

6:07 you set targets to a board, those targets are in the context of ARR. And then you have to ask yourself, what is it going to take to get to that ARR number? So a couple breakouts here, some of them are obvious. Some of them can be a little bit more nuanced. One is what is your current ARR? So if you don't have that figured out, and a lot of companies don't, so don't feel self conscious if you don't, it just means you need to spend some time defining it. But start with your current ARR, and then decide where you need to build to. Then here are the changes that come along the way that

6:45 you're going to need to plan for and forecast. First is new ARR. So sometimes that means, it always means new logos, sometimes it means new contracts with existing customers too. So people think about this section a little bit differently. But for simplicity, let's just say this is going to be new customers. So new ARR getting added into the mix. And this is just the beginning. A lot of teams tend to stop right here and don't realize the other components that are part of this build. So next is going to be your expansion. Take a look at your existing customer base. How much do you

7:25 anticipate this cohort to expand throughout the year? If you have a really good line of sight on to what that expansion number is, it can actually take a lot of relief off of new logo business if you feel like you're in a position to expand well. Now, on the flip side of that, you're also going to want to take a look at churn and contraction or downgrades. And that's taking a look at the same cohort of existing business. How much of that revenue do you expect to actually contract away? How much churn do you anticipate? And you may need to make up that loss

7:59 with even more new business. So having a really solid understanding of each of these components, being able to plan for these for your different segments of business is going to be vital to build that ARR bridge to your new goal from where you are today. So I know for some that might be basic for others might be new, but there's some nuances there. That's really important to just make sure we capture. And Gil, I don't know if you have any comments on that, or in your experience, if you see people making any missteps on any of these foundational metrics in the beginning.

8:40 I think people often underestimate as you grow, the ARR that churn and downgrade stick away from your top line. The more you grow, the more that 1%, 2%, 3% churn rate is actually complex. And a lot of growth goals are toward generating new ARR, but a lot of leverage comes from the second and the third line and getting that growth loop that really turns your existing customer into additional revenue. I couldn't agree more. Before my time in RevOps, I actually spent a lot of my career and customer success owning the existing revenue. And it compounds other way. If you're

09:29Timing performance: seasonality and ramp

9:29 expanding well and things are going well, then it can really take a lot of relief off of the new business. But if you're not, it leaves a pretty big gap that you need to fill. 100%. All right. So the other thing to keep in mind too, a lot of times we're going to say, okay, great. We're going to go from 10 million to 20 million because doubling always sounds good to the board. So let's do that. And now we have to think about when do we actually anticipate that performance to come in. So this is a huge area where people often get themselves into trouble because they say, hey,

10:11 10 to 20 million, and then let's evenly spread that across the year. And then immediately you're already starting to fall behind or running into issues. The other one too, is sometimes people will say, hey, we have a lot of seasonality. Let's hope like at the back half of the year, we're going to figure it out. And then you're also not getting a head start on how you need to be performing to achieve the target that you have as well. So two things really to consider. One is, do you have any seasonality in your business? Are there any major reasons why you'd expect

10:46 exceptional performance in certain quarters over others? Sometimes that's the cue for e-commerce season. Sometimes it's tied to an event or some event season where you tend to drum up a lot of business. But take a look at any macro external factors that could be creating that seasonality, and then see where you want to spread the performance. That's one bucket. The other bucket is how do you anticipate ramping up your resources and ramping up your team? We're going to talk about that when we hop into a live example of the model real quick. But you don't build

11:30 resources and then immediately start to get the results from that. It takes time. If you're hiring reps, if you're testing new marketing channels, if you're deploying new customer strategies, if you're deploying new products, all of these things take much more time than people tend to anticipate. And you really need to time out the performance of that. So those two things can impact when you expect the performance to come in the year and how you plan throughout the year. So before I hop in, if anybody wants to get a copy that they can follow along as I go through, we have a very simple model. We also have a video on YouTube that walks you

12:10Live growth-model walkthrough

12:10 through it if you want to. So that QR code will enable you to download a copy of a growth model. So you can start building this on your own. And then I'll walk through some of the components now. I'm going to go through the growth model that's on the QR code here. So we're looking at the same, same piece of paper, if you will. But I'm also going to step into a slightly more complex one, because this one will give you the basics and give you an idea and unlock a few perspectives that are important. But when you start to build this for your company, you're likely going to need further segmentation and breakdown.

