1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Share of Wallet. This is a fun one for all you marketplace people (who should also check this other article on Marketplace Liquidity).Share of Wallet is a measure of a marketplace going from being one of many options to becoming the main option. for a buyer (AND also a supplier).
2. MARKETING: Guess what? Your marketing team is slow!. Take a read of this article on frameworks to make your marketers speed up. Tech companies are market differentiators in-part due to the fact that they operate at a cadence that is faster than most. Speed is a competitive advantage that your marketing teams need to leverage!
3. SECURITY: Even ignoring everything else that has made this year bonkers,  2020 has also been an absolute doozy of a year for cyber attacks and breaches. here are some stats: 60% increase in the average ransomware payment from Q1-Q2 2020, Web App attacks are up 800% from last year, and Coronavirus alone  is blamed for a 238% rise in cyber attacks on banks. So first steps - protect your perimeter, especially if you are running WordPress.
4. PRICING: The debates are always passionate when discussing the merits of expose the pricing of a SaaS product via a public facing page. But regardless of what side of that argument you want to sit on, a simple truth remains: The pricing model of your product serves as the entry point for your customers. Public or not. Chartmogul reviewed 600+ publicly facing SaaS pricing pages and analyzed them to learn how subscription software companies price, package, and position their products - its a great read.  and Alexandre Dewez has done something similar with benchmarking the pricing model of 100+ subscription based mobile apps.
5. TECHNOGRAPHIC: Add this doozy of a Portmanteau to your dictionaries and spell checker - you should also read that article too as I don't know about you, but the number of tech vendors we use to run our tech business stresses me out, with services flopping in and out all the time! Which leads nicely into this article: How Many Technologies Can a Company Adopt at Once?  Answer - there is always one more (JK, but not really).
6. SALES: Budgeting for growth - we could spend a whole newsletter on that topic, but lets not. But how much sales budget should there be? Zoominfo have some answers for ya! Bad news - spend is on the rise.
7. GROWTH MARKETING: For all of you who appreciated last weeks Great guide to Growth Marketing Success I have an update from the same author:  15 Growth Marketing Tactics to Turbocharge Your Startup.
8. TRAFFIC:  An Indie Hacker short double-article whammy on web-traffic : a) How to boost traffic to your boring-ass SaaS product  (basically create some FREE exciting/useful tools related in some way and share them around) and b) How to rank higher in those pesky product based search results (pro-tip - use Reddit!! Genius)
9. MOATS: Moats are one of the best ways to provide a competitive advantage for your business and can moats come in all kinds of different flavors (such as speed, Brand, or growth). This post lists some other popular and effective ways for B2B SaaS companies to create such moats for their products.
10. UNICORNS: At the end of 2013, there were just 43 $1Billion plus valued unicorns, by October 2015 there were 141. Last week it hit the 500 mark for the first time. Full Excel sheet here from CBInsights

POD OF THE WEEK: Startup US Legal Basics in the US (and what kid of entity to form)  from the team at Wilson Sonsini, one of the premier legal forms for US startups. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: LTV This metric represents the average revenue that a customer generates before they churn. ChartMogul have a great online calculator here. Go advanced mode as this calculator references the traditional formula as well as the David Skok version (which is the advanced one, but viewed as being more realistic)....and check here for a thought provoking read of why your LTV may be lower than you think.
2. CODE: Hard truth - some of your code stinks. Take a read of this for the kind of bad smells your repo may have.  Meh - but how much does it matter? Well here is a report that gives you that cold-hard number . In this report Stripe also calculates the developer "community" to be valued at about $3 trillion GDP globally.
3. DELIGHT AUDIT. Its the Age of the Customer you know, so this should be a thing - enough with the  eye rolling! This is an in-depth post from CopyHackers on how to make this kind of Audit happen and here is a case study on how 3 big Tech companies (GitLab, HubSpot and Zoom) make delight happen. Also here is a Case Study on building a customer centric B2B organization from McKinsey
4. WRITING: Being able to write well is a skill that needs to sit with founders. So here is 3 step guide - Step 1. How to position your startup and achieve your unique value prop; Step 2. how to write well and one more version for good measure; and Step 3 top tips for telling stories.
5. GROWTH MARKETING: For all those who have mastered step 4 above, here is a great guide to Growth Marketing Success - as the author points out, Growth "hacking" is not a series of "hacks." It's a rigorous methodology consisting of experimenting, collecting data, and leveraging human psychology.
6. MONEY: Just because cash is key to eeevvverrrything right now. Take some time to review some fundamentals on cash management (in 2020)  - it's a printable PDF from PitchBook! and understanding SaaS P&L statements.
7. MANAGEMENT: Thinking of moving from engineering to management? Awesome! But guess what, the rules have kind of changed in 2020 and you probably wont code anymore - but it's still a technical job.
8. SALES ANALYSIS: Every company wants to boost your sales and close more deals right? So take a read and a bookmark to this article as it is a really deep dive into comprehensive Sales Analysis - listing 4 different analysis types and then providing  9 tips on how to use this quality sales sales analysis data to generate more revenue.
9. DECIDE: Because human beings are weird we often make decisions using  predictable (and fairly subconscious) mental shortcuts  - in the UX world, the term used is 'Heuristics'.  Check this (ultimate) guide to heuristics evaluation, complete with cast studies!
10. RULE OF 40: What is the 40% rule for SaaS companies? This video explains more but basically when a VC backed SaaS businesses (of over ~ $2m ARR) adds profit + growth rate, the total should be equal to 40% (or more). This helps calculate the cadence of a business: The faster they grow, the less profitable they need to be. Rule of 40 stocks have outperformed the broader indices and IT benchmarks over the last 15 years.

​
POD OF THE WEEK: Trello (now part of Atlassian) is well beyond 50,000,000 users. Check this vid-cast from Jason Lemkin and SaaStr on the fo

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: EXPANSION: A lot of SaaS companies are fixated on customer acquisition, leaving customer expansion as an underrated growth strategy that SaaS companies often gloss over. Hard facts: Every dollar of new customer revenue in 2020 costs $1.60  - expansion is the growth bargain - with each dollar of expansion revenue costing $0.69. Using the analogy of Ice Cream (you had my attention right there) this article goes in-depth to identify and separate out three differing kinds of expansion along with five strategies you can deploy.
2. DATA: I don’t think I have more to add than the title of this article: "You Cannot Be Data-Driven Without Experimentation” but the opposite of that is also a truth to hammer home "You Cannot run experiments successfully without being data-driven”. We all overestimate our experimentation skills AND our Data collection skills.
3. MARKETING: I like the fact that the authors of this article didn't use the words "ultimate" or "top" in their B2B SaaS Marketing Guide - 2020 edition. It's a collection of learnings for founders and b2b marketers who are looking to build their b2b marketing programs - very much a book-markable link.
4. FORWARD MULTIPLES: This is a preferred metric used to value SaaS companies, who generally carry very few assets, little to no profitability, but all kinds of potential. That number is wildly variable and often bonkers - as of June 2020, the median SaaS valuation multiple for public companies stands at 11.4x ARR. So how is that number calculated? The answer?.....it depends: But a companies revenue growth and sales efficiency dominate the model. Cash flow margins, net income margins (profitability), gross margins, and many other metrics are largely irrelevant.
5. SALES: Deal mechanics! How can Account Executives who are getting the same amount of meetings booked by SDRs out-perform their counterparts? According to this article - best-practice deal mechanics. It's about what also happens between meetings, using video, phone, and LinkedIn to engage all the decision-makers involved in complex enterprise deals, giving your prospects an out, and setting next steps. Jason Lemkin also swoops in this week with some top tips on tips to help sales execs close more.
6. NO CODE: Codeless apps have been here for a while! Technology infrastructure has become so commoditized and abstracted that we have now reached a point in time where web services, apps, and integrations can be provisioned visually with zero amounts of line-based code written. AWS has legitimized this practice into the main-stream via Amazon Honeycode, a tool that makes it possible to build web and mobile applications without coding and this article goes into depth outlining the current squad of no-code players, tools, and haters.
7. CI/CD: Continuous improvement (CI) is not just a process that dev teams use to iterate and ship software quickly, the process identifies opportunities to reduce waste and streamline work within any department or team. CI can easily be confused with Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery - but they are not the same. This article from Angel.co helps clarify the differences and makes the case why CI is the optimal dev strategy for delivering great customer experiences.
8. PRODUCT: Product Management - what exactly is it? This article highlights what it is and also what it isn't (in comparison to the role of a project manager) as does this one and this article highlights a more subtle difference - one between Product Managers and  Product Owners. Unfortunately for professional growth, in-person conferences for all you Product Managers out there is on hold for the foreseeable future so here are some thought-provoking presentations for product managers from years past.
9. TEST TEST TEST: Evaluating the functionality of a software application at every stage is critical to shipping something awesome.  Take a good read of this PDF guide (along with real-life examples) and then bookmark this Google Site (blast from the past) page for a comprehensive list of the Stages of Test Development.  Thats list is kind of old school though - so take a read and sprinkle some of  this more modern (ie Agile) take on testing. into your QA world.
10. LINK BUILDING: This kind of seems like an SEO tactic of the past, where businesses build links to create a more organically positive Search rating. So is it still a relevant practice in 2020? Well......yah! But the rules have changed quite a lot. Check this article on how to optimize (by careful curation and intent) what to link.

