SaaS Acronyms: The CEO Guide to the Metrics That Move Valuation

Every SaaS founder I work with even­tu­al­ly hits the same wall: a board meet­ing, a banker call, or a dili­gence request where some­one fires off a string of SaaS acronyms — NRR, GRR, CAC pay­back, ARPA, the SaaS Mag­ic Num­ber — and assumes you already share their exact def­i­n­i­tion of each one. You prob­a­bly nod along. Most CEOs do. And that nod is where a sur­pris­ing amount of mon­ey gets lost, because the acronym is the easy part. The def­i­n­i­tion sit­ting under­neath it is what an acquir­er actu­al­ly pays for, or qui­et­ly marks down.

Here is the thing almost no glos­sary tells you: the acronyms change, but the core issues don’t. I start­ed in this indus­try back when we called the whole cat­e­go­ry “ASP” — Appli­ca­tion Ser­vice Provider — not SaaS. The vocab­u­lary has turned over two or three times since. What has nev­er changed is that the busi­ness­es with clean, con­sis­tent­ly-defined met­rics com­mand high­er mul­ti­ples than the ones that can’t tell you, with­out think­ing, which churn for­mu­la they use. So this guide does two jobs. First, it’s a fast, plain-Eng­lish ref­er­ence for the SaaS acronyms a $5M–$15M ARR CEO actu­al­ly needs — grouped so you can find them. Sec­ond, and more impor­tant, it shows you which of these met­rics qui­et­ly deter­mine your val­u­a­tion, and why get­ting the def­i­n­i­tion right mat­ters far more than get­ting the acronym right.

If you just want the lookup table, scroll to the ref­er­ence sec­tion below. If you want to know why a banker once came back to one of my clients with churn num­bers off by 15% — and what that near­ly cost them — read straight through.

The Real Problem Isn’t the Acronyms — It’s the Definitions

Let me start with the most expen­sive mis­un­der­stand­ing in SaaS met­rics, because it reframes every­thing else in this arti­cle.

A glos­sary makes you feel like the work is “learn what the let­ters stand for.” That work takes an after­noon. The work that actu­al­ly mat­ters is mak­ing sure every per­son in your com­pa­ny — and every banker, audi­tor, and acquir­er who looks at your num­bers — cal­cu­lates each met­ric the same way, every time. That is the gold­en rule of SaaS met­rics: a met­ric is only valu­able if the entire orga­ni­za­tion com­putes it using the exact same inputs and time peri­ods. An acronym every­one spells the same but cal­cu­lates dif­fer­ent­ly is worse than no met­ric at all, because it cre­ates false con­fi­dence.

I watched this play out with a client prepar­ing to sell. They had been report­ing their churn num­ber inter­nal­ly for years and felt good about it. Then they hand­ed their data to bankers, who recal­cu­lat­ed churn using the stan­dard the buy-side uses. The num­bers came back off by 15%. Not a round­ing error — a mate­r­i­al gap large enough that a banker could look at the deal and say “their churn is too high, this isn’t one we want to rep­re­sent,” and walk. The scram­ble that fol­lowed was­n’t “what does churn mean?” Every­one knew what churn meant. It was “which for­mu­la are we using, and can we defend it?” That is a def­i­n­i­tion prob­lem wear­ing an acronym’s cloth­ing.

This is why, through­out this guide, you’ll see me flag the met­rics where the def­i­n­i­tion is con­test­ed. Churn, NRR, ACV, book­ings, and CAC are the usu­al sus­pects — each one has two or three legit­i­mate def­i­n­i­tions, and the dif­fer­ence between them can swing your head­line num­bers by dou­ble dig­its. When you’re build­ing toward an exit, you don’t get to dis­cov­er that gap in the dili­gence room. You lock the def­i­n­i­tions down years ear­li­er, write them down, and cal­cu­late them the same way every sin­gle peri­od.

Keep that lens as you read the ref­er­ence tables below. The let­ters are triv­ial. The agree­ment on what they mean is the asset.

The Growth and Revenue Acronyms

These are the acronyms that describe the size and tra­jec­to­ry of your recur­ring-rev­enue book. They are the first num­bers any investor or acquir­er asks for, and the ones your board lives in.

The two you can­not get wrong are MRR and ARR, because every oth­er rev­enue met­ric is built on top of them.