12:46 So I'm going to show two. This is an example of what you should have been able to download on the QR code. So you'll have an exact copy of this. It's a very simple growth model. That really is just looking at one segment, but I think it's going to give the core fundamentals that will enable you to build your own and also give you an idea of, hey, if I'm using Vasco, how would I house this in a platform like Vasco? So like I mentioned before, everything is really anchored to that ARR target. So you have to think, where am I today? Let's say, let's use that example that we had. We're going to go 10, 10 million, I want to double

13:24 to 20 million. So I need to build a plan that's going to get my company from 10 million in ARR to 20 million in ARR. And then all of these inputs are going to have massive effects in the performance that we expect, and then the new business that we need to bring in and pipeline we need to build. So next, let's take a look at annual net retention. You could break this out if you wanted to between expansion and contraction, but for simplicity, let's just say, hey, net of churn and expansions, and upgrades and downgrades, the net of it, our customer base, we actually anticipate to grow maybe about 10% this year. So that's

14:06 going to actually take a little bit of relief off of the new business that you need, because you're anticipating that existing book to grow. Now, a couple other inputs that are going to be important, these are more funnel metric focused. So huge one is going to be the SQL to close one conversion rate. Once you have a lead, you have a sales qualified lead, at what clip are you bringing those to close one deals? If you're for some benchmarks, because sometimes people don't even have this data. Anywhere from 20 to 25% is a decent benchmark to use if you're mid market enterprise. If you're smaller business, you know, anywhere

14:47The sales-cycle trap

14:47 from a 30 to 40%, you might be able to expect as a conversion rate. But for this case, let's just anticipate a 25% conversion rate, we're going to close a quarter of the SQLs that come in. Okay, next, let's take a look at sale cycle. Great, we built the pipeline, the pipeline is here, how long does this actually take to close? And I'm going to pause right here, because I saw Guillaume smile for this, because nothing, absolutely nothing trips up a growth model more than factoring in your sales cycle. Indeed, indeed, indeed. And very often, there is that kind of magical sense that people

15:27 will close leads that come in within the same months. But if you need to reach a certain number within within, I don't know, the second quarter, but your sales cycle are actually three months, well, those leads despite when you need to generate in January, February, March, otherwise, you're sending your troops on the death march. And I think this is where things get a bit more complicated. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm just gonna shine the red sirens pause here, we'll turn this into a clip after this is the time where it's like you really need to know your sales cycle, and how it's going to impact because I'll show you some

16:04 examples of what we'll do in the performance. But you know, hey, do you close in quarter? That's great. If you can, does it take one quarter, two quarters, all of that's going to impact how much pipeline you need to build earlier on. Okay, next mql, the SQL conversion, how much flow do you need to get the number of SQLs that you need average ACV, this is going to help you get an understanding of logos and number, sometimes number, number of leads or opportunities can be a little bit of directive of how much resource you need. So we'll take a look at that. Then let's take a look at the team you need to go the resources

16:43Team, quota, and ramp-time inputs

16:43 and team you need to go capture this demand and make it happen. So we have customer success capacity, how much can a CSM carry in your world. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower if you're looking for a benchmark. If you're around a 20x CSM cost to carry ratio, you're doing okay. If you can push it higher, great. If you're getting below 15 or nearing 10, then you may have an inefficient CS operation. So I would take a look at that. Next is going to be the quota expectation. And I would actually say there's the quota you assign, and then there's the performance you actually expect. So in this case, I'm going to put the performance

17:28 I actually expect because you're going to over assign quota. And then there's going to be what actually comes in through the door. Okay, another one probably another siren to ring here sales ramp time. A lot of people will think of sales ramp time as when did my salesperson go through training, they went through the pitch boot camp, they know the product, they're ready to hit the field, they're ready to sell. Yes, that's an important component of ramp. But even more important is when is that salesperson building pipeline and closing deals and being fully productive. That's when you have a ramped salesperson. And I put a

18:08 note in here for you, this should not be shorter than your sales cycle. Because the math just doesn't make sense. If it takes a quarter to build pipeline and close it, then you can't have a rep fully performing earlier than that. So take a look at those two to give you some guidance on how to set it up. Average cost per SQL, this will give you a rough idea of your marketing budget, you can get hyper detailed if you have excellent channel and lead attribution metrics set up and you have a system to do this. So you can look at this at the exact channel or lead source level. A lot of companies, especially when they're starting out, can

18:47Aligning the plan: 'which input is wrong?'