POD OF THE WEEK:  A continuation from #5 above:  Deal Mechanics: How to Work (And Close) 3x The Deals with Nick Cegelski

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: MRR: Subscription revenue is powerful. It accumulates and compounds over time and MRR, or Monthly Recurring Revenue, is a predictable (..get it?) SaaS Metric Classic - so this is a deep dive article into everything you ever wanted to know (and much, much more) about this most common of metrics, covering different MRR types, differences between MRR and ARR, etc, etc, etc.
2. MRR LEVERS: OK -so what are the best ways that SaaS companies can grow their MRR? Check this article that looks at two (of the five) elements of MRR growth that often fly under the radar of acquisition (expansion and reactivation).
3. CAPITAL: If you are looking to raise capital - You have 2-4 slides tops to grab the attention of an investor. Use those slides wisely and don’t go beyond 12-15. But also check this word of warning from Elizabeth Yin (Co-founder / GP at hustle fund): NOW is really a horrible time to be raising, only fundraise now if you are wrapping up a raise or really need a little bit of money.
4. FUTURE FOUNDERS: Looking to start something soon? Y Combinator is launching a new Startup School intended for the Founders of the future. The course will start next week - November 9th and run for 6 weeks. Spread the word or Sign up here!
5. PERSONAS: SaaS B2B Marketing is a pretty unique beast - and getting into the minds of an idealized customer often requires going through the practice of creating personas - you should try it - it will def make you a better SaaS marketer. For most SaaS companies creating multiple personas is often a strategic necessity. So here is an additional differentiator (and what the difference is compared to a persona) of an Ideal customer profile.
6. MARKETING: Add this one to your SaaS dictionary: Buyer Intent Data. I have posted all kinds of articles in this newsletter on Marketing strategies and tactics - but there is never a one-size fits all channel for a company. So how does a business find out what are the best marketing channels for them? This article suggests that everything needed to answer that questions is already within the data a business generates every day. (you're gonna need Personas - so don't skip #5)
7. CUSTOMER DATA: Looping together 5 and 6 above  - Customer data management is a practice, not a technology. I love that simple message. Bluconic give the crib notes/5-steps in this article about how to develop a strategy to optimize and improve customer experience using good data management practices.
8. USABILITY TESTING: Creating an intuitive application or website takes time, and requires a process of design - what may seem obvious to one person may not be for everyone.  It's not just about UX - it's about usability testing, read here for the fundamentals on this concept. Once you have that article mastered, head over here on how to elevate your UX design empathy skills.
9. WORK-LIFE 💩: I don't know about you - I think WFH is great but it also makes work-life integration just straight up weird and the boundaries a little tricky to manage. 4 year olds do not respect Zoom rooms. So I did lean into this article and feel we are all in here somewhere - to reel you in: "Remote isn’t just a different way of working, it’s a different way of living. And if you’re not careful, the only thing you’ll experience is work" . The author recognizes 4 different types of work-life boundary management to help you manage your own boundaries: Integrators, Cyclers, Separators and Role-Firsters.
10. FRAMEWORKS: Beyond metrics, a successful framework can distills complex processes or models to make execution more of a simple recipe. Kinda why OKR's exist. Sarah Tavel has compiled a great list of compelling Frameworks covering the 10x model, the hierarchy of engagement, hype cycles and more!

POD OF THE WEEK: A new podcast from First Round Review - In Depth - focused on good advice startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. First episode is with Molly Graham discussing team management who helped build and scale Facebook, Quip, and is now the COO of Lambda School.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Net Dollar Retention - Sammy Abdullah of Blossom Street Ventures backs up my on-going opinion that net dollar retention (and by-proxy Up-sell) is the most important metric in SaaS. NDR comes in a variety of different efforts though so take a read of this article to get a better grip of the nuance and then ask yourself: "Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend?" Tomasz Tunguz writes in detail about this and Crunchbase do the work to calculate what good NDR benchmarks should look like. 
2. CUSTOMER SERVICE:  In this current age of the customer, enhanced by COVID,  SaaSx make the argument that Customer Success is actually the product. Want to start building out that product? Check the HubSpot guide on getting started with your customer team.
3. HANDOFF: To add onto above, the customer journey will have plenty of touch points and handoffs. Chartmogul provide some great tips on customer handoff from sales to Customer Success teams.
4. NPS: To add onto the add on above. Customer Service and Success have many metrics to track and NPS makes the top of the list. This White Paper from Ask Nicely reviews NPS (among with other common customer experience metrics) and explains how to measure and calculate NPS. Neil Patel then gets into a 3 step program of how to leverage NPS for your business.
5. ANALYTICS: Being a "growth hacker" is just putting a shiny label on high fidelity analytics mastery but many analytics efforts result in failure - it’s all about the data, not the tools, check this primer on the topic. McKinsey provide five pointers on how to make analytics work in B2B Sales. And once you get good at collecting the cold hard data, check the following article on how to perform a sales analysis (step by step).
6. PERSONALIZATION: Did you know that personalization can reduce acquisition costs as much as 50% and 87% of companies see a lift in key growth metrics when they employ personalization? SaaS marketers have been leveraging personalization to increase conversion rates, improve customer success, and increase the quality of sales/marketing funnels for some time so here is a great article from Chart Mogul on the (modern day) personalization fundamentals.
7. PRIVACY: The Debbie downer from above, let's not get too personal. Privacy concerns are rightfully growing and rules around the globe are tightening (FYI the California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect in 2020). This is creating significant challenges in the digital advertising industry, so Google has created a playbook, collecting best practices and case studies from this forward-thinking, privacy optimized,  group of marketers. 
8. FIRST PRINCIPLE THINKING : Want to be more like Elon? Take a read here on the concept of  First Principles Thinking. Not gonna lie, I've re-read it again this week and it still makes my brain hurt. Want more? Fine. Here is a full guide/website. Now that you are an expert on this principle, here is how First Principle Thinking can be applied IRL - in this example towards a Product Lead Growth business.
9. ROADMAPS: Always seem a bit too waterfall-y for Agile teams -  old-school, clunky and rigid. But Agile teams absolutely need them as the teams still need some overarching direction and sense of what’s to come beyond Sprint cycles. Read here on the reasoning why along with 5 roadmap templates to use. I'm personally a fan of  how Atlassian have designed their public access roadmap - it gives me hope.
10. DEATH: Of the SaaS kind. Y-Combinator (via the SaaStr Blog) lists 5 things that kill startups (and what to do about it). It's a way deeper article than it sounds (and it ain't just 5 things)

BONUS: There is no real category for this post, but I think it's awesome. Entitled 'A Few Rules'

POD OF THE WEEK: Expanding on #5 above, just having data is not enough: it takes an entire system of tools and technology to extract value from data. a16z explore the evolution of data architectures.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: WORD OF MOUTH - guess we are calling this one WOM? it's something that is very hard to measure, this article calls it a coefficient. Sure. Let's run with that! The WOM coefficient. Want something more WOM intellectual? Fine, McKinsey also has this deep dive on WOM Science.
2. INCLUSIVITY: From my buddies and old crew at SecondMuse comes a new report:"The State of Entrepreneurship in the U.S." Only 17% of Entrepreneurs interviewed view the U.S. Economy as inclusive. 91%of women entrepreneurs don't view the economy as inclusive, and 69% view COVID as an opportunity to rethink the economy.
3. PITCH DECKS: It's really hard to craft the right narrative in pitch decks at the earliest stages, but here’s a great Tweet thread on how to think best about telling you startups story. Then start with part one of a two-part series from The Dyess Group who a) do this for a job, and b) reviewed and analyzed 50 pitch decks to find out that y’all need to delete a boat-load of words from your pitch deck right away.
4. SALES: Last week we did a bit of a 101 to Marketing. This week, let's try the same with Sales (of the SaaS kind). LighterCapital has a great intro to everything SaaS sales - cycles, commissions, metrics and models. ScaleVP has a really good primer on SaaS sales efficiency (with some metrics) and I need to acknowledge it’s just a weird time to sell anything by referencing this article on leading sales through the COVID-19 Crisis.
5. DATA: The data hype is definitely back! I’ve certainly heard it hyped at a few events lately as kind of savior of industries and the Snowflake IPO was just bonkers. Let's unpack the data hype and focus in on what it means. Starting here with 5 trends in Data and what software buyers are looking for in tools. Tomasz Tunguz also presented at the first conference on cloud data lakes earlier this year (link to the slides here). TL;DR - data systems are no longer just the domain of IT and are now owned by a variety of different departments and tools now exist to sanitize, query, instrument and interpret the data in ways that were un-imaginable just a handful of years ago.
6. FREEMIUM: Don’t call it a comeback! But Freemium is gaining popularity again as an effective growth strategy for B2B SaaS companies. Canva and Slack have contributed to the re-emergence of this growth strategy. So, why is Freemium becoming  popular again? Read more on that here, then check these 3 Famous Freemium SaaS Strategies (And Why They’re So Good): 
7. ONBOARDING: It’s something I’m deeply into right now. Doing this well is key to increasing value, lowering churn and creating advocates - so here is how some of the best do it: Leveraging email, this is how ZenDesk document their comms flow and ChartMogul have a guide to their non-email version too.  From HeavyBit here is a 4 phase plan and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality.
8. ABANDON: This is the sibling to the post above as abandonment can be a signal of poor onboarding. Here are 3 reasons why users abandon the onboarding process (identify verification, slow onboarding experiences, and being asked for too much data) and AppSee have another 8 reasons in this article (adding Privacy and Ad clutter to the list).
9. CSM ATTRIBUTION (Customer success managers): How do you account for or budget the cost of a CSM team? The team at Gainsight dive deep into this question and come up with some fantastic insights - even though the question itself is complicated and the answers end up being more non-monetary than you would probably like. Owning the renewal, up-sell, cross-sell are key delineation point s between expense attribution to different departments who CSM teams may sit under. 
10. SEO: SEO is dead! Just kidding - thats #1 in this top 10 SEO myths article. Discoverability trumps content marketing and needs to be an endless-part of any modern business strategy.  Moz has a great little guide on keyword research complimented by their other article on Search Intent and here is a pretty good (current) guide from Founder Institute.