Month­ly Recur­ring Rev­enue (MRR) is the nor­mal­ized month­ly val­ue of your con­tract­ed, recur­ring sub­scrip­tion rev­enue. The word “recur­ring” is doing real work: MRR excludes one-time set­up fees, imple­men­ta­tion charges, and one-off con­sult­ing. If you let those leak into MRR, every met­ric down­stream inher­its the error.

Annu­al Recur­ring Rev­enue (ARR) is sim­ply your cur­rent MRR annu­al­ized — ARR = MRR × 12. The trap here is con­cep­tu­al, not arith­metic: ARR is a snap­shot of your cur­rent run rate, not “the rev­enue we booked over the trail­ing twelve months.” Con­fus­ing ARR with trail­ing rev­enue is one of the fastest ways to lose cred­i­bil­i­ty in a board meet­ing, because the two num­bers can dif­fer sub­stan­tial­ly in a fast-grow­ing or fast-churn­ing busi­ness.

Acronym	Full Name	What It Measures	Common Definition Trap
MRR	Monthly Recurring Revenue	Normalized monthly recurring subscription revenue	Letting one-time fees leak in
ARR	Annual Recurring Revenue	Current MRR annualized (MRR × 12)	Confusing it with trailing-12-month revenue
ARPA / ARPU	Average Revenue Per Account / User	Average recurring revenue per customer	Account-based (B2B) vs. user-based mixing
ACV	Annual Contract Value	Annualized recurring value of one contract	Including vs. excluding one-time fees
TCV	Total Contract Value	Full lifetime value of a contract, including one-time fees	Reporting TCV where ACV was expected
ASP	Average Selling Price	Average value of a newly closed deal	Undefined: first-year, ACV, or TCV?

Aver­age Rev­enue Per Account (ARPA) — some­times writ­ten ARPU for “per user” — tells you how big your aver­age cus­tomer is. Use ARPA for account-based B2B and ARPU for user-based or con­sumer mod­els, and don’t mix the two in the same report. Annu­al Con­tract Val­ue (ACV) is the annu­al­ized recur­ring val­ue of a sin­gle con­tract, usu­al­ly strip­ping out one-time fees, while Total Con­tract Val­ue (TCV) is the whole com­mit­ted val­ue over the con­trac­t’s life, one-time fees includ­ed. Con­fus­ing ACV and TCV is a clas­sic way to make deals look big­ger than they are — which feels good until an acquir­er nor­mal­izes them back down.

If your ARPA, ACV, or ASP def­i­n­i­tions aren’t writ­ten down and enforced, your sales team will opti­mize for whichev­er num­ber makes the quar­ter look best, and you’ll inher­it a report­ing lay­er you can’t defend. The fix is the same every time: pick one def­i­n­i­tion, doc­u­ment it, and audit against it. (For a deep­er treat­ment of how the recur­ring-rev­enue num­bers con­nect to each oth­er, see the annu­al recur­ring rev­enue guide and the break­down of ARR ver­sus report­ed rev­enue.)

The Retention Acronyms — Where Valuation Is Won or Lost

If I could only look at one set of SaaS acronyms before judg­ing a com­pa­ny’s qual­i­ty, it would be these. Reten­tion met­rics are the clos­est thing to a sin­gle-num­ber ver­dict on whether your busi­ness com­pounds or decays — and they are the met­rics most like­ly to be defined incon­sis­tent­ly.

The head­line num­ber is Net Rev­enue Reten­tion (NRR), some­times report­ed as NDR (Net Dol­lar Reten­tion) — same met­ric, dif­fer­ent label. NRR mea­sures how much recur­ring rev­enue you keep from your exist­ing cus­tomer base over a peri­od, after account­ing for churn, con­trac­tion, and expan­sion:

NRR = (Start­ing MRR − Churned MRR − Con­trac­tion MRR + Expan­sion MRR) / Start­ing MRR

NRR can exceed 100%, and when it does, some­thing pow­er­ful hap­pens: your exist­ing cus­tomer base grows on its own, before you sign a sin­gle new logo. An NRR above 100% means your installed base is a growth engine; below 100% means it’s a leaky buck­et you’re refill­ing with expen­sive new acqui­si­tion. This is why NRR is the met­ric that most direct­ly caps — or uncaps — your long-term growth. It’s also a met­ric where the bench­mark depends heav­i­ly on your seg­ment: SaaS Cap­i­tal’s reten­tion research across more than 1,000 pri­vate B2B SaaS com­pa­nies shows medi­an NRR climb­ing from rough­ly 97% for sub-$25K-ACV (SMB) busi­ness­es to around 118% for enter­prise ($100K+ ACV) — the same met­ric, a 20-point spread, dri­ven entire­ly by who you sell to.

