The Essential SaaS Implementation Startup KPI tracker (download included)

Congrats! Your sales team has started to close deals, and now you are getting your team staffed and ready to get your customers onboarded. The first part of that stage is implementation. How will you track your team's performance? How will Finance know when it is ok to send that first monthly invoice? How will you know when your customers are at risk and are becoming churn risks?

Going through my search logs, you are not the only person that has these questions.  I have put together a list of the essential KPI's and data points that your implementation team needs to track. I have created a simple spreadsheet here-

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Note- these are not CSM KPI's, so there is no talk of churn or net revenue retention. That being said, Retention starts in Implementation. Start paying attention to these KPI's now so you won't be in a bad spot later.

Here is an actionable list that should be reviewed weekly with your team. You should have a weekly invite and have all of your CSM's there. If you are early stage and have roadmap dependencies or custom work from Product needing to be done, you will need to make sure that you have someone from your Product and possibly Development teams.

Basic/Table-stakes KPI's

Customer Name - I am hoping no description is needed here....

CSM/Implementation Manager - Unless you are using a pooled CSM model, list the CSM's name for each customer.

Status - Red, Green, Yellow. No orange, no magenta. This needs to be filled out the day before the meeting occurs. Red customers should always be discussed first, and then yellow.

ACV - Whether we like to admit it or not, we have to always work on the most important things first. Sometimes, you need ACV to know which is the most important. If you have one customer on fire and their ACV is 5k, and another is 100k, the answer should be pretty clear

Implementation Fee - You are charging an implementation fee, correct? If not, please read this article. I like to have this number here to use for calculations like Project Profitability.

Kickoff date- Every project should have a kickoff date. It's important to also mark them if the kickoff is in the future. If a customer has not shown up to their kickoff, or has requested a delay, you will note that here as well.

Project Launch Date- Another essential data point. During your kickoff, you should have documented the desired kickoff date. I am writing in the IPOP article, having this defined during pre-sales will help keep your customers engaged.

Actual Launch Date - I am going to break some terrible news to you. Sometimes a customer doesn't launch on the actual date that everyone wanted. So why keep track of the 2? The reason is that you need to be able to remind everyone involved that the actual date was X, and now you are looking at Z. Sometimes this date is 6-8 months apart. Whether the root cause is internal or external, this is an important data point to track

Current Duration - The reason for this is to quickly be able to scan the list of projects and to see the longest implementations (tip - long durations are usually also "Red" for status). Having lots of long-duration projects can identify trends. Do certain customer types need longer than the standard duration? Now that you have more features, does the standard duration need to be extended?

Next QBR - Every customer should be having a QBR (hence the "quarterly") every 90 days. This applies to customers that are still in implementation. Why? Because this is a perfect time to get your customer out of the tactical day-to-day project cadence and to start looking at the accomplishments over the last 90 days. This can also be a meeting where 360 constructive criticism is discussed. Get to any issues early, and don't let them bottle up (on all sides).

Risks - add things in here like "roadmap dependencies", "customer hasn't shown up to the last 2 meetings", and "he's too busy so his daughter is going to jump in" (true story).

Bonus KPIs: (These are not critical, but I find them useful)

Number of users - If you are part of a SaaS company that sells by seats, this can be an important number. How many total users are being launched? Are they being launched in phases?

Hours used - This is a critical data point for startups. If you have been charging 5k for implementations, but your implementations consistently go over 30 hours, you are most likely paying your customers to do their implementations. As a startup, the hours used help guide you to see the level of effort it takes to implement a customer. It also helps pay for your implementation team.

As your company matures, you may be able to start making a profit off of this phase.

A quick and easy tool like Harvest is usually what I recommend to keep track of time.

Project Profitability - As I mentioned above, knowing if your project is profitable is a data point that is very good to know. Even if you are completely underwater on a project, I have found that showing this type of number to a customer can show how much you have invested in their success can help with difficult implementations. As you are maturing, your boards will ask these questions as well.

Here is the link to the Tracker that you can make a copy of and use on your own

Did I miss any? Please leave in the comments below. Need help with any of this? Grab some time on my calendar and I would be happy to chat.