POD OF THE WEEK: For some the concept of ’salesperson’ is cringe - so listen to this podcast from Predictable Revenue that explores the idea of social selling and bringing back the human element of sales  

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Product-Market Fit (Quantitate)- it’s cool to consider this concept as a metric, so I’m bringing it back, according to Jeff Chang this is the best metric for determining quantitative product market fit. Another metric is by Andrew Chen from a16z who calls PMF as a 5% conversion rate from free-to-paid, or 3X CPA to LTV ratio.
2. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: Continued from above - beyond quantitive measurements, how else can a company know (ie Qualify, not Quantify) that they have achieved product-market fit?  This article from TechNexus qualifies PMF as 40% + of respondents stating “very disappointed” to the survey question “How would you feel if you can no longer use the product?”  and Salesforce.io has an even more in depth deep dive that is also a 56 page Google Doc on how to find Product-Market Fit in the most capital-efficient and time-efficient way possible.
3. CAPITAL: Pitchbook has released the Q3 Venture report (downloadable PDF here) GOOD NEWS: The total estimated deal count for US startups saw an uptick in Q3'20 and the total value of all deals remained about the same. BAD NEWS: Seed rounds continue to take a hit but ($4B so far, down from $6.7B).
4. ONBOARDING: It used to be pretty easy when a new team member starts and simply shows up to the office for their orientation. So how does that optimally work in a WFH/Distributed team? Justin Garrison has some great tips in this Twitter thread.
5. SALES: Enterprise sales are something else - especially if you're a small startup trying to just get some momentum going and don’t know s&!t. If this sounds like you take a good read of this article from Close on how to identify all of those enterprise sales weak spots and also take a read here - this is a big lesson I’ve learnt. Often times you are not just selling product, you are selling capability.
6. REVOPS: Is this for you and your business? RevOps is the concept of centralizing operations teams from marketing, sales, and customer success. To many SaaS B2B companies it can be a high-impact way to accelerate revenue growth and provide some operational efficiency (especially in more austere Pandemic Times). BCG have a great deep dive for you to read here to get started on assessing RevOps as a practice for your business.  
7. MARKETING: Anyone here see Marketing as the big unknown? Just what the heck is it? Seth Godin has a pretty good idea and this article is a marketing 101-401 listing some of the best marketing-based articles and resources on the webs. Definitely something I recommend as a bookmark for frequent reference.
8. PRICING: How to price and sell in a pandemic is an article that immediately gets my attention - and the article is a good one from BCG, so def take a read. Then also take a read of this article from Julian Lehr of Stripe: 9 Tricks to Experiment with your Pricing Strategy.
9. VALUE: Unless you know why customers buy your stuff…...and then buy from you again….you’re not ready to scale. In this article from Solving Product there is a great list of questions you can ask your customers to identify why they made the purchase, but more importantly there is another group of questions to consider to figure out why they stayed (and spent more) as that is where the true and often unrealized value is. This is also a great complimentary article on choosing the ideal feature sets based on values.
10. CONTENT MARKETING: I bet you have been told that you need to focus on top of the funnel - but here is something controversial to read: When it’s comes to Content Marketing -  focus on the bottom of the funnel first to drive signups. Whaaaaaaaat? The thinking is - top of the funnel already know their stuff, it’s the bottom part of the funnel thats truly on the learning search.

POD OF THE WEEK: It’s a kinda Product Market Fit special this week, so here is a podcast from SaaStock on how to find it.  

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ZCP: Repeat this metric 5 times as fast as you can: "month zero cash-on-cash payback”- this tongue twister is best referred to as ZCP. It’s a cash-based metric, as cash-in-the-bank is a critical number for a SaaS company to monitor. ZCP answers the question: if we invest $1 in sales costs (such as salaries and commissions), how long does it take to recoup that dollar spent and welcome it back to the bank account?  
2. WOMEN IN TECH: A new Girls Who Code and Accenture report has launched - check out this metric: By age 35, fifty percent of women leave their jobs in tech. This is primarily (37% of those surveyed) attributed to noninclusive company cultures. The call to action here is that the bottom 80% have big role to play: If all companies could score as well in inclusion as the top 20% performing do, attribution could drop by up to 70%!
3. REMOTE: Nearly all of us are working remotely or WFH. The big tech players in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc) are all doing it too and not really looking back too much. So take read of this article from Inc. Magazine (and rip it off): 9 great tips from Googles Remote Work Policy. Ars Technica expand beyond policy and dive into both technical and cultural changes in this article.
4. REVENUE TEAMS: Revenue teams are a combo of Marketing and Sales. Getting them aligned is a really trick and Tomasz Tunguz has a quick diagnostic to determine if your sales and marketing teams are working well together.
5. SAASTR: In-person events are a thing of the past and hopefully the future. For now, we are stuck attending and watching events from the comforts of Zoom. SaaStr Annual hosted an “At Home” edition recently, which was pretty good,  and Christelle Blanchet-Aissaoui from Proxi has written a banger of a summary for you to read.
6. PRODUCT LED GROWTH (PLG): Time for a refresher - read this to understand the 4 basic principles behind PLG. Traditionally companies have focused their marketing and sales efforts on external acquisition channels to drive demand, but in a PLG world,  your product is the driver for growth (such as Atlassian and Netflix). From ChartMogul here is the PLG Sales best practices to complement the marketing Cheat Sheet. OpenView have launched a Product Led Growth Maturity Grader  -  this tool is designed to give feedback on how far along your organization is on the PLG maturity spectrum.
7. CUSTOMERS: OK - so, umm, what exactly is the difference between Customer Success and Customer Support? Get started here to understand the nuances, they are both part of the same customer journey spectrum, and Totango posits, in this recent Start Annual presentation, that we need a fresher look at Success and Support that they coin the “Customer Operating System” (downloadable Google Slide presso).
8. LANDING PAGES: One of the most common reasons why a search engine based marketing campaign fail is that is does not have an optimized landing pages to continue the journey, take a look here at some best practices, real examples, and templates for Google Ad-based Landing Pages. Then also  Check this site out - a collection of the best landing pages around the web with a focus on copywriting and design - finally (this is a repeat-post) IceBreakerVC lists best practices for good landing page planning and strategy. 
9. FREEMIUM: If you are looking to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy for your business, take a good read of this article on “everything you need to know" But it’s probably a good time to think about more free as a sales strategy - according to Jason Lemkin from Saastr - more free seems to be working well these days. BTW Freemium is not just for B2C businesses like Dropbox and Spotify. Freemium is now a strategy employed in gaming,  Enterprise, Cloud, and online Payments.
10. ROADMAPS: I’ve been asked for product roadmaps quite a lot lately and I have to admit, I don’t like traditional versions of them, Too clunky, too rigid, too old-school. Discovering the flexibility that Atlassian have designed on their public access roadmap gave me hope, but Ryan Singer has a different and far more flexible opinion on roadmaps - don’t do them, instead create options. Ryan is also part of the ShapeUp crew. Their publications and toolbox of techniques are designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to designing, prioritizing and shipping product/features.

POD OF THE WEEK: From SaaStr:  Churn is dead. Long live Net Dollar Retention (NDR) with David Kellogg 

David Skok is a legend in the SaaS world and I have written about his work a little in the past, as well as convincing him to speak at an event - gifting South African born Skok with an All Blacks rugby top was an outstanding idea. 

The annual KBCM Technology Group SasS report which Skok is an endorsement partner for 2020 is now out and is a special COVID Edition. I’m dedicating this weeks newsletter to 10 top nuggets from this report as it’s the industry go-to benchmarking report. The full report can be downloaded as a nice PDF here (It’s also the ten year anniversary of the survey). There are way more nuggets in here than the ones below. So be sure to take a deeper read.