Here’s a worked exam­ple so the for­mu­la isn’t abstract. Say you start a month with $100,000 in MRR. Over that month you lose $5,000 to cus­tomers who can­cel (churn), anoth­er $2,000 to cus­tomers who down­grade (con­trac­tion), and you gain $15,000 from exist­ing cus­tomers who expand. Your NRR is:

($100,000 − $5,000 − $2,000 + $15,000) / $100,000 = $108,000 / $100,000 = 108%

That 108% means your exist­ing base grew 8% with­out any new cus­tomers. Com­pound­ed over a few years, the dif­fer­ence between 108% NRR and 95% NRR is the dif­fer­ence between a busi­ness that sells for a pre­mi­um mul­ti­ple and one that strug­gles to find a buy­er.

Its con­ser­v­a­tive sib­ling is Gross Rev­enue Reten­tion (GRR), which uses the same for­mu­la minus the expan­sion term:

GRR = (Start­ing MRR − Churned MRR − Con­trac­tion MRR) / Start­ing MRR

Because GRR ignores expan­sion, it can nev­er exceed 100%. Acquir­ers love GRR pre­cise­ly because it can’t be inflat­ed by upsells — it shows the raw stick­i­ness of your prod­uct. A high NRR built on a low GRR is a warn­ing sign: it means you’re los­ing a lot of cus­tomers but paper­ing over it with aggres­sive expan­sion in the ones who stay.

Acronym	Full Name	Formula Shape	Can Exceed 100%?
NRR / NDR	Net Revenue Retention / Net Dollar Retention	Start − Churn − Contraction + Expansion, over Start	Yes
GRR	Gross Revenue Retention	Start − Churn − Contraction, over Start	No
Logo Churn	Customer / Logo Churn Rate	Customers lost / Customers at start	No (it's a loss rate)

Then there’s churn — the sin­gle most dan­ger­ous word in SaaS report­ing, because it’s ambigu­ous by default. “Churn” can mean logo churn (the per­cent­age of cus­tomer accounts you lost), gross rev­enue churn (the per­cent­age of rev­enue you lost to can­cel­la­tions and down­grades), or net rev­enue churn (rev­enue lost minus rev­enue gained from expan­sion). These are three dif­fer­ent num­bers. When some­one hands you a churn fig­ure, your first ques­tion should always be “which churn?” The 15%-gap dili­gence sto­ry I told ear­li­er start­ed exact­ly here: two teams using the word “churn” to mean two dif­fer­ent for­mu­las. If you do noth­ing else after read­ing this arti­cle, go write down which churn def­i­n­i­tion your com­pa­ny uses — and con­firm it match­es the one bankers in your space use. (See the net rev­enue churn for­mu­la and the broad­er rev­enue reten­tion overview for the full mechan­ics, and prac­ti­cal ways to reduce SaaS churn once you’ve nailed the def­i­n­i­tion.)

The Unit Economics Acronyms

This clus­ter answers one ques­tion every investor cares about: is it prof­itable to acquire a cus­tomer? You can nev­er out­grow bad unit eco­nom­ics — if it costs more to win and serve a cus­tomer than that cus­tomer is worth, scal­ing just los­es mon­ey faster. These acronyms are how you prove the engine works.

Cus­tomer Acqui­si­tion Cost (CAC) is the ful­ly loaded cost to acquire one new cus­tomer: total sales and mar­ket­ing expense divid­ed by new cus­tomers acquired in the same peri­od. “Ful­ly loaded” mat­ters — it includes salaries, com­mis­sions, pro­grams, soft­ware, and ad spend, not just the media bill.