18:47 take your overall marketing budget over the opportunities that you created, that's going to give you a rough idea of how big your marketing budget should be. So a lot of nuance there, but for simplicity, I'm gonna leave it there. Throw in some salaries, and then you're ready to take a look at your performance. Now I'm going to pause here, because this is the moment where you align all of this with your executive team. So when they're asking, what does it take to go from 10 million to 20 million, and you tell them, we're gonna need this number of reps, we're gonna need this type of marketing budget, we're gonna need to be able to build

19:23 this amount of pipeline, and they start to challenge and push back. What you do is you go back to your inputs and tell me which one of these inputs is wrong. Do we expect more performance here? Do we expect a better conversion rate? Do we think we can reduce the sales cycle? Do we think we can increase the conversion from MQL to SQL? Where do we feel like we can improve performance on these inputs? Because that's the only conversation we should be having, and then we'll talk about the outputs. So this is super, super important. Usually this takes a few meetings, probably a couple of yelling matches to get alignment on, and

20:02 then you can start looking at your plan. Which one is the one you get the most pushback on when you present that plan, on that structure of a plan? That's a great question. I would say it's not a metric, but a perspective that these metrics should be significantly improving while you're scaling. I think that's the biggest feedback when I would bring this to a CEO. We do this a lean scale. We do growth modeling for our customers, and when we present it, they go, "Well, our SQL to close one was 30% last quarter. Shouldn't we be able to crank it to 40%? We're getting better. We're training better." When you are building the airplane

20:49The efficiency-while-scaling pushback

20:49 while you're flying it, I really, really caution you to also expect your efficiency to increase at the same time. So when you get to a certain destination or certain level of scale, then you can start to increase. But I think the biggest pushback I get is CEOs, founders expect these to be getting better while they're getting bigger. I would caution at least keep it the same. Do you experience the same or is there anything that pokes out to you? For me, the ramp time and the sales cycle is where very often people underestimate how fast you need to build the pipeline and how fast you need to hire your people and how

21:35The year is won in the first 3–4 months

21:35 good your hiring process needs to be. Because if you compound them, actually you realize that the year or the ability to hit the year is almost in the maps within the first three to four months. I see a lot of people focusing on the lead stage of the bow tie, so closed one, expansion, and everything. But those are the inputs that really matter actually. I think you're absolutely right. The timing component is huge. I'll show you what happens over here. Now I have a four quarter plan built out here. We took a swag at, "Hey, how do you want that performance to distribute across the year?" And we said, "Hey, maybe

22:21 it's a little bit more back weighted and we have some ramping to do. We have some building to do." So we'll push it back there. And then this is what your ARR build needs to look like in order to go from 10 to 20. We anticipate the net retention. We're going to have a quarter of a million a year. But again, if I change that, then it changes how much we're expecting and then it increases the number of new business that we need. So I'm going to put that back to 110, take a little bit of pressure off the sales team. Then here's how we anticipate the bookings to come in the door. And then this is the pipeline that we need. So I want

22:57 you to kind of take a look at these numbers real quick. So if we had a shorter sales cycle, let's say we close everything in quarter, that definitely takes a lot of pressure off of the amount of pipeline you need to build. Because the bookings you need here, if we're going to close a quarter, then we can build the pipeline in this quarter and close it. Now if I need to close 2.2 million in Q3, and I have a two quarter sales cycle, that $9 million of pipeline build moves to Q1 now. So now we have to have that built in Q1. So we're able to close 2.2 in Q3. So I think that's a massive difference if you're setting

23:37 up a pipeline target for a CMO for a marketing team. The difference between $9 million and $5.4 million, 54 SQLs versus 90 SQLs, these are dramatic differences just based on moving the sales cycle component. Conversion too. So if we just increase this 25% to 30%, that this is that pipeline you need in Q1 from 90 to 75. But let's say you were off 5% the other way. Now from 90, it's going to go to 113 SQLs. So the importance of the accuracy of these metrics couldn't be highlighted more in how much pipeline you need to build one. All right, I'm going to fly through the rest and hop into another model real quick, and

24:27Reverse-engineering makes targets mathematical

24:27 then we'll wrap up the live demo here. But I think what's really important as we look at this is that very often I see targets of MQLs or pipelines or SQLs being driven by we did X last year, therefore we need to do X plus 30% this year. With this way, it's actually reverse engineering the goal of the company to get to the next stage, and the target of the company becomes mathematical. So you stop arguing about what is the right target of MQLs pipeline, and you move directly to conversation to how do we get there, knowing that it's all connected. Absolutely. And that's why when you're going through this planning, it's so important that