1. GROWTH 1: Ouch! There is still growth, but the top line growth projections for 2020 have been pretty-much cut in half. 39% growth was expected as of January, by the end of June it was reduced to 20% (2019 was 36%).
2. GROWTH 2: These two charts may show a better visual of what the above means. 2019 was a typical year in growth for SaaS and 2020 looked the same (at least in January) until COVID forced a massive change in 2020 revenue forecasts (green is more, red is less) with the end of June re-forecasts.
3. GROWTH 3: If you don’t know by now, Silicon Valley has a bit of an obsession with SaaS growth. The 40% rule (nice little video explainer for ya) is an examples of that. TL;DW when a VC backed SaaS businesses adds profit + growth rate, the total should be equal to 40% or ideally more. This helps calculate the cadence of a business: The faster they grow, the less profitable they need to be. Here is Skok’s 40% rule chart of the companies surveyed. It’s a high bar with just a couple of dozen of the 200 respondents hitting or surpassing that line. 
4. CHURN: Anecdotally in 2020 I have churned or reduced plans both professionally and personally with quite a few SaaS products in my desire for more work-life austerity. So how does my sentiment resonate across larger industry trends of churn? Covid Churn is definitely a thing and the report recognizes a YoY trend of a dollar churn increase from 12.5% in 2019 to 13.9% in 2020, 20% of which was attributed to Covid.
5. CAC: Also increased across the board for 2020 (covering new, up-sell/cross-sell and blended CAC). Every dollar of new revenue in 2020 costs $1.60 (compared to $1.35 in 2019). Up-sell and cross-sell still remains the CAC bargain, but it’s still up YoY, with each dollar of new revenue costing $0.69 in 2020 (it was $0.61 in 2019). Big impacts to sales efficiency.
6. CAC PAYBACK: Increasing CAC also stretches out the 2020 customer CAC payback period, from 1.9 years average in 2019 (which is a crazy big number IMO) to an even larger 2.4 years in 2020 for new customers. This means it will take a 2020 SaaS company 2.4 years to reach cash profitability per customer - that is an expansive trough! Up-sell and cross-sell remains much closer but still significantly up - 8 months in 2019 to 1 year in 2020. This really highlights what will be a deepening dependency on Capital to fuel SaaS companies growth.
7. FUNDING: Adding on to my last sentence above, only 14% of companies surveyed were Bootstrapped or Independent.  A cool slide this year is breaking down performance based on funding type. VC-backed business demonstrate better growth, but at the total expense of margin, which is very much negative in comparison to their bootstrapped peers which YoY remained profitable (but with a significantly smaller average deal size). Correlating these deal size categories to forecast growth highlights that the low end of town retained the best re-forecast for 2020 (25% growth)
8. SALES: The primary mode of Sales and Marketing efforts remains Field Sales based in 2020, but has shrunk from 54% last year, with Inside Sales taking a growing chunk of the remainder. (28% last year to 33% this year). Sales forecasting took a big hit too with over half (52%) of companies forecasting a reduction in revenue forecasts for the remainder of the year.
9. DEAL SIZE: For the most part this is pretty evenly split between 3 categories: Sub $15k (32%), $15-$50k (30%) and $50k-$250k (29%). Over $250k deal size remains the exclusive group with just 9% of surveyed respondents. 
10. DELIVERY: This is a great trend but lifted taken from the 2019 report (as it wasn’t reported this year), it's one of my favorite slides. How is a SaaS product shipped? 88% today use third-party cloud (up from just over 60% 4 years ago). AWS remains solidly dominant at 60%  but with drop from last year as Azure and GCP have seen gains and Hybrid-Multi-Cloud will be an emerging option as competitive pressures mount. AWS also dominates across companies of every scale but self managed infrastructure is more common at the high end of town.

POD OF THE WEEK: Of course it’s from our good buddy David Skok, choosing the right metrics for the right growth stage. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Customer success has many metrics to track (in 2020) - here is a comprehensive list of the top 15. NPS making the top of the list.  From Asknicely, This White Paper reviews NPS and some other common user experience metrics.
2. SHAPE UP: A refresher for your tech dictionaries. Software product development requires innovative strategies based on today's cadence expectations of continuous integration, micro-services, feature delivery, and scale. The team at Basecamp (I’m an old school fan) have developed ShapeUp, their publications and toolbox of techniques designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to designing, prioritizing and shipping product/features.
3. DIFFERENTIATION: Standing out in a saturated sea of SaaS is a tricky problem to solve - pro-tip - never do it on price alone. So ask yourself - why should someone buy from you? It requires balancing familiarity and differentiation - read this article to get you thinking on the topic more.
4. CUSTOMER PROFILE:  Here is a great tool for anyone. Sales can be a real uphill battle when sales teams don't truly understand their ideal customer, building out customer profiles is an incredibly useful way to identify your best customers. So download this Profiler kit pdf and use these questions and survey generator to quickly generate the ideal questions and template for your customer profiles. The rest is all on you.
5. DEADLINES: Author Douglas Adams once wrote “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”. It’s funny because it's true. So when it comes to software development, how do you make peace with that whoosh? Check this article from Free Code Camp that discusses the art of managing the deadline - part of it is complimentary to a reference to the sub-art of saying NO from a couple of weeks back.
6. OUTREACH: Things like “Let's catch up for Coffee” is sooooo 2019. Given our less-social lives that are mainly digital, check these fantastic tips and tricks for creating outreach that matters. We can all do better.
7. COOKIES: (not the chocolate chip kind). Love them or hate them, the reality is that browser cookies are headed the way of the Dodo, which creates a new attribution problem to solve. Conversion modeling is a way forward, so if attribution is a necessary part of your business or your channel/partners Business, take a read of this article from Google on why conversion modeling will be crucial in a world without cookies.
8. EMAIL: A few weeks back I referenced a power point deck from Predictable Revenue on the four pillars they think constitutes a quality sales based email campaign. Quality resource for anyone with email marketing as part of their businesses. From Better Marketing this week is a complimentary deep dive into a single cold email and why the author actually opened it (TL;DR - yes it’s all about everything in the emails design, but more  about how targeted the message is).
9. NOTE TAKING APPS: Yup - this is a random headline. But with all things 2020, this sector is pretty hot right now. Roam is a new competitor that has achieved a whopping $200 million valuation at SEED STAGE thanks to the shift to remote work (and some interesting pricing models). The other new competitor, Notion, is valued even higher - currently about $2 Billion. How???? Well, I got you covered with that question. Check this incredible deep dive from Foundation on how Notion used community and templates to scale.
10. VIDEO: Nailing introductory and Demo videos is a bit of an art form. Don’t know where to start or have video-block? Get inspiration from this curated collection of some of the best and here is a list of 6 videos every SaaS Company needs. (TL;DR Explainers, Company, Testimonials, landing, page, FAQ and Personalized Sales)

POD OF THE WEEK: Trade shows/travel are so not 2020. So listen to predictable revenue talk about how to build a content strategy to replace trade shows and travel. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK - CHURN: Profitwell has the motherlode - a complete guide to understanding, calculating, and reducing churn, which they call "the silent killer of subscription businesses”. This is more than a download, it’s pretty much an eBook (and a downloadable PDF).
2. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION: CI is a process that dev teams use to iterate and ship software quickly, it can easily be confused with Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery - but they are not the same. This article from Angel.co helps clarify the differences and makes the case why CI is the optimal dev strategy for delivering great customer experiences.
3. ADOPTION: A couple of weeks back I mentioned a comprehensive guide to measuring ways in which new users turn into paying customers (and which users are going to drift away). Now that you know how to measure it, check this great article from UserPilot discussing ways to increase product adoption, complete with real-life examples.
4. CYBER-SECURITY: Threats are on the rise, as is the adoption rates of apps and products within large organizations. It’s a perfect storm of real risk that needs solid, strategic approaches to management. This article from McKinsey offers a risk-based approach to managing overall modern-day cyber-risk exposure. Great article from Mckinsey (downloadable PDF!) on how SaaS providers can meet the security needs of their enterprise customers. But as mentioned last week regardless of the size of your SaaS business, security should be part of your dev cycle. Not to freak all you CEO’s/founders out - but Gartner are also expecting more CEO/founders to be personally liable for cyber-physical security incidents in the future.
5. PRICING: Product pricing is super hard. Here are top lessons learned from 25 SaaS companies, as well as what the impact pricing changes can have on your business and how to test it. Chargify has a list of 5 pricing scenarios to test as a SaaS company, with real examples to compare and Point Nine Capital has 9 awesome pricing strategy experiments.
6. UN-SCALE: Sometimes, while building a repeatable scaleable business model, there a things that have to be done that are unsaleable.  This article highlights three specific non-scalable things sales teams should be doing right now.
7. MVP CANVAS: OK - this is interesting (because visual frameworks are my jam). Y’all have heard of the Lean Canvas and the Business Model Canvas? Well check out this spin on applying the framework focused on designing and launching MVP’s (just don’t burn the Pizza).
8. MOATS: Moats are one of the best ways to provide a competitive advantage for your business and can moats come in all kinds of different flavors (such as speed, Brand, or growth). This post lists some other popular and effective ways for B2B SaaS companies to create such moats for their products.
9. BURNOUT: Anecdotally I feel like I have had more conversations about burnout in the past few months than ever. I’m glad people are talking about it, but it’s also very much a sign of the times. Check this very personal article from the CEO of Subbly on how he he recognized and managed his own burnout. Great lessons in here for everyone.
10. AI and QUANTUM: Here is some great news - last month the White House announced a $1 billion investment into two of tech’s most promising frontiers, AI and quantum computing and announced the creation of the AI and quantum research institutes. (This is all likely in response to data on China’s spend on AI - $70b this year).