Life­time Val­ue (LTV), also writ­ten CLV (Cus­tomer Life­time Val­ue), esti­mates the total gross prof­it a cus­tomer gen­er­ates over their entire rela­tion­ship with you. Note the words gross prof­it — the LTV worth trust­ing is built on gross prof­it, not raw rev­enue, because rev­enue you spend 40 cents on the dol­lar to deliv­er isn’t worth what it looks like:

LTV = (Month­ly ARPA × Gross Mar­gin %) / Month­ly Churn Rate

The num­ber every­one quotes is the LTV:CAC ratio — LTV divid­ed by CAC. The rule of thumb is that 3:1 or high­er is healthy. Below that, you’re spend­ing too much to acquire cus­tomers rel­a­tive to what they’re worth; far above it, you may actu­al­ly be under-invest­ing in growth. Crit­i­cal­ly, always write it LTV:CAC, nev­er CAC:LTV — the direc­tion of the ratio mat­ters, and flip­ping it inverts the mean­ing.

Acronym	Full Name	Formula Shape	Healthy Benchmark
CAC	Customer Acquisition Cost	Total S&M expense / New customers	Lower is better; judge via payback
LTV / CLV	(Customer) Lifetime Value	(Monthly ARPA × Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn	—
LTV:CAC	Lifetime Value to CAC Ratio	LTV / CAC	3:1 or higher
CAC Payback	CAC Payback Period	CAC / (Monthly ARPA × Gross Margin %)	Under ~12 months

The met­ric I trust more than raw LTV:CAC is CAC Pay­back Peri­od — the num­ber of months it takes to earn back the cost of acquir­ing a cus­tomer through gross prof­it:

CAC Pay­back = CAC / (Month­ly ARPA × Gross Mar­gin %)

Pay­back is more hon­est than LTV:CAC because it does­n’t depend on a long-hori­zon churn esti­mate that’s easy to flat­ter. If you’re get­ting your mon­ey back in under a year, your acqui­si­tion engine is effi­cient; if it takes two or three years, you’re financ­ing your cus­tomers’ rela­tion­ships with your own cash, and growth will strain your run­way. (For the full treat­ment, see the LTV:CAC guide, the deep dive on SaaS unit eco­nom­ics, and the cus­tomer life­time val­ue walk­through.)

One more warn­ing that applies to this entire clus­ter: com­pa­ny-wide aver­ages hide the truth. When you look at LTV, CAC, and churn for the whole busi­ness at once, you get a blend­ed num­ber that describes no actu­al cus­tomer. The real­i­ty only shows up when you cal­cu­late these met­rics by seg­ment — by ver­ti­cal, con­tract size, chan­nel, or geog­ra­phy. I have seen it 100% of the time: the moment a CEO seg­ments their unit eco­nom­ics, sig­nif­i­cant vari­ances appear that the com­pa­ny aver­age com­plete­ly con­cealed. One seg­ment is wild­ly prof­itable, anoth­er is qui­et­ly bleed­ing, and the blend­ed aver­age makes both invis­i­ble. The acronyms are the same; the insight comes from refus­ing to look at them com­pa­ny-wide.

The Profitability and Efficiency Acronyms

As your com­pa­ny matures, the con­ver­sa­tion shifts from pure growth to effi­cient growth. These acronyms are how investors decide whether your growth is sus­tain­able or just expen­sive.

The most famous is the Rule of 40: your ARR growth rate plus your EBITDA mar­gin should sum to 40% or more. It’s a heuris­tic, not an account­ing rule, but it’s the sin­gle-sen­tence fil­ter investors use to judge whether you’re bal­anc­ing growth and prof­itabil­i­ty. A com­pa­ny grow­ing 30% with a 15% EBITDA mar­gin (Rule of 40 score: 45) looks health­i­er than one grow­ing 50% while burn­ing 30% (score: 20). If you clear the Rule of 40, lead with it.

EBITDA — Earn­ings Before Inter­est, Tax­es, Depre­ci­a­tion, and Amor­ti­za­tion — is a proxy for core oper­at­ing prof­itabil­i­ty, and EBITDA Mar­gin express­es it as a per­cent­age of rev­enue. Many SaaS oper­a­tors also watch FCF (Free Cash Flow), which is cash from oper­a­tions minus cap­i­tal expen­di­tures, because cash per­for­mance can diverge from account­ing prof­it, espe­cial­ly when you bill annu­al­ly upfront.