25:14 you get as accurate data as possible here, and you keep the conversation there like Yoma is saying. Just talk about which of these metrics are off and what you expect in one of these, then we can talk about the performance that we need. And also sometimes you may have an opportunity to do better than last year plus. So if you believe in some of this, and depending on how much capital you've raised, of course, you could accelerate this even more. It's not just about hitting achievable targets. We work with companies where they forecasted too low, and now they're losing opportunities

25:51 because they don't have enough salespeople to convert the demand. They don't have enough CSNs to manage it. So the problem definitely goes both ways. It's an exercise of being accurate, not pushing higher or lower. Okay, so the same thing. You're going to get the MQLs you need, then you'll get the sales team you need. I'm just going to illustrate ramp time too. Yes, if sellers can ramp immediately, then maybe you only need six reps in Q1. But since it's going to take two quarters, we should probably hire 11 reps in Q1. So that way they're ramped in time for the bookings target that we have coming up in the next couple quarters.

26:30Multi-segment models and planning two years out

26:30 And then you can start to assess your costs and go through that. So that's a simple model. This is like a one segment, one year, one dimensional, but this'll get the juices flowing. I'm going to flash up just another example, just so you have an idea of what it might look like. If you have an enterprise segment and maybe a mid market segment, then essentially all you're doing is a bunch of mini growth models, and then you're adding them all up. Because your funnel metrics are going to look different, like your sales cycle and enterprise might be three quarters, your sales cycle, and your mid marketer SMB might be one, you

27:08 might be able to ramp up this part of the team faster. There's a lot of factors that can change depending on what segment you're talking about, even regionally as well. Hey, maybe you have a team in Europe or EMEA, an APAC team, maybe funnel metrics look a little different in different geographies. And then the other thing I want to caution or just stress, I know you can only plan so far ahead in the future, but I would have an idea at least two years into the future, because a lot of what you're going to be planning for in 2026 depends on what you want to do in 2027. Because the back half of 2026, you're likely going to need to start ramping for

27:54Q&A: pipeline coverage

27:54 the 2027 plan. So that way you can stack what your ARR build and growth will look like from year to year, and then make sure you're not underestimating the amount of investments you need to make next year. We have a question from the chat. Nicholas is asking, "What pipeline coverage do you recommend?" Yeah, great question. I would point you back to what your conversion rate is. So I would go see what your 100%. If you're 100% conversion rate, that'd be great. No. Yeah, so I would look there and then I'd add a little bit of a buffer. So let's say, hey, when we pull historically,

28:41 we got 25% conversion rate. Yeah, a 4x coverage is going to be healthy. A 5x coverage is going to help you sleep at night. So basically, your pipeline coverage depends heavily on your conversion rate, your win rate. So if your conversion rate, by the way, is way too low, let's say at 10%, that means that you need to get a pipeline of 10x, your revenue goal. So it's also an adjustment that we can discuss at a strategic level with the CRO, the CEO, the CFO saying, well, before we throw more SDRs on generating pipeline, maybe we need to fix the conversion rate so that we balance the right amount of pipeline and the right amount of targets.

29:24 Absolutely. And Nicholas, if you don't have this data, sometimes you just haven't had a chance to collect it. I'll throw out some, you can put some benchmarks in. It's okay to put placeholders. Nobody has perfect data. So it's just about getting as close as you can to the truth. If you're kind of a SMB smaller, let's say sub 50k ACV deals, then maybe like a 3 to 4x coverage if you're enterprise anywhere from a 5 to 10x coverage. All right, Anthony, thank you so much for showing the model. I think it gives you an idea of the things that you can build in order to really reverse engineer that macro goal

30:14Budget and unit economics: count every cost

30:14 that the company has asked you to deliver on with assumptions and things that need to happen in the business. So if you want to download again, that templates, feel free to pull your phones up and scan that QR codes. We're going to be sharing, of course, also the presentation for the attendees. So you'll be able to look at it as well. So now I want to get to the other piece of the conversation. So we've been understanding how to reverse engineer again, that 3x or 2x growth goal into things that are attainable at the top of the funnel. But it only matters if it's within the right parameters. And by