POD OF THE WEEK: From Invest Like The Best this week is an interview with Michael Seibel - the CEO of Y-Combinator's startup accelerator - he has reviewed literally thousands of applications to YC, so has a lot of experiential insight. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: RETENTION is key to growth and profitability and businesses that truly want to put their customers at the centre of their business are the ones most likely to succeed. Check UserPilots article on how to build a marketing-based retention strategy that works and  how to measure it.
2. SALES: It’s all about the journey! Take a good read of this “ultimate" sales pipeline guide from Close.com, covering stages, key metrics and templates (whaaaat! Oh yeah) - this guide is a keeper.
3. CONTENT: Its a must have for a modern SaaS business, but good content (and not all that super fluffy stuff) is super critical not just for this newsletter (ahem) but is a must-have for a SaaS Sales Team - this article gives 3 solid reasons why you should double down on it.
4. CYBER: With all kinds of cyber attacks happening lately (The FBI has see a 400% increase in reports of Cyberattacks since the Strat of Covid), it’s time to hammer this home: Regardless of the size of your SaaS business, security should be part of your dev cycle but also know your weak spots. Founder Institute discusses 6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack that may be a bit leaky. Security needs to be rolled up into the process - DevSecOps being the new port-portmanteau or is that SecDevOps? - anywhoooo……beyond the DevSecOps article, Heavybit also have a great article discussing cloud security challenges (as apparently, if we extrapolate this out, 88% of SaaS is now sitting on public cloud).
5. MLP: Thats the adorable acronym -  Minimum Lovable Product. MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is OK but what if no-one likes it? FirstRound capital use the analogy of burnt pizza - pointing out that the fastest and cheapest functional prototype could produce a poor or flawed version of something that people may actually love. No-one likes burnt pizza!
6. NO: Two sides of the no-coin here….a bit of a NO deep dive. This first one was shared by my one of my team this week and thought it was too good to not share. Learning to say no is the most important skill a programmer can learn - TL;DR - it’s all about keeping code base small and solving the right problems! When it comes to selling No is almost a curse-word. So this article goes into depth of ways to be Yes, rather than have to say no - it’s a great way to think about how to say yes through product.
7. COVID-CONSUMERS: Has there ever been a more dramatic and acute impact to global economies, peoples health, and consumer behavior than this pandemic? Not that I can think of. It’s been devastating. McKinsey have taken a deep dive exploring the pandemics impact on consumers’ lives and have some thoughts on what changes may be sticky/permanent. If your business engages with consumers (or even just a human) use this as a striating point to rethink how, what, and where people will gather information, procure, and experience purchases.
8. PROCRASTINATION: I left this one for last. Warning! Adult content ahead. Cover your eyes for this next sentence if you don’t want to see. A wise, but juvenile friend once said this to me many moons ago: “procrastination is like masturbation, you just end up &^)$ing yourself”. It was funny at the time, but that statement has stuck with me through thick and thin in my adult life…. To be more like Nike and just do it. Chronic procrastination is real and, to be honest, something I struggle with at times especially given the current demand for my attention from a variety of sources - it’s the enemy of cranking out a weekly newsletter while trying to enjoy a morning cup of coffee for example. So don’t wait! Take a read of this two part guide to stopping procrastination using the Fogg behavior model: Part 1 and Part 2. (TL;DR: Behavior = motivation + ability + trigger)
9. BURN RATE: Zoom is an astonishing success story in the SaaS world. Even this week, their earnings call caused over a 40% bump in their stock price in A SINGLE DAY (that delta is a sweet $5B to the CEO if anyone is interested). There are some great insights to the Zoom story and earlier tshie month, Jason Lemkin of SaaStr uncovered a fascinating one - Zoom had a burn rate budget. What the heck is that? Don’t worry, I had the same question. Zoom’s OpEx was the same as gross revenue - the CEO had told the team exactly how much they could spend — as an entire team. Jason sees this as nothing but upside: It will reduce your stress. Increase efficiency. Enhance focus. Not decrease productivity.
10. MISTAKES: A somewhat morbid post-mortem article from Failory who analyzed over 80 startups who have failed and identified some of their common mistakes (some fatal). Marketing problems seem the most abundant (and deadly) - but product-market-fit, market size, and value add are all creeping around too.

POD OF THE WEEK: Learn Fast over Fail fast - this is a great podcast covering the Myths about Failure from Greylock Partners (and Reid Hoffman) 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: VALUE: A value metric is what a company charges for - in modern SaaS that can be per block of users, per transaction, bandwidth, etc, etc. Aligning that pricing value to the value a customer receives is the trick! (that needs tracking). Why does that matter? Well according to Profitwell, who studied about 4,000 companies, the corollary is serious growth (companies using value metrics are growing at double the rate than those companies not using a value metric) AND reduced churn. 
2. COMPETITION: Of course you will always be asked for Market Sizing in a pitch, but how well prepared are you for questions about the competition? (Pro-tip - saying you don't have competitors is red-flag). Read this article from Search Engine Land that outline the steps you can follow to get some quality competitive analysis research in. Pro-tip 2 - as we are all tech people here - do not underestimate the power of G2, product hunt,  or Capterra to set your research foundations.
3. GOVERNANCE: Mark Suster (from Upfront Ventures) has started a series on his Medium Blog covering StartUp Boards. With a follow up article (which I think is very relevant to NZ startups) which shows a board structure based on stage! He also provides a blog post AND a 43 slide presentation on Managing Startup Boards with really interesting (for founders at least) continuous integration/agile approaches to management.
4. USERS: Convincing users (that are not friends and family) to adopt, and pay for, your product at the early stage is a significant milestone. Check this impressive post from Lenny Rachitsky on what he learned unpicking that for some of todays tastes growing B2B businesses.
5. SALES EMAILS: Sweet - a power point deck for y’all. This is from Predictable Revenue on the four pillars they think constitutes a quality sales based email campaign. TL;DR less is more. FYI - there is a resource page at the end of quality helpful additional resources.
6. GROWTH: No matter what all the fancy decks you look at with envy tell you - revenue is NOT linear, like ever. When it comes to solving revenue growth problems, most will jump on the get-more-customers bandwagon. But read this article, centered on MRR as a representative of growth, but asking "what things can a SaaS company do to grow without adding more customers?" TL;DR: 1. Reduce Churn, 2. Upsell/cross-sell, 3. Charge more.
7. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: This is all about preserving as much revenue as possible over time (post purchase) - complementing the post above,  take a (deep) read of this extensive guide for building great customer success teams - it’s not just about limiting churn, but also a department and practice to convince existing customers to buy even more from you. As Jason Lemkin said back in 2015: "Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is”. Want a working example? Chart Mogul expand on this and explain their approach to a (successful) success management strategy.
8. VC IPOs: Pitchbook’s report - Index of Venture-Backed IPOs for Q3 2020 is out. Big (but maybe obvious) key observations: the performance of the newer companies differs radically across factors including sector, size, business model, and market cap - all add up to higher performance (and reward)
9. SEO: Discoverability trumps content marketing and needs to be an endless-part of any modern business strategy.  Moz have a great little guide and here is a pretty good (current) guide from Founder Institute. But how does SEO work if you are part of a larger enterprise? The basics of wining in this category are summarized in this report from DeepCrawl.
10. FRICTION: Every SaaS business process I look at seems to have areas of friction and when it comes to SaaS products, user-based friction becomes a critical aspect to understand and solve. This article breaks user-friction down into 3 types (emotional, cognitive and interactive) and provides tools to help understand and solve for each different type.

POD OF THE WEEK: CASH. Pretty much every SaaS founder: Long term prospects look promising, short term cash sucks. From Hiten Shah and Steli Efti comes a great podcast on How to Improve Cashflow During a Crisis. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: USER ADOPTION - measuring which new users could turn into paying customers (and which are going to drift away). Everything you need to know is in this article - it’s a comprehensive and a very deep dive (because these metrics differ between businesses and between cohorts of users).
2. MANAGEMENT: Favorite/hardest part of a startup?…...Unlocking the potential in your people. Managing a team (and being good at it) is an incredibly hard art and a perishable skill. Take a read of this collection of people management principles with a nice little TL;DR list at the top.
3. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: A lot of SaaS businesses require flat fee based Implementation and deployment cost charges, often captured as revenue from Professional Services. This amount naturally increases with customer size (and complexity) capping out at an average of 11% of all revenue at Enterprise size customers. So why do it? Well according to this Pre-COVID survey $$$$$ -  the number of apps in use has increased by 68% for large companies and 43% for small and mid-size companies since 2015. 
4. SALES: Managing remote sales teams? From the team at Close comes a great read on how to leverage your CRM to keep coaching sales teams remotely.
5. FINTECH: CBInsights released their State Of Fintech Q2'20 Report - it’s similarly bleak to the Q1 report from Business Insider I mentioned a few newsletters back with CBInsights reporting the number of deals continued to drop (397 compared to 452 last Q, which was already down significantly from Q4 2019). Total dollars invested though is up - ($9.3B compared to $7.95B last Q) - but mist of that was dues to mega rounds ($100m and above)
6. API: You’ve probably heard of them - but what the hell do they do and why should I care? An API is a simple code interface that helps two applications communicate without having to know the details of the other application here is a non-technical explanation if you want more.  According to this report from Pandium the average SaaS company has an average of 15 API-based product integrations and some of those integrations can be a serious driver of revenue.
7. SPEED MATTERS: I write this newsletter during my weekly morning coffee - I prioritize speed and appreciating the content over spelling, editorial tightness, and grammar. (But big shout to Grammarly who I outsource all that too) James Somers feels the same. As does Google, they obviously make speed a priority for their tech stack - Speed is very much a UX moat for tech companies. Netflix is my favorite great speed-focused tech company, who (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy-experience solutions.
8. ONBOARDING: Doing this well is key to increasing value, lowering churn and creating advocates. From HeavyBit here is a 4 phase plan and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality. I also love me a good working example, so take a look at this onboarding teardown from the Product-Led Institute.
9. GROWTH: Using Zoom and Twilio as examples (both also notable product led) a16z make the case that the new era of enterprise go-to-market requires growth-plus-sales - which is just a fancy-pants way of highlighting the evolution in customer buying behavior for high end B2B. Great read.
10. DATA: You like Data Lakes? Tomasz Tunguz presented at the first conference on cloud data lakes last month, the link to the slides is here. This is technical stuff but highlights are data systems are no longer just the domain of IT and are now owned by a variety of different departments. Which means these data systems need to be meshed (that's the Lake!) - and the tools exist now to sanitize, query, instrument and interpret the data in ways that were un-imaginable just a handful of years ago.