Acronym	Full Name	What It Tells You
Rule of 40	Growth + Profit ≥ 40%	Whether growth is balanced with profitability
EBITDA	Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortization	Core operating profitability proxy
FCF	Free Cash Flow	Actual cash the business generates
Gross Margin	(Revenue − COGS) / Revenue	How efficiently you deliver the product
COGS	Cost of Goods Sold (Cost of Revenue)	Direct cost of delivering the software
Burn Multiple	Net Burn / Net New ARR	Dollars burned per dollar of new ARR

Two more effi­cien­cy met­rics worth know­ing: Gross Mar­gin is rev­enue minus COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) — your direct deliv­ery costs like host­ing, infra­struc­ture, and the sup­port tied to deliv­ery — divid­ed by rev­enue. SaaS investors watch gross mar­gin close­ly because it caps how prof­itable the mod­el can ever be. And the Burn Mul­ti­ple — net burn divid­ed by net new ARR — tells you how many dol­lars you’re torch­ing to gen­er­ate each new dol­lar of recur­ring rev­enue; under 1.5x is excel­lent, and the high­er it climbs, the less cap­i­tal-effi­cient your growth. (See the SaaS Mag­ic Num­ber guide, the Rule of 40 break­down, what counts as a good EBITDA mar­gin, and how to allo­cate cost of goods sold for SaaS.)

There’s one effi­cien­cy met­ric that lives between sales and finance and deserves its own men­tion: the SaaS Mag­ic Num­ber, which mea­sures how effec­tive­ly your sales and mar­ket­ing spend con­verts into new recur­ring rev­enue. A mag­ic num­ber above 1.0 means each dol­lar of S&M is gen­er­at­ing more than a dol­lar of new annu­al­ized recur­ring rev­enue — a green light to spend more. Below 1.0, you’re buy­ing growth at a loss, and the fix is in the fun­nel, not the bud­get.

The Go-to-Market and Sales Acronyms

This is the dens­est acronym soup in SaaS, because mar­ket­ing and sales gen­er­ate jar­gon faster than any oth­er func­tion. Here’s the prac­ti­cal sub­set a CEO needs to fol­low a pipeline review with­out nod­ding blind­ly.

The fun­nel has three stages, each with its own abbre­vi­a­tion: TOFU (Top of Fun­nel) is aware­ness, MOFU (Mid­dle of Fun­nel) is con­sid­er­a­tion, and BOFU (Bot­tom of Fun­nel) is the deci­sion stage. Leads move through qual­i­fi­ca­tion stages that also get abbre­vi­at­ed: an MQL (Mar­ket­ing Qual­i­fied Lead) has met mar­ket­ing’s cri­te­ria, an SQL (Sales Qual­i­fied Lead) has been vet­ted by sales as worth pur­su­ing, and a PQL (Prod­uct Qual­i­fied Lead) has shown real buy­ing intent through prod­uct usage — often the high­est-qual­i­ty lead of the three in a prod­uct-led busi­ness.

Acronym	Full Name	Where It Lives
ICP	Ideal Customer Profile	Strategy — who you should sell to
TOFU / MOFU / BOFU	Top / Middle / Bottom of Funnel	Funnel stages
MQL / SQL / PQL	Marketing / Sales / Product Qualified Lead	Lead qualification
PLG / SLG	Product-Led / Sales-Led Growth	Go-to-market motion
B2B / B2C	Business-to-Business / -Consumer	Business model
NPS / CSAT	Net Promoter Score / Customer Satisfaction	Customer sentiment

The most strate­gi­cal­ly impor­tant acronym in this whole group isn’t a met­ric at all — it’s ICP (Ide­al Cus­tomer Pro­file), the pre­cise descrip­tion of the cus­tomer you’re best suit­ed to serve. A wrong or fuzzy ICP is the root cause behind most bad unit eco­nom­ics, because every dol­lar spent acquir­ing cus­tomers out­side your ICP drags down LTV and inflates CAC. Define it nar­row­ly, mea­sure per­for­mance against it, and resist the “we serve every­one” instinct that dilutes go-to-mar­ket. (The ide­al cus­tomer pro­file guide walks through how to define yours, and B2B SaaS sell­ing cov­ers the motion around it.)

You’ll also hear PLG (Prod­uct-Led Growth) ver­sus SLG (Sales-Led Growth) — whether your prod­uct or your sales­peo­ple dri­ve acqui­si­tion — and cus­tomer-sen­ti­ment acronyms like NPS (Net Pro­mot­er Score) and CSAT (Cus­tomer Sat­is­fac­tion Score). These are use­ful lead­ing indi­ca­tors, but treat them as that: indi­ca­tors, not the out­come met­rics that move val­u­a­tion.

