BC Startup Sales Podcast – Building Your SaaS Dashboard with David Appel (Sage Intacct)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted David Appel, Head of the SaaS Vertical at Sage Intacct, to discuss “Building Your SaaS Dashboard.” Sage Intacct is a provider of cloud financial management and accounting applications. Resulting from Sage’s acquisition of Intacct in mid-2017, the company serves thousands of businesses in growth and enterprise markets. With ~$100MM in ARR and growing 30%+ year-over-year, Sage Intacct is an emerging SaaS market leader with decades of experience helping businesses understand their goals and metrics.

David Appel is Head of the SaaS Vertical at Sage Intacct, where he oversees Product, Marketing, Sales, and Implementation for the Company’s largest vertical. Prior to Sage Intacct, David served as the Head of Direct Sales at Bill.com, where he grew business by 85% and tripled the team over his 18-month tenure. Previously, he held various sales leadership roles at leading software companies including NetSuite, IBM and Oracle. Having spent over 10 years as a startup sales advisor, David has helped many founders think about their own SaaS dashboards directly.

Here at the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast, we’ve hosted at least 10 episodes around the topic of SaaS metrics over the years. But understanding the various metrics is only half the battle. Today we discuss the other half: choosing the right ones for your business, understanding where should be on each, and organizing your tracking efforts in to an actionable SaaS dashboard. David begins by walking us through the major categories of KPIs you’ll think want to think about as a startup leader. We bring some context to these metrics by then walking through real-world growth companies and their numbers for each, from deep enterprise to high-volume examples. We then explain how to build your SaaS dashboard by picking measures commensurate with your stage and what you are trying to prove, be it product fit, scalability in the market, or financial soundness. Finally, David also shares some insight into the tools his clients use for SaaS dashboard exercise, Sage Intacct and otherwise. You can find a presentation that David was kind enough to share with us on this topic embedded below; it provides visuals fleshing out many of the talking points covered in our show today. We hope these resources combined will serve as a helpful guide on performance management planning for SaaS leaders at any stage.

If you liked “Building Your SaaS Dashboard” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!

For the full deck, check out Building your SaaS Dashboard.