POD OF THE WEEK: Want to build a sales culture that attracts, and retains, top performers? How to build a culture that attracts top performers with Justin Welsh. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK - ARPU: Average revenue per user (ARPU) is one of the most important measures needed to understand the quality of revenue SaaS companies generate and how that quality can shift over time. This article and Animal: ARPU chart is really informative to help determine how to validate the right-size of customers (with their animal totems).
2. INVESTING: Jason Lemkin lists 11 signs a VC can use to predict if a venture investment will work out and 10 further hacks to have happier investors.
3. CONTENT MARKETING: Heavy Bit makes the case that now more than ever is the time to double down on content. Also, spot quiz hotshot - how long should a Blog Post be? Hypothetically this long (but also literally not that long - its a long-ass blog post).
4. MARKET SIZING: The dreaded slide on everyone's pitch deck. What's the size of the market. TL;DR if the market is not huge, same with your startup. Understanding the nuances of TAM, TOM and SOM is a great way to get started understanding market sizes as it applies to your business and the business problem your startup solves. 
5. LANDING PAGES: Check this site out - a collection of the best landing pages with a focus on copywriting and design - also (this is a repeat-post) IceBreakerVC lists best practices for good landing page planning and strategy. 
6. ANXIETY: HEY!……….Do you constantly worry that something is always on fire within your startup? Well don’t worry about worrying about it being normal or not - it is (especially if you are venture-backed). Just read this article and hopefully, you feel some comfort that the discomfort you feel - everybody feels! Don’t believe me - well go check out this Facebook group (and join me and other startup leaders) to share your experiences and challenges
7. PLG (aka Product Lead Growth) - as a refresher read this to understand the 4 basic principles behind PLG and then check this article out that goes into lengthy detail of how to design for PLG across the customer journey (and creating a flywheel) - trying to get a user to a point at which they understand the value they can get from your product (aka the AHA moment).
8. FLS (aka Founder Led Sales) are critical at the early stages of a startup. But most founders are not experts at selling. Something you can relate with? If so check this guide from Kunal Jasty on 10 lessons for startup founders to get their first 10 sales.
9. DEMAND: From Campbell Brown of PredictHQ (who knows a few things about demand) - is a pandemic relevant article discussing demand forecasting for 2020 and beyond now that the ability to do that traditionally took a massive dump in Q1. TL;DR demand forecast will be wrong for at least the next 3-12 months, be prepared and pay attention to geographic disparities.
10. SPEED: First Round Capital  have their take on speed this week but top tech companies are top performers and ,market differentiators in-part due to the fact that they operate at a cadence that is faster than most. It’s all about execution and heartbeat, which requires a fierce focus and prioritization.

​
POD OF THE WEEK: This is a great extension for #6 above. Don’t keep all your worry to yourself listen to the Startup Chat talk all about their worries (and how to reframe them)
BONUS: Looking for some good reads? Check this list of Free eBooks targeting Techy/Maker/Entrepreneury peoples - I’ve already added 4 of them to my Kindle!

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Product-Market-Fit. Wait it’s a metric? According to Jeff Chang - you betcha: The best metric for determining quantitative product market fit.
2. MARKETING: In early-stage start-up land, often time marketing is an after-thought. The Founder Coach lists seven things he wished he knew about Marketing early on and HeavyBit have a great article and video on early-stage positioning - one of the best things you can do starting out. Not sure how you rank? Go take the Tomasz Tunguz Marketing Scorecard.
3. SALES: McKinsey discuss strategies companies can leverage to boost the resiliency and sense of urgency of their sales teams to try to recapture lost revenues. Also you o
4. SDR RAMP: According to past studies, time to ramp for an SDR averages about 3.2 months. From Saleshacker here are some tips and tricks to make this ramp time as effective and successful as possible.
5. PRICING: Ah! The ever continual experiment of never-quite-right. Chargify has a list of 5 pricing scenarios to test as a SaaS company, with real examples to compare and Point Nine Capital has 9 awesome pricing strategy experiments - including just straight-up charging more, try that one asap. Jon Lemkin also asks - what’s better, monthly or annual pricing? (TL;DR - the answer is yes!)
6. CAPITAL: We’re two quarters into Covid and from a VC lens, Tomasz Tunguz observes that the Seed, Series B, and Series C markets are all down (37%, 23%, and 29%, respectively) and the total number of rounds are also down across the board. VC’s are currently well-funded still, but holding tight to those purse strings. Which is interesting as Jason Lemkin points out - Many SaaS Companies are beneficiaries of the pandemic, in usage and growth, which means, hypothetically, that VC’s portfolios (even factoring in the attraction of certain industries such as Travel Tech) should be thriving. 
7. ADJACENT USERS: This is one for your Startup dictionaries. From the Andrew Chen (a16z) blog is this article that that uses Instagram’s growth to describe the concept.
8. ENTERPRISE: Another bookmark for me! A comprehensive page dedicated to SaaS businesses targeting enterprise, from how to sell to how to build for the high end of town.
9. OKRs: Objectives and Key results. Pioneered by Google a few years back, OKR’s have emerged as a part of the suite of modern product and company best practices (that include Lean, Agile and Jobs-To-Be-Done frameworks). But are they for you? Check this SVPG overview, then head over to Heavybit who have a great article on steps to get started for the first time within your organization. 
10. MANAGEMENT: IMO - one of the hardest (and most rewarding) parts of running a Startup? Managing the people. I’ve bookmarked this one post, it’s one I’m going to re-read a lot - 9 people management principles. TL;DR - just read it!

​
POD OF THE WEEK: Finding Product-Market Fit in the new normal, with Des Traynor from Intercom

BONUS: Looking to accelerate your career? Andrew Chen from A16z just announced that applications are now open for the Reforge 2020 Career Accelerator Programs across a whole bunch of operator roles - cross-functional growth, marketing, and product. Apply here. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: NDR. Net Dollar Retention is an important metric in the new world of Product Led Growth (SEE #2 BELOW). It’s used to help answer the following: Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend? Tomasz Tunguz writes in detail about this and Crunchbase does the work to calculate what good NDR benchmarks should look like. 
2. VENTURE:  The 95 page CB Insights MoneyTree Report Q2’20 is now out with some optimistic news. The number of deals is up (1,374 for the Q compared to 1,336 last Q) and Seed rounds have seen gains after a long (pre-pandemic) decline. On the other side of VC town, the number of quarterly mega-rounds (rounds worth $100m) also hit a new record (69). Other notable metrics - M&A activity dropped significantly - 120 exits compared to 155 in Q1’20.
3. SECURITY, SECURITY, SECURITY: Security should be part of your dev cycle but also know your weak spots. Founder Institute discusses 6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack that may be a bit leaky.
4. WEBSITE: I was on a local cafe’s website earlier this week trying to check out the menu ahead of a meeting and the site was terrible, resisting all my efforts to access a menu (something I’m sure, beside an address or phone number, is the reason people would seek it out) so I thought of this article from Smashing Magazine this week, asking the question “Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors”? TL;DR - remove the noise and focus on the jobs you want the website to do.
5. BRANDS: Just how much does brand matter in B2B?….put your bias away as it's apparently a lot according to this article and this one. Need to get started or run a branding review? Check this article on how to get started.
6. PITCH: Now you have your brand sorted via the above post. It’s time to sort the pitch. This is part one of a two-part series from The Dyess Group who a) do this for a job, and b) reviewed 50 pitch decks and analyzed 4 UX techniques to find out.  TL;DR Delete a boat-load of words from your pitch deck right away.
7. CHURN: In our current comic climate, crisis-driven product churn is a legitimate thing as most businesses are practicing austerity by default. As I’ve mentioned quite often in the past acquiring new customers is much more expensive than retaining an existing one. Creating a culture of customer retention is one of the best things to do, especially during a pandemic. This article discusses ways to make that happen.
8. GROWTH: To complement the article above on retention - as well as focusing on customer retention, now is also the ideal time for a startup to prepare for growth by getting data, CRM’s, processes, and lead get all in order.
9. DATA: I don’t think I have more to add than the title of this article: "You Cannot Be Data-Driven Without Experimentation”, well OK fine, I do have more to say: The opposite of that is also a truth to hammer home "You Cannot run experiments successfully without being data-driven”. We all overestimate our experimentation skills AND our Data collection skills.
10. FREE-ER: It’s not necessarily a time to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy? But it’s probably a good time to think about more free as a sales strategy - according to Jason Lemkin from Saastr - more free seems to be working well these days. BTW Freemium is not just for B2C businesses like Dropbox and Spotify. Freemium is now a strategy employed in gaming,  Enterprise, Cloud, and Online Payments. 