30:55 parameters, I mean budget and unit economics. So the first thing you really need to build after you have that plan, that kind of makes sense. It's to understand how much it's going to cost. And I see very, very often a lot of mistakes being made at that stage because people don't take all the costs into the equation. And that's where very often the CFO starts to push back. So what do we mean by all sales and marketing costs? Well, it's the cost of your people, not just the cost of acquiring leads through ads. So the cost of your people includes both the people who are producing pipeline and producing closed one and so on,

31:35 but also all the teams that are helping around those. So if you have a team of sales engineer, they should be factored in. If you have a team of technical sales, they should be factored in. If you have no customer success with different layers, account management, all those costs that you will see on the profit and loss of your P&L, sorry, on the lines in line in your profit and loss, you need to find a way to trickle them back into your model. So people, marketing acquisition costs, and also all the other custom expenses that you can have like computer, potentially allocation of square meters and so on and so on. And once you have

32:11 that, then from the investment and growth, you can balance it with the budget and calculate your unique economies. And unique economies are very important, especially when you talk to the boards. Okay. For those who really want to go deep into that topic, we have built at Vasco a board meeting playbook and template so you can scan it and go through that. I will not go in very much detail. I will more stay on topic into widest matter in the planning exercise. Very briefly, what are the typical unit economics that you see in a SaaS business? Well the 10 ones that I almost see every time is net growth rates, lifetime value of customer,

32:52 acquisition costs, CAC payback, LTV of a CAC, net revenue retention, which is what we saw in the model. It's your expansion minus your churn. How much can you grow with your existing customers? Gross revenue retention, which is basically one minus your churn rate. So how sticky are your existing customers? And then efficiency metrics like ARR per employee, sales cycles and conversion rates, and the magic number, which basically tells you by dollar of sales and marketing expenses, how many dollars can I generate of new AR, net new AR. Okay. So those are ballpark, like the typical unit economics that you'll find

33:31Why the board rejects your plan

33:31 in SaaS. Now put yourself in the shoes of the CEO and the CFO because we always see the process as being you build a plan, you show that plan, it feels it's grounded in reality and then you go into that term all of selling that plan and you don't understand why people don't go into details as much as you do. And then just push it back without giving you concrete sometimes answers on very detailed elements that you should add or remove. That's because in the process, most people forget that your CEO and your CFO, they have a boss and that boss is called the board. And very often the board is composed of the

34:15 investors who've injected money in the company with the expectation of certain results. And he has the CFO and the CEO, they are part of the board, but the other members are your investors, right? So when you build that plan, of course, the CEO and the CFO will look at it and we'll have a view, but when they present it to the board, they will never go into details because what the investors will look at are not the sum of all the little initiative and changes and drivers. And so they will look at the unique economics balanced with the growth that you propose in order to find whether ballpark or not, you are within the right

34:52 parameters for you to graduate to the next phase of your growth. And if you don't pass that stress test, then the CEO and the CFO have the plan rejected to the board. So very often they push you back because they know this is a plan they can't sell to the investors. And this is where you can actually shine. You can shine by getting the right balance of growth and you need economics because in the end, this is what will help you graduate to the next round of financing from a market's perspective. If you're a seed company and you need to get to series A, this is what a series A company needs to have in terms

35:32 of metrics. This is what a series B company needs to have in metrics. And if your plan doesn't support that, it might be the best plan in the world. It's a plan that's going to be rejected because it's a plan that's going to condemn the company. But it's also your opportunity for you in RevOps to become strategic because if you understand that language of the board, then you can talk that language to the CEO and the CFO and you can have really a seat at the table that is way different. And for the CEOs out there and the founders, making the unit economics language also builds trust with the board because you speak the

36:07Graduating to the next round: the metrics that matter

36:07 language of the investors. They want to know if you understand the game you're playing. So let me give you a concrete example. You're a seed company and you want to get to a series A milestone. Well, first ask what are the metrics that the board and the investors are looking at so that you can graduate to series A. So in this example, we're so well, you need to reach $2 million of AR within the next 18 months. So that means you need to get a growth rate above 100% because $2 million in five years. It's not a VC play. It's not a PE play, private equity play. So you need to get a certain velocity to get to those

36:44 $2 million. But also the investor want to make sure you acquire customer in a way that is scalable. So they want to see your customer acquisition cost payback to be lower than 18 months. They want to make sure that actually your product is sticky so that when you graduate and you move to the next phase, you're not losing so much customer that it's impossible to go from. So they're going to ask some kind of gross revenue retention around 85% and you go on and on and on. Of course, you're never perfect, but you understand the kind of metrics that you plan or the bound that you plan needs to pass so that it's not rejected

