Your Series B board deck tells a story about whether your business compounds. VCs at this stage aren’t evaluating product-market fit — they’re evaluating the economics of scaling. The metrics that matter most are retention metrics: NRR, churn, GRR, cohort retention, and customer health. Get these right and you control the fundraising narrative. Get them wrong and an investor’s analyst will find the gaps during diligence.
This guide covers what to present, how to calculate it correctly, what VCs actually look for behind the numbers, and how to get board-ready metrics from your existing RevOps stack without hiring a data team.
What VCs Actually Look for in Retention Data
Investors at Series B have seen hundreds of board decks. They’re not impressed by clean dashboards — they’re looking for data integrity, trend direction, and the narrative coherence between your metrics and your growth story.
Cohort Analysis: The First Thing They Check
Cohort retention is the metric VCs use to separate real product-market fit from growth-funded retention. They want to see:
- Improving cohorts over time. If your Q3 2025 cohort retains better at month 6 than your Q1 2025 cohort did at month 6, that’s evidence your product, onboarding, or customer success is getting better. This is the single strongest signal of compounding value.
- Cohort flattening, not declining. Healthy cohorts lose customers early (the first 3–6 months are the highest-risk period) and then flatten. If cohort curves continue declining past month 12, there’s a structural retention problem.
- Expansion within cohorts. The best cohort analysis shows not just retention but expansion. A cohort that starts at $100K MRR and grows to $120K MRR over 12 months tells a much stronger story than one that retains at $95K.
Where it breaks: Most billing-only tools (ChartMogul, Baremetrics, ProfitWell) can show cohort retention by signup month and plan. They cannot segment cohorts by acquisition channel, deal size, product engagement level, or CSM coverage — the dimensions VCs actually ask about during due diligence. These cross-system cohort views require data from billing, CRM, and product analytics in one place.
Gross vs Net Revenue Retention: Both Matter
NRR gets the headlines, but VCs evaluate GRR and NRR together to understand the full picture:
| Metric | What It Reveals | Series B Benchmark | What VCs Worry About |
|---|---|---|---|
| GRR | How leaky is the bucket? Revenue retained before expansion. | 90%+ good, 95%+ exceptional | GRR below 85% means you’re running on a treadmill. Expansion is masking a churn problem. |
| NRR | Does the business compound? Revenue retained plus expansion. | 110%+ strong, 120%+ elite | High NRR with low GRR signals dependency on upsells to a shrinking base. Unsustainable. |
The combination tells the story. GRR at 92% with NRR at 115% says: “We retain well and expand efficiently.” GRR at 80% with NRR at 110% says: “We’re growing, but we’re losing 20% of our base and compensating with aggressive upselling.” VCs will read the second scenario as a risk.
Customer Health Trajectories: The Leading Indicator
Sophisticated Series B investors look beyond lagging retention metrics to leading indicators. They want to know:
- What percentage of your accounts are in “healthy” vs “at-risk” vs “critical” states? This shows whether your current NRR is sustainable or about to decline.
- Is the health distribution improving? If 70% of accounts were healthy 6 months ago and 80% are healthy today, that’s a leading indicator that NRR will improve.
- What signals make up your health score? VCs want to see that health scores are based on behavioural data (product usage, support patterns, engagement quality) — not just survey responses or CSM gut feel.
A customer health score that combines product usage (from Amplitude or Mixpanel), support patterns (from Zendesk or Intercom), billing signals (from Stripe), and relationship data (from Salesforce) is far more defensible than one built on a single source. Building a multi-source health score requires connecting these systems — either through custom engineering or a platform like Eru that handles the integration and entity matching automatically.
The Metrics Your Series B Board Deck Needs
Here are the specific metrics to include, in the order most investors expect to see them:
1. ARR and MRR Composition
What to show: Current ARR with a waterfall breakdown — new business, expansion, contraction, and churn. Show the last 4–6 quarters of the waterfall so the trend is visible.
What VCs check: They’ll compare your ARR against their independent calculation from your billing data. If your deck says $12M ARR and Stripe says $11.4M, you have a credibility problem. The most common cause is revenue drift between billing and CRM — mid-cycle changes, merged accounts, and manual discounts that one system captures and the other doesn’t.
How to get it right: Reconcile billing and CRM data at the account level before calculating ARR. Automated Stripe–Salesforce reconciliation catches the discrepancies that manual processes miss.
2. Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
What to show: Trailing 12-month NRR, plus quarterly NRR trend. Segment by customer tier (enterprise, mid-market, SMB) if the numbers tell different stories.
How to calculate: NRR = (Starting MRR + Expansion − Churn − Contraction) ÷ Starting MRR × 100. The formula is simple. The data quality is where it breaks. Every revenue change needs to be correctly categorised — a customer switching from annual to monthly billing isn’t contraction, and a reactivation after 90 days shouldn’t count as new business. See our step-by-step NRR calculation guide for the edge cases.
What VCs check: They’ll recalculate NRR from your raw data. If your billing system and CRM don’t agree on which accounts expanded, contracted, or churned, the investor will get a different NRR than your deck shows. Cross-system reconciliation is the only way to prevent this.
3. Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)
What to show: Trailing 12-month GRR alongside NRR. The gap between them shows how dependent your growth is on expansion.
What VCs check: GRR is the cleaner metric because it removes the noise of expansion. A declining GRR trend is a red flag even if NRR is holding steady — it means your expansion engine is working harder to compensate for growing churn.
4. Cohort Retention Curves
What to show: Revenue retention by quarterly cohort for the last 6–8 cohorts. Overlay them on a single chart so the improvement (or deterioration) is immediately visible.
What VCs check: Whether later cohorts retain better than earlier ones. They’ll also look for consistency in cohort definitions — if you changed how you define “active” or “churned” mid-way through the period, the curves aren’t comparable.
5. Customer Health Distribution
What to show: Current distribution of accounts by health tier (healthy, at-risk, critical) with the trend over the last 3–4 quarters. Include the methodology — what signals feed the score and how they’re weighted.
What VCs check: Whether the health score is predictive. If you can show that accounts flagged “at-risk” three months ago churned at 3x the rate of “healthy” accounts, that’s evidence your team can see and act on churn signals early. That’s the narrative VCs want.
6. Expansion Rate and Path
What to show: Expansion revenue as a percentage of total new ARR. Include the expansion motion — seat-based growth, cross-sell, upsell to higher tiers, or usage-based expansion.
Series B benchmark: The strongest SaaS companies generate 30–50% of new ARR from expansion. At Series B, demonstrating a repeatable expansion motion is almost as important as demonstrating a repeatable acquisition motion.
7. Burn Multiple
What to show: Net burn divided by net new ARR for the last 4 quarters.
Series B benchmark: Below 2x is good. Below 1.5x is great. Above 3x prompts questions about unit economics. This metric has become the default efficiency measure for growth-stage investors.
How to Get Board-Ready Metrics from Your RevOps Stack
Most Series B founders produce board metrics by exporting data from multiple tools, reconciling in spreadsheets, and hoping the numbers hold up. This works until it doesn’t — usually during due diligence when an investor’s analyst finds discrepancies you didn’t know existed.
There are three approaches to getting board-ready metrics, depending on your resources:
Billing Analytics Tools (ChartMogul, Baremetrics, ProfitWell)
What they do: Connect to your billing system (Stripe, Chargebee, Recurly) and calculate MRR, NRR, churn, LTV, and cohort metrics automatically.
Strengths: Fast setup (minutes), clean dashboards, and accurate metrics from billing data. ChartMogul is the most capable, supporting multiple billing sources with granular segmentation.
Limitation: They only see billing data. If your CRM tells a different revenue story than your billing system (it will), these tools won’t catch the gap. During due diligence, investors cross-check billing against CRM — and discrepancies of 3–8% are typical for SaaS companies that haven’t reconciled their systems. For a detailed comparison, see ChartMogul vs Baremetrics vs ProfitWell vs Eru for board reporting.
Customer Success Platforms (Gainsight, ChurnZero)
What they do: Health scoring, CS workflow automation, and retention analytics. Gainsight is the enterprise standard; ChurnZero is lighter-weight for mid-market.
Strengths: Strong health scoring and playbook automation for CS teams. Good at the operational side of retention — ensuring CSMs act on at-risk accounts.
Limitation: CSPs are workflow tools, not data reconciliation tools. They require data to be pushed into them from external systems. They don’t natively reconcile Stripe against Salesforce, don’t detect revenue drift, and typically need 6–12 weeks (Gainsight) or 2–4 weeks (ChurnZero) of implementation. For board metrics specifically, a CSP alone doesn’t solve the data integrity problem. See our NRR and RevOps tools comparison for more detail.