​
POD OF THE WEEK: A great discussion on what the future of B2B marketing may look like. Great insights in customer experience automation vs. marketing automation, changes in Go To Market and positioning/story.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Cohort Analysis (free Cohort Analysis template!). GoPractice have a Product focused article on how to forecast key product metrics through cohort analysis and The Startup take a look at this metric from a VC Due Diligence perspective.
2. MARKETING: A SaaS 101 primer.  From the team at SaaStock is 1) a 20-page PDF guide to SaaS Marketing and 2) pulled from their last (non-virtual) conference are 4 of their top marketing Sessions.
3. DEVELOPERS: This is a really in-depth report from Stripe on the fiscal benefits of developers (They calculate it at $3 trillion GDP globally) and it also highlights the opportunity costs of bad code and technical debt - something that NZ startups such as RayGun and Codelingo are trying to help solve
4. PRODUCTIVITY: OK, real talk - now that we are all WFH and Remote Work is here to say, we have eliminated commutes, limited lengthy meetings, and small talk. This means that you have freed up a lot of time to tackle real tasks, right? Well according to the New York Times companies such as Cisco and Microsoft agree and have actually observed a productivity bump. Whoop! But there is a downside. According to this report, Work-life integration is hard - 40% of people surveyed experienced Zoom Mental exhaustion and this article from Forbes expands on some of that WFH negativity
5. GDPR: Do you have customers based in Europe (or that are even European Citizens)? You need to understand GDPR. Consent Cookie Walls are no longer compliant FYI. Lucky for you (or you Devs) the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) just published this GDPR guide for developers. Covering what needs to be considered at each stage of a project to ensure it adheres to GDPR guidelines (and also offering best practices and great tops and thematic files).  GitHub version here for all you hardcore GitHub users.
6. CYBER: Fun fact: 80% of hacking-related data breaches involve stolen or reused credentials (you can check here if you have compromised email addresses AND, more importantly, any of your Passwords breached). CB Insights have just released a new report on CyberSecurity Trends for 2020 and beyond (downloadable PDF). Threats are on the rise so it’s a compelling read/must read for any Tech based startup. Luckily for us there are a bunch of companies addressing password-less verification, privacy by design, and decentralized digital identities.
7. CAPITAL: If you haven’t seen this yet, bookmark away. This is a Tech Crunch directory of the most active and engaged investors in the VC industry today (perf reviewed - so ones recommended by founders).
8. PRODUCT: As this article (and accompanying podcast) points out -  all product work is not created (and executed) equally. Part of the problem is a singular approach is not the right strategy as there are different kinds of product work, each with their own processes, measures of success, and strategies.
9. SALES: Of the remote kind are now the norm. Managing and coaching a distributed team takes a modified approach. This article from Forbes comes a great article for anyone managing a sales team of seven methods sales leaders can use right now to coach remote teams.
10. PR: To me PR is kinda like SEO - I know I need it, but I don't get how to make it work effectively. ChartMoguls’ ears must have been burning with my commentary as they released this article late last month on PR for SaaS -  just at the time I needed to read it.

​
POD OF THE WEEK: I first heard Hiten Shah talk at a HeavyBit event a couple of years ago and have been a fan since. This podcast is a good example of his quality commentary - covering his experiences over the last 20 years in tech.

Welcome to the Benchmark special! I’ve been asked for this a few times and I’m on the road this week. So this is a compilation of benchmark data reported from across the webs….

1. SKOK: David Skok is a legend in the SaaS world and I have written about his work extensively in the past, as well as convincing him to speak at events. His 2019 annual report in partnership with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) is here - comprehensive benchmarks for any SaaS business. 
2. EXPANSION Acquiring customers Isn’t enough for long-term success, expansion strategies are pragmatic growth practices that any good SaaS company needs to get a grip on as 37% of new ARR bookings is attributable to cross-sell/up-sell activities. Here is what good expansion looks like. OpenView Partners have gone to town to benchmark this metric with an extensive Expansion SaaS Benchmarks report. Product Led Growth businesses lead the pack!
3. RETENTION. To compliment #2 above, retention is deeply related to expansion in regard to sustainable growth, and here is what good retention goals should be benchmarked against and how to optimize them.
4. CAC: This one needs nuance, so the David Skok report referenced at #1 has broken it down into blended, new, up-sell, and expansion. Median blended is every $1 of ARR generated costs $1.14. Net new is almost double ($1.34) of up-sell ($0.78) and 3x expansion (sitting at a neat $0.50). This chart alone highlights why having a customer-focused strategy is critical for growth. 
5. GROWTH: Median organic ARR growth for the year surveyed (2018) was 36%. Thus is across 424 SaaS businesses distributed globally (but 2/3 of which were US-domiciled). This rate is pretty evenly split across different contract size businesses - so there is no obvious relationship between ACV and growth. Companies surveyed average median ARR of $8.7m 
6. MARKETING AND SALES: Hubspot continues to benchmark Pandemic-times data for core business metrics like website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates, and more (aggregated from their global customer base of over 70,000 companies). It’s an incredibly useful tool as a benchmark to measure your business against. Explore all the benchmark data here or check this week's summary here. Chorus.ai is doing something similar by benchmarking sales organizations (daily!) across their user base. A recent Tomasz Tunguz summary can be found here.
7. GTM: Current and pragmatic Go-To-Market benchmarks are presented in this deck from Tomasz Tunguz and the team at Redpoint Ventures. Some good findings from their survey: 1) If SDR/BDR teams hit their numbers, so do Account Executives; 2) Most sales teams ramp Account Executives in about six months; 3) Marketing teams spend 5-10% of a companies ARR. David Skok also observes that the primary mode of Sales and Marketing efforts remains Field Sales based, with Inside Sales taking a very close second strategy for smaller businesses (under $10m ARR)
8. WEB VITALS: Optimizing a User Experience is key to the long term success of any service or product. Google is all over this and just launched Web Vitals, a program that offers developers guidance about user experience. It’s benchmarking very Google based metrics: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
9. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: It’s a weird open secret that a lot of B2B SaaS businesses generate a significant amount of revenue from implementation and deployment projects, often captured as revenue from Professional Services, due to deployment and configuration complexity. So what are the revenue benchmarks for a SaaS Business to captured revenue through professional services? On average it caps out at 11% of all annual revenue with Enterprise focused businesses but even at the lower end of town it’s still 5% of revenues with SMB focused businesses.
10. SPEND: Figuring out how to optimize marketing spend and growth rate is a key question and this study doesn’t show great benchmarks - the percentage of revenue in pretty much equals percentage growth out, but with an ever-increasing range of outcomes as spend increases per business. More solid benchmarks are with the Sales vs Marketing spend ratios which stay at about 2:1 regardless of market-facing strategies (although Mixed is a bit of an outlier). 

POD OF THE WEEK: Of course it’s going to be How to Succeed at SaaS with David Skok
​
BONUS: INFLUENCERS - Across multiple forms of media, influencer ads spark a greater emotional response and stick with users for longer than non-influencer ads do. Want more? Here is the 2019 benchmark report for influencer marketing. Influencer marketing spend is projected to hit as high as $15 billion globally by 2022.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Landing Page Metrics - you may not need 25,000 landing pages like Zapier does, but a well designed and personalized landing page can make a huge impact. ConvertKit lists the 5 key metrics for measuring the success of landing pages (and how to track them). To back that up, IceBreakerVC lists best practices for good landing page planning and strategy. 
2. WEBSITE: To compliment #1 above, optimizing the user experience (especially on mobile) can significantly boost the bottom line of a business, for example, improving site load times by just 0.1 second can increase conversion rates by up to 8%. Check this page from Google to review your site (and also your competitors sites) to see how you measure up and review what changes can be made.
3. WOMEN IN TECH: A Female Founders Fund survey investigating 111 companies found 20% of women-led companies expect increased revenue next year. Doesn’t sound great? Well that Covid for ya, as this metric is in comparison to the average of 12% of all companies expecting increases in revenue.  500 Startups also looked into the disproportionate (and negative) effects of coronavirus on female and minority founders.
4. MARKETING: I love some good alliterative guides, so here are the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place and Promotion). It seems so basic in hindsight, so get all hindsightful and read the article, which does a really good job of making it all sound so obvious.
5. GTM: Current and pragmatic Go-To-Market benchmarks are presented in this deck from Tomasz Tunguz and the team at Redpoint Ventures. Some good findings from their survey: 1) If SDR/BDR teams hit their numbers, so do Account Executives; 2) Most sales teams ramp Account Executives in about six months; 3) Marketing teams spend 5-10% of a companies ARR.
6. NO-CODE: Welcome to the world of no-code. Technology infrastructure is becoming so commoditized and abstracted that we have now reached a point in time where web services, apps, and integrations can be provisioned visually with zero amounts of code written.  Last week AWS legitimized this practice into the main-stream and entered the no-code world, launching the beta version of Amazon Honeycode, a tool that makes it possible to build web and mobile applications without coding. 
7. PITCH DECKS: Why recreate the pitch-wheel? Alexander Jarvis has compiled a monster collection (139) of funded pitch decks here (including AirBnB, LinkedIn, Intercom, Transferwise, Canva, and Sendgrid).
8. DATA: FYI/PSA - the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is going into effect in 2020, which means that businesses (esp SaaS ones) need to comply with a new set of provisions designed to protect the privacy of California consumer data - find more on the requirements here.
9. CHAOS: OK - hear me out on this one: There has never been a more significant time for a different way of thinking about change in modern organizations. Digital Transformations are important, strategically. But the mindset needed requires a certain kind of improv style to get there - as the systems in place that are needed to change or pivot are usually very complex - change IS chaos. So take some time to read this article to understand more of what this is about - I also aspire to have the title of "Chaos Manager" one day...
10. EMAIL: DEEP DIVE. When it comes to outbound marketing, email works best. Yes, organic search is consistently the biggest source of traffic (Driving up to 68% of all traffic). Email accounts for less than 5% of traffic, on average, but has an incredibly high ROI, upwards of 3,800%!!! Digital Olympus has a great guide on effective email outreach (HINT: This takes time and effort!), Andrea Bosoni gives an IRL story about how he worked hard to improve email open rates and Gong provide a bunch (43 to be exact) highly effective Call-To-Action templates you can use in email campaigns. 