37:19 by the investors. And then it goes back to the organization and you have that term all again and again. So once you build that and you have your plan that Anthony has shown, then compile those unit economics and show them. And this is a format that you can use where you see all of them and how they're growing and performing months over months. You'll see that there's going to be quite a lot of volatility around those because as you invest, they degrade as you divest, or you see the investments starting to produce some ROI, they improve. What you're looking at is not the perfect thing. You're looking

37:51 to a trend that grows you through the right unit economics. Bonus points if you want to become strategic, try to get those unit economics split at the channel level because channel speaks resource allocation. You're going to realize that there's going to be a lot of pressure to grow the unit economics, but also to grow the top line. And both are conflicting because you want to spend more to grow more and they're asking you to spend less to grow in a certain way. So what you can do is kind of balance and benchmark your different channels and say, "Well, we're going to reallocate some resources from outbound to partnership

38:30Channel-level economics and benchmarking

38:30 and inbound because they produce better unit economics. So we're going to spend less to get the same result in the end." And of course, you need to think about how many leads you can acquire. So you need to make sure that you diversify your channel at a certain period of time. But that's a way for you to be very strategic with the CFO and the CEO by proposing resource allocation based on data. An amazing way for you also to defend the plan when you talk to people within your organization, the CFO, or even as a founder to the board, is to anchor that plan or to stress test that plan within benchmarks. And what is great

39:10 here is that there are a lot of benchmarks that VCs and PE publish everywhere. Here we have a periodic table that is being published and refreshed every year by Insightspot now. And you can see clear brackets to which for Insightspot now, great looks like. So here they say, "Well, when you're within 10 to 100 million of ARR, typically your win rate should be 30% and if you were to click there, they have different levels based on your typical deal size. But if your plan has a 60% win rate, then that means probably that you're being too optimistic or that you're not bringing enough velocity. On the other side, if it's

39:51 10%, you can argue, "Well, maybe we have a problem here. Maybe this is a driver that we need to focus more on to get more efficiency." Same thing, we're setting up quota. If you give a quota of 2 million to a rep, you're paying 100k. It means that maybe you're living in a delusion, right? But if someone tells you, "I want to be paid 200k to bring, I don't know, 400k of ARR per year," that's a 2x quota to OT ratio, which means that they're only bringing twice what the cost the organization and that's way below the benchmark. Then you can come back and say, "Well, we can't do that because that's not sustainable because

40:27 the market typically insists on having a quota to OT ratio of 4 to 5x." So they are amazing. Those benchmarks are depersonalizing the conversation on you and the person, but more putting it to what the market says great look like. I encourage you as well to look at those benchmarks from a conversion metrics perspective. We have some benchmarks that we can share with you. Based on your deal size, what is a good rate for lead to MQL, MQL to SQL, SQL to SEL? That is a great win rate. When you put your assumptions in that model and you're being challenged or you want to challenge the assumption, then you can refer to those in order to bring

41:13 a little bit more weight into the arguments. For those who want, you can scan that QR code. We've actually compiled all those benchmarks and assembled them into a spreadsheet that we believe gives a very nice sense of reality so you can access those and use them in your planning season. They're going to be a great way for you to have kind of a point to put your first assumptions to your model, but also defend it or challenge it to the rest of the organization. Now, I want to touch on something very important. We've talked about unit economics, but you have to invest in SaaS before you get the results. You hire

41:56Grow into your unit economics

41:56 your reps now, but the produce results afterwards. You spend in marketing now and the hope that the revenue is going to come afterwards. It's normal that as you invest more, you see your unit economics degrade naturally. What you really want to see is not a perfect line of unit economics that is green all the way through your plan. You want to grow progressively into those unit economics that the board want to see. You want to build a plan that is going to show a path to getting to the milestones, not something that is always perfect and always on every quarter because that doesn't exist and nobody is expecting that. We've understood

42:38Scenario modeling and reporting to plan live

42:38 the importance of unit economics. Why they matter and how the investors and the board are going to be looking at your plan from a macro perspective. Now, of course, what you will want afterwards is to build that cadence. That comes with scenario modeling and then also reporting to plan. The scenario modeling is really making sure that you have the main plan, but instead of every time spinning out a new spreadsheet in order to change the plan, and this is where I really encourage you actually to try to put the systems and the infrastructure in place, is to build scenarios in order to understand

