An approach to measuring how efficiently your go-to-market and R&D investments work together to drive growth
Most efficiency metrics look at one lever at a time. CAC payback measures go-to-market, Magic Number measures sales productivity, Rule of 40 measures growth against profitability. None of them tells you whether your product and sales investments are succeeding together.
This playbook lays out a model that does, with benchmarks from 11 public SaaS companies and OPEXEngine's private-company database so you can see where your own number lands. Authored by Brian Weisberg, former VP of Business Operations and Strategic Finance at Mux, with Katherine Zhang, CEO of OPEXEngine by Bain & Company.
What You’ll Discover Inside:
- The model, with the math. How to spread GTM and R&D spend across the quarters that actually produced the revenue, plus a worked example.
- Benchmarks from real companies. Four performance tiers, from above $1.20 to under $0.60, with named public companies at each level.
- The $1.00 threshold. Why a ratio below $1.00 turns retention into a financing decision.
- How to read your own number. What each band means, and how to adjust the model for your sales cycle.
- Where this fits. A direct comparison to CAC payback, Magic Number, and Rule of 40.