​
POD OF THE WEEK: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield talks about competing with Microsoft, the future of work (now we are all using his app), and managing all those notifications.

BONUS: To compliment 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Customer Loyalty - it’s actually an amalgam of metrics - Net Promoter Score (shout out to Ask Nicely), CSAT (shoutout to Thematic), Churn Rate, and MRR. Profitwell describes a five-step process to develop a customer loyalty program here.
2. MARKETING: So how do you measure up as a business? Get started here with the 9 marketing disciplines of great SaaS companies, created by the former CMO of Zendesk and Slack, then complete the Marketing Scorecard Spreadsheet here, scoring each on a 1 to 10 scale. A deeper explainer is on this post.
3. EXPANSION and RETENTION: Acquiring customers Isn’t enough, expansion and retention are growth practices any good SaaS company needs to get a grip on. They are both deeply related so in this deep dive let's get started with benchmarking. Here is what good expansion looks like and here is what good retention goals should be benchmarked against and how to optimize them.
4. SECURITY: The ever-increasing adoption of cloud-based software creates more exposure to bad actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities. Tech companies should be continually concerned about the security of the software being built. OWASP can help you out here - it’s a foundation working to improve the security of software and maintains a Top 10 list of the most critical security risks to web applications.
5. PITCH: If you are looking to raise capital, burn this into memory: You have 2-4 slides tops to grab the attention of an investor. Use those slides wisely and don’t go beyond 12-15 TOTAL. Oh and also do these 4 things as a business to be VC friendly.
6. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: It’s a weird open secret that a lot of B2B SaaS businesses generate a significant amount of revenue from implementation and deployment projects, often captured as revenue from Professional Services, due to deployment and configuration complexity. So what are the revenue benchmarks for a SaaS Business to captured revenue through professional services? On average it caps out at 11% of all annual revenue with Enterprise focused businesses but even at the lower end of town it’s still 5% of revenues with SMB focused businesses.
7. SALES: The Series A funding round is a stamp of approval, product-market-fit is evident and the capital is expected to be spent on growth. PointNine Capital has a great article on how to build a sales engine at Series A.
8. BUILD or BUY: I’m constantly in a debate (mainly with myself) of whether to build or integrate with an existing app/service to solve a problem in my business or introduce a new feature on behalf of a customer/feature request. So (like me), you should read this article to get a better grip on assessing the pros and cons of either a build or buy strategy.
9. ED-TECH: Not often referenced in this newsletter - but the sector has become a hotspot and a lifeline in eduction during the COVID-19 pandemic. So how impactful are the technologies to learning pedagogies outside of the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom? McKinsey have an extensive report here  TL;DR - it depends on who, how, where and what - there are gaps.
10. WEBSITE: GrowthInsider have released a great and comprehensive list of the biggest mistakes made on websites and to flip that in a more positive light, here are some ways you can supercharge your website (using research). 
    ​
    

POD OF THE WEEK: I love good growth stories and I also love DataDog (I'm a customer). So check out how they got to over a half BILLION in revenue with their product led go-to-market strategy. 

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Activation Rate: According to Jason Lemkin, Activation Rate is one of the 3-4 most important metrics in SaaS. His observation is pretty pragmatic: 90% or more of your customers need to activate in the shortest practical time.  And you need to track this, measure it, and discuss it weekly.  Every week. If you don’t, so much of that hard work is down the drain. Read more on his thought here.
2. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: This is a getting-started deep-dive. We all have a pretty good idea of what Customer Success is and why it’s important (if not read this), but getting started can be a bit tricky and overwhelming. Read this article to better understand how to create a customer success journey
3. PRICING: Should always be viewed as a continual experiment of never-quite-right. Chargify has a list of 5 pricing scenarios to test as a SaaS company, with real examples to compare.
4. VENTURE CAPITAL: So, are VC’s still investing? This was a great presentation from Point Nine Capital during last months virtual SaaStr Summit and here is the accompanying article.
5. COMMISSIONS: How to pay your different sales channels? Commission levels of sales are pretty stable across sale types at about 10-14%. Commissions on renewals is only 3% and up-sell is 9% - however about 50% of the time this is not paid at all. (Bringing up another subject on how much revenue a Customer Service Manager can manage).
6. RENEWALS (deep dive): To add onto above, I’ll keep banging this drum: Customer Success is CRITICAL to the sustainable growth of a modern tech business. Landing a customer is (obviously) important keep in mind costs - being just acquisition focused is WAAAY expensive (Costing about $1.10+ per $1 of ARR). Compare that to the cost of retaining or up-selling existing customers (about 12c-15c per $1ARR) - that’s 8 times cheaper. Finding a repeatable scalable sales processes is something required to scale. But don’t be a purely acquisition focused business, give some love and attention toward building out the same repeatable-scaleable process for renewals. Also both of these revenue teams need to be aligned.
7. OUTBOUND SALES: Forget Netflix, do you want some Outbound Sales TV? Yeah! The team at predictable revenue have been running over 50 outbound sales experiments using good ol’ scientific methods to find out what works best (and what doesn’t.). Watch the whole series on YouTube!
8. DESIGN: Bringing good design into different elements of a business actually has massive benefits. Design led businesses outperform the FTSE 100 by 200%. Marvel have got you covered on how to get started and growth based Design is my new my sub-specialty fav - merging typical HCD/Empathy Design but adding in the pragmatism of designing the jobs that need to be done
9. ZOOM: Dramatic post title - but also a fascinating read: Why Zoom doesn't have product/market fit. Say whaaaaaaaat now? Full disclosure: I participated in this survey by Hiten Shah. Based on the survey results (but also accepting that the respondents may represent a bias population) Hiten makes that case that Zoom has zoom work to do - esp correlated to it’s new fangled NPS of 21 (not terrible, just not great).
10. PITCH: So the days of an in-person pitch meeting to a VC are mostly behind us (at least for now). Pitching over Zoom is where we are. Before you focus on getting the perfect lighting though - check these 16 rookie errors founder make pitching to VC’s from Jason Lemkin. 

​POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting number 8 above is the First Round Podcast on getting started with Growth Design from head of Growth Design at Dropbox and Pintrest

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Predictive Churn. Churn is a key metric for every SaaS Business - but it’s a metric of hindsight and not exactly useful for future forecasts apart from presumptions based on past trends. So checkout this tool (another handy Google Sheet) from Newfund as a way to analyze the strength of revenues streams for any B2B startup. A complimentary article outlining the methodology behind the predictive churn tool is here (you should read this first).
2. REVOPS: aka Revenue Operations is definitely a thing and it needs to be. You may already be practicing this without using the phrase - it’s a way too maximize revenues and in this Age of the Customer it’s also a way to align operational excellence around the customer experience. Here is a good introductory article from Chargebee on RevOps and here are 3 nuggets of wisdom from some significant RevOps leaders.
3. GROWTH: To compliment above, should a “Growth Team” be party of your revenue strategy? Growth is a fairly generic term, so take a read of this article from Andy Boyd who reviews the benefits of such a team, especially important as there has never been a more important time to focus on efficient growth.
4. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: Customer behaviors have changed dramatically in the past few months and now is the time to start a) Evaluating current customer experience strategies and b) Changing them to gain an advantage during the global impact of Covid-19. McKinsey has an article on the impact and trends in customer behavior during this pandemic era, mapping out ones they feel are here to stay - emphasizing that primarily, recoveries will be digital. This is signaling a great opportunity for tech companies in this post-COVID economy - which McKinsey is also labelling “The Careful Economy".
5. TRUST: This is an extension from the above reference to the Careful Economy, but worth separating out as, according to Godard Abel (Co-Founder and CEO at G2, who know a few things about trust), SaaS buyers are increasingly more skeptical, suspicious, and unconvinced in this current post/current pandemic world. Making it harder to market and sell software and services than ever before.
6. MARKETING: To drive marketing-based results via relevant content, a good content strategy is (obviously) key. ContentTools (now part of Growth hackers) has a five step guide to develop a great Content Strategy. Want a shortcut? I got ya, here are 5 B2B examples you can copy.
7. CAPITAL: We are seeing a growing world of Debt in the Venture and SaaS world…..and according to Nathan Latka, thats a good thing and here is why (from Tomasz Tunguz in 2017).
8. SALES: I’m sure you have all seen it - a salesforce that likes to cherry pick leads or opportunties based on effort and the source of the lead. It’s a form of confirmation bias that leads to missed opportunities and revenue. So here is an interesting thought exercise - what if you wrapped an SLA around leads? Where all leads need to be followed up on.
9. ONBOARDING: Good onboarding is a good investment -  it impacts product activation and adoption (which improves retention). Here is an onboarding checklist with examples & metrics and, at minimum, good onboarding emails are needed - here are 8 tips to writing great ones.
10. POC’s: (aka Proof of Concepts) in enterprise sales are a powerful sales tool and critical part of the customer journey. But often times they can be just as big an anchor in sales as they can be an accelerator. Here are some pro tips if your POC’s get stuck.

POD OF THE WEEK: I love good growth stories. Here are the 7 Marketing Steps Lemlist took to get to $1m ARR