43:15 various variation and sensitivity analysis of the inputs that you have. If you build that cadence, then as you reformcast, it's going to be a little less of a hell and it's going to be a little more easy and fast to adjust based on reality. Also, what you absolutely need to do is to have a cadence where you report to plan almost live. There is nothing worse than having that plan on a spreadsheet that sits on the side and then you reopen it at the end of the quarter, see whether you hit or not, and then go through again a reformcasting hell that takes you six to eight weeks, becomes live after the beginning

43:53 of the next quarter, and is already obsolete as you close the next quarter. So building that cadence, it's what's going to align the entire company around the plan that you've built, but also align everyone's understanding of what's working and what's not working, so that reformcasting becomes a breeze. This is where we encourage you to really move away from spreadsheet misery and potentially equip yourself with the right tools and software in order to automate this. Live progress to target. So you want to have some kind of live dashboards that from the plan that you've sold to the board and that you've agreed upon with the executive, you're

44:34 measuring progress to target almost every day, if possible, live. And that becomes the single source of truth that your company operates on. And when this happens, everybody starts to get a common understanding of what's working and what's not working. Do we have a problem of MQLs from marketing? Do we have a problem of close rate? Where are the bottlenecks? So when comes time to actually adjust, move away allocation from a certain channel to another, everybody already has a common understanding of the bottlenecks and the leakages. And you don't have to go through the end of the quarter and the beginning of the next one to trial

45:13 to align again everyone on what truth is because they've seen it for the previous quarter. Building that operating guidance of live progress to target is absolutely essential and you'll see if you implement that with your organization, the alignment that it gives is just phenomenal. Bonus points, if you can split that between your core business and your new bets, that's what Anthony has kind of shown in the model is then we've seen one layer, but it's more complex version where you have the core business that you forecast and then you have the various bets. You decide to enter another market. You decide to go up markets and try to get

45:50Core business vs. new bets

45:50 enterprise deals and so on and so on. Well, as you have those new bets that you're building up, well, they're not going to work instantly. If you go up market and you try to go enterprise and you wear SMB, it's going to take time before you get a credibility of your brand. And up market typically means lower conversion rates, win rates and longer sales cycle. If you aggregate everything together, well, at the macro level, the board is going to say, well, we have a problem. Conversion rates are going down and sales cycle are going up. What's happening? Stop, stop, stop, change everything and so on. But if you split and

46:30 you say, no, no, no, on the core business, everything's running well. We're on the green. But on the new bets, we have some of them that are paying off, some of them that are re refining and some of them that are not working. Then decision making process becomes much more rational and the board and the executive feel that they're in control because they understand where to scale, where to accelerate and where to divest rather than put everything in jeopardy and put the entire revenue engine to a halt because they don't know what's happening. So splitting in the right motions is essential. A little trick that we have is if you really

47:07 want to get the alignment that there is a kind of a forcing function that you can do, which is sending a sales tracker every day. It's a simple email that shows progress to target to everyone leadership included in the company. And when that happens, they see an email that is measuring what the company is looking at in terms of performance and that has a tendency to be kind of a gravitational pull where everyone has the same understanding of what's happening within the company. Are we having enough leads? Where do they come from the MQR and so on and so on. And it's very hard to impose a single source of truth

47:451% better every day compounds

47:45 in most organizations. This is a way for you to get there because that email is read by the CEO, the CFO and the CRO. So everybody's going to be willing to work on your data set and not the one that they've compiled on the side because they're going to know that this email is how the performance is going to be measured on a daily basis. So a little tip to implement this. And finally, Anthony, I'm always hearing silver bullets, the thing that we did that changed the trajectory of the company, the thing that we did and then we went from zero to X. The reality is that once you build the real revenue engine and the

48:22 metric model, it's all the little improvement that compound every day that have a magnifying impact on your growth. And it's easier to talk about the great things that you've done and that we're kind of, you know, mini silver bullet. But the real, real, real lift is when you get one percent better every day. And one percent better every day is a 37 X growth at the end of the year. And one percent worth is 97 percent loss. So it's really about building that engine and trying to fix, improve a little bit of a better messaging, a little bit of a better coverage, a little bit of a better demo. And you realize that those improvements,

