Quick:
- How big is the Acme deal? $250K.
- What’s Joe’s forecast for the quarter? $500K
- What’s the number this year? Duh. $7,500K.
Awesome. By the way: $250K what? $500K what? $7,500K what? ARR, ACV, bookings, TCV, new ARR, net new ARR, committed ARR, contracted ARR, terminal ARR, or something else?
Defining those terms isn’t the point of this post, so see note [1] below if interested.
The point is that these ambiguous, unitless conversations happen all the time in enterprise software companies. This isn’t a post about confusion; the vast majority of the time, everyone understands exactly what is being said. What those implicit units really tell you about is culture.
Since there can be only one lead metric, every company, typically silently, decides what it is. And what you pick says a lot about what you’re focused on.
- New ARR means you’re focused on sales adding water to the SaaS leaky bucket — regardless of whether it’s from new or existing customers.
- Net New ARR means you’re focused the change in water level in the SaaS leaky bucket — balancing new sales and churn — and presumably means you hold AEs accountable for both sales and renewals within their patch.
- New Logo ARR means you’re focused on new ARR from new customers. That is, you’re focused on “lands” [2].
- Bookings means you’re focused on cash [3], bringing in dollars regardless of whether they’re from subscription or services, or potentially something else [4].
- TCV, which became a four-letter word after management teams too often conflated it with ARR, is probably still best avoided in polite company. Use RPO for a similar, if not identical, concept.
- Committed ARR usually means somebody important is a fan of Bessemer metrics, and means the company is (as with Net New ARR) focused on new ARR net of actual and projected churn.
- Terminal ARR means you’re focused on the final-year ARR of multi-year contracts, implying you sign contracts with built-in expansion, not a bad idea in an NDR-focused world, I might add.
- Contracted ARR can be a synonym for either committed or terminal ARR, so I’d refer to the appropriate bullet above as the case may be.
While your choice of lead metric certainly affects the calculations of other metrics (a bookings CAC or a terminal-ARR CAC) that’s not today’s point, either. Today’s point is simple. What you pick says a lot about you and what you want your organization focused on.
- What number do you celebrate at the all hands meeting?
- What number do you tell employees is “the number” for the year?
For example, in my opinion:
- A strong sales culture should focus on New ARR. Yes, the CFO and CEO care about Ending ARR and thus Net New ARR, but the job of sales is to fill the bucket. Someone else typically worries about what leaks out.
- A shareholder value culture would focus on Ending ARR, and ergo Net New ARR. After all, the company’s value is typically a linear function of its Ending ARR (with slope determined by growth).
- A strong land-and-expand culture might focus on Terminal ARR, thinking, regardless of precisely when they come in, we have contracts that converge to a given total ARR value over time [5].
- Conversely, a strong land and expand-through-usage culture might focus on New Logo ARR (i.e., “land”), especially if the downstream, usage-based expansion is seen as somewhat automatic [6].
- A cash-focused culture (and I hope you’re bootstrapped) would focus on bookings. Think: we eat what we kill.
This isn’t about a right or wrong answer [7]. It’s about a choice for your organization, and one that likely changes as you scale. It’s about mindfulness in making a subtle choice that actually makes a big statement about what you value.
# # #
Notes
[1] For clarity’s sake, ARR is annual recurring revenue, the annual subscription value. ACV is annual contract value which, while some treat as identical to ARR, others treat as first-year total contract value, i.e., first-year ARR plus year-one services. Bookings is usually used as a proxy for cash and ergo would include any effects of multi-year prepayments, e.g., a two-year, prepaid, $100K/year ARR contract would be $200K in bookings. TCV is total contract value which is typically the total (subscription) value of the contract, e.g., a 3-year deal with an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K would have a $600K, regardless of when the cash payments occurred. New ARR is new ARR from either new customers (often called New Logo ARR) or existing customers (often called Upsell ARR). Net New ARR is new ARR minus churn ARR, e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, adds $2,000K in new ARR and churns $500K, then net new ARR is $1,500K. Committed ARR (as defined by Bessemer who defined the term) is “contracted, but not yet live ARR, plus live ARR netted against known projected ARR churn” (e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, has signed contracts that start within an acceptable time period of $2,000K, takes $200K of expected churn in the period, and knows of $500K of new projected churn upcoming, then their ending committed is ARR is $11,500K. (Why not $11,300K? Because the $200K of expected churn was presumably already in the starting figure.) Terminal ARR the ARR in the last year of the contract, e.g., say a contract has an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K, the terminal ARR is $300K [1A]. Contracted ARR is for companies that have hybrid models (e.g., annual subscription plus usage fee) and includes only the contractually committed recurring revenues and not usage fees.
[1A] Note that it’s not yet clear to me how far Bessemer goes out with “contracted” ARR in their committed ARR definition, but I’m currently guessing they don’t mean three years. Watch this space as I get clarification from them on this issue.
[2] In the sense of land-and-expand.
[3] On the assumptions that bookings is being used as a proxy for cash, which I recommend, but which is not always the case.
[4] e.g., non-recurring engineering; a bad thing to be focused on.
[5] Although if they all do so in different timeframes it becomes less meaningful. Also unless the company has a track record of actually achieving the contractually committed growth figures, it becomes less credible.
[6] Which it never actually is in my experience, but it is a matter of degree.
[7] Though your investors will definitely like some of these choices better than others.