Revenue Intelligence Platform (Eru)
What it does: Eru connects billing, CRM, support, and product analytics systems and reconciles data across them. It produces NRR, GRR, cohort analysis, customer health scores, and revenue composition — all from reconciled cross-system data with an audit trail.
Strengths: The metrics it produces are pre-reconciled. Your board deck NRR is the same number an investor would calculate from a full data room because it’s built from the same cross-system view. Setup takes minutes via OAuth — no engineering, no implementation partner, no 12-week onboarding.
Where Eru fits: Eru is the connective layer between your existing tools. It doesn’t replace your billing system, CRM, or CS platform — it connects them so the data agrees. For Series B founders who need board-ready metrics without building a data team, Eru produces the numbers directly. For teams with an existing CSP, Eru solves the data reconciliation gap that CSPs don’t address.
Common Board Deck Mistakes at Series B
Presenting NRR without GRR
NRR alone hides churn behind expansion. If you show 115% NRR without GRR, the first question from a sophisticated investor will be “what’s your gross retention?” If the answer is 82%, the story changes from “strong retention” to “significant churn offset by expansion.” Present both upfront.
Using different definitions across slides
If your churn slide uses one definition (e.g., billing cancellations) and your NRR slide uses another (e.g., CRM opportunity status), the numbers won’t reconcile. Investors will notice. Use a single, documented methodology across all retention metrics.
Showing a health score without validation
A health score is only useful if it’s predictive. If you show a health distribution without evidence that “at-risk” accounts actually churn at higher rates, VCs will treat it as decoration. Include a simple validation: “Accounts flagged at-risk in Q3 churned at 22%, vs 4% for healthy accounts.”
Not reconciling billing and CRM before due diligence
This is the most expensive mistake. If your Stripe data shows $12M ARR and your Salesforce data implies $11.1M, that $900K gap will dominate the diligence conversation. The fix is reconciliation before diligence starts — either manually (budget 2–5 days per month) or with automated reconciliation tooling.
Building the Board Deck Narrative
The metrics tell a story. At Series B, that story should answer three questions:
- “Does this business compound?” Answer with NRR and expansion rate. Show that existing customers generate increasing revenue over time.
- “Is retention getting better?” Answer with cohort curves and health score trends. Show that newer customers retain better than older ones, and that your leading indicators are improving.
- “Can we trust these numbers?” Answer with your methodology. Show that metrics are reconciled across systems, that you know where discrepancies exist, and that you have an audit trail. This is the slide most founders skip and the one that builds the most confidence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What metrics do VCs want for Series B due diligence?
For Series B due diligence, VCs focus on five core metrics: net revenue retention (NRR) above 110%, gross revenue retention (GRR) above 90%, improving cohort retention curves, burn multiple below 2x, and expansion revenue as a percentage of new ARR. Investors will independently verify these numbers by cross-checking your billing data against your CRM — so the metrics need to be reconciled across systems, not just pulled from a single dashboard.
How do you calculate NRR for a board presentation?
NRR = (Starting MRR + Expansion − Churn − Contraction) ÷ Starting MRR × 100. For a board presentation, clearly state your cohort period, how you categorise each type of MRR movement, and which data sources feed the calculation. Reconcile between billing and CRM so your number matches what an investor would calculate independently. Present trailing 12-month NRR plus the quarterly trend.
What tools help automate board reporting?
Billing analytics (ChartMogul, Baremetrics, ProfitWell) calculate SaaS metrics from billing data — fast to set up but limited to a single source. Customer success platforms (Gainsight, ChurnZero) provide health scoring and retention workflows but require significant implementation. Revenue intelligence platforms like Eru connect billing, CRM, support, and product data to produce reconciled board metrics with an audit trail. For Series B, the key requirement is cross-system reconciliation.
How important is gross revenue retention vs net revenue retention for Series B?
Both matter, and VCs evaluate them together. GRR reveals how leaky the bucket is before expansion fills it back up. NRR shows whether the business compounds. GRR below 85% with high NRR signals that expansion is masking a churn problem — a pattern that experienced investors recognise and flag as risk. Present both metrics alongside each other in your board deck.
Related reading: How to Prepare Revenue Metrics for Due Diligence (Series A–C) — the complete checklist for making your data room investor-ready. The RevOps Tech Stack Audit: What to Fix Before You Scale — assess your revenue operations infrastructure before fundraising.
See what your board metrics look like when billing, CRM, and product data are reconciled. Book a free revenue audit — we’ll show you where your numbers diverge and what it means for your reported NRR.
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