How to Actually Use This: A Decision, Not a Dictionary

You don’t need to mem­o­rize every acronym in SaaS. You need to do three things, in order of impor­tance.

1. Lock down the def­i­n­i­tions of the five con­test­ed met­rics. Churn, NRR, ACV, book­ings, and CAC each have mul­ti­ple legit­i­mate def­i­n­i­tions. Pick one for each, write it down, con­firm it match­es how acquir­ers and bankers in your space cal­cu­late it, and enforce it across every report. This is the work that pro­tects your val­u­a­tion. Every­thing else on this list is a lookup.
2. Know your reten­tion and unit eco­nom­ics num­bers cold. NRR, GRR, LTV:CAC, and CAC pay­back are the met­rics an acquir­er judges you on. You should be able to state them — and defend how you cal­cu­late them — with­out reach­ing for a spread­sheet.
3. Seg­ment before you trust any of them. Every met­ric here lies to you when com­put­ed com­pa­ny-wide. Cal­cu­late them by seg­ment and the real sto­ry — the prof­itable cohort, the bleed­ing one — final­ly appears.

The rea­son this mat­ters more than any glos­sary is the point I opened with: the acronyms keep chang­ing, but the core issues don’t. New vocab­u­lary will keep wash­ing through SaaS the way “ASP” gave way to “SaaS.” The CEOs who build valu­able, sell­able com­pa­nies aren’t the ones who mem­o­rized the most abbre­vi­a­tions. They’re the ones whose num­bers mean the same thing every time some­one asks — includ­ing the day a banker recal­cu­lates them in a dili­gence room. (When you’re clos­er to that day, the SaaS exit strat­e­gy guide and the broad­er SaaS KPI and growth met­rics overview tie these def­i­n­i­tions back to what an acquir­er actu­al­ly pays for.)

Frequently Asked Questions About SaaS Acronyms

What is the dif­fer­ence between ARR and MRR? MRR (Month­ly Recur­ring Rev­enue) is your nor­mal­ized month­ly recur­ring sub­scrip­tion rev­enue. ARR (Annu­al Recur­ring Rev­enue) is that same num­ber annu­al­ized — ARR = MRR × 12. ARR is a snap­shot of your cur­rent run rate, not your trail­ing twelve months of rev­enue, which is the most com­mon way the two get con­fused.

What does NRR stand for, and is it the same as NDR? NRR stands for Net Rev­enue Reten­tion — the per­cent­age of recur­ring rev­enue you keep from exist­ing cus­tomers after churn, con­trac­tion, and expan­sion. NDR (Net Dol­lar Reten­tion) is the same met­ric under a dif­fer­ent name; some com­pa­nies, espe­cial­ly in investor report­ing, pre­fer NDR. Above 100% means your exist­ing base is grow­ing on its own.

Which SaaS acronyms mat­ter most for val­u­a­tion? The reten­tion met­rics (NRR and GRR) and the unit eco­nom­ics met­rics (LTV:CAC and CAC pay­back) car­ry the most weight in a sale, because they tell an acquir­er whether the busi­ness com­pounds and whether acquir­ing cus­tomers is prof­itable. But what mat­ters even more than the met­ric is whether your def­i­n­i­tion of it match­es the one the acquir­er uses.

Why do the same SaaS acronyms have dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions? Many SaaS met­rics — churn, ACV, book­ings, CAC, NRR — have two or three legit­i­mate def­i­n­i­tions that vary by com­pa­ny, investor, and report­ing sys­tem. The acronym is stan­dard­ized; the for­mu­la behind it often isn’t. This is why inter­nal con­sis­ten­cy mat­ters more than uni­ver­sal per­fec­tion: pick one def­i­n­i­tion, doc­u­ment it, and cal­cu­late it the same way every peri­od.

Do I need to know every SaaS acronym? No. You need to know your rev­enue, reten­tion, and unit eco­nom­ics acronyms cold, lock down the def­i­n­i­tions of the five con­test­ed ones (churn, NRR, ACV, book­ings, CAC), and treat the rest as a ref­er­ence you look up when it appears. Mem­o­riz­ing vocab­u­lary is far less valu­able than being able to defend how you cal­cu­late the hand­ful of met­rics that move your val­u­a­tion.