49:01 the compound and from something that sounds impossible, three X of growth, it's not to become inevitable. So yeah, because in companies, basically rev ups like Anthony, our goal is to help you make your growth predictable, fast and efficient. And I think that's the jobs to be done of rev ups in the world. So with this, we're going to be opening up to Q&A. You have the QR code to download the guides, but hopefully you found a few useful frameworks and tips that you can use during planning sessions so that it's a little bit less of a hell than you used to be in the past. Yeah. And while some of the questions are coming

49:48Closing: no growth hacks; visibility wins fundraises

49:48 in, couldn't agree more with the one percent better every day, there are no growth hacks. There's no, I haven't seen it at least. And I've seen some really successful companies go through all those phases. It's showing up every day, pouring a hot cup of coffee, getting to work and making things better and being intentional. And the one thing I'd also add to is don't underestimate the power of having all of this buttoned up when you go through a fundraising or exit process. The sheer fact that you have this level of visibility and intentionality and how you're growing could mean a tremendous amount on your valuation

50:30 and the type of investors you can attract and the type of exit you could have. So just the visibility alone has tremendous value. It builds trust and we've been sitting in many board meetings and being advisor to so many companies and very often the board doesn't expect you to be perfect. But if you don't have the answers, this is where trust start to erode and this is where it becomes more complex. If you come equipped with the right data and the right answer, you build that trust with the board and you can continue operating in a much more smooth way. We have a question from John, not directly related

51:13Q&A: automating CRM data entry

51:13 to planning, but have you seen any good ways to make CRM data entry easier or more automatic so sales actually does it? I could probably take that one. Since LeanScale, we're involved in really managing the entire revenue tech stack. One is just making your CRM cleaner, more intentional, giving guidance. Sometimes you have 20,000 mandatory fields and it makes it difficult. So try to trim down to get the most efficient ones. And then there are a few tools out there. Epstein is one I can speak to where they will connect your emails, your calendars, so all of that interaction gets automatically logged in your CRM and

52:00 as well as taking your video recordings and then automatically filling in things like Medic or Bant, whatever your qualification is. So that way you know your opportunities or deals are meeting the qualification criteria without your sales team needing to lift a finger and type it all in. So a few other tools and everything, but a couple basics. And that removes a lot of judgment calls and becomes much more systematic. So yeah, great advice. There's a question from Monica. How do you build a culture where reps and marketers own their numbers instead of seeing plans target as just a RevOps thing? Do you notice

52:39Q&A: building a culture of accountability

52:39 a big change in accountability with the live reporting view? I do see a lot of accountability that rises up the minute you have that live view and that live view is distributed every single day to the leaders of the organization. Because then there is that forcing function where the numbers are updated every single day and your performance is being measured on those numbers and viewed by the entire organization. So surfacing the numbers by itself creates a lot of accountability and it also removes the ability from people within the organization to assemble the data that's going to make them look good. We've all seen

53:23 that a lot of time you have sales marketing and customer success coming with different data that tells a completely different story. And this is where when you run into QBR or WBR, you spend more time arguing about the data rather than what to do about it. That sales tracker, that daily digest of progress to target is really a forcing function that works very cool in order to align everyone on this. And then you as RevOps, you don't become the enemy. The email is the enemy. You're there to help them make the numbers better and that kind of changes the narrative. Yeah, I can't say how many times I've been

53:58 in a meeting where you show a pipeline number or something, because that number is not right. That one's wrong because you're only looking at the data maybe once a month or something. Absolutely. Getting in that daily rhythm, daily habit, then you're cleaning the data every day as you go. It's huge. And yes, Monica, you're asking the question that feature is available in Vasco. And just to give you a little fun fact, daily emails, like you know how many emails people receive every day, the feature of daily emails progress to target the open rate in our companies that

54:34Wrap-up

54:34 are using Vasco is 85%. So the open rate of an email received every day is 85%. That kind of gives you an idea about how, you know, a forcing function this becomes in the organization. All right. I think we are at time. Anthony, thank you so much. I think it was a session packed with a lot of content. And I hope it was useful for everyone. Do you have any concluding knocks? Anthony, I just appreciate the time and can't emphasize enough doing the growth model, basing it in your unit economics and making sure you have a good understanding of how you're going to achieve a company's goals. I can't tell you what that can also

55:19 do to your culture, your team, and everybody's there to win. And this is such an important component of that. So, and I really appreciate everything you all are doing at Vasco to give a home and a platform for arguably one of the most important aspects of the business to live in. I'm really, really excited about all the features and everything you're pumping out too. So thanks for having me and thanks for everything that you do.