# Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 23, 2021

Published: 23 July 2021
Canonical: https://www.top10in.tech/posts/week-ending-july-23-2021

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 because cash-in-the-bank is THE critical number for a SaaS company to monitor in my experience. 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 our bank account](https://tomtunguz.com/month-zero-cash-on-cash/)?

2. SPEND:

Figuring out how to optimize marketing spend with growth rate is a key question and this study doesn’t show amazing benchmarks for us all - [the percentage of inbound revenue pretty much equals the percentage of growth out](https://dskok-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/img_5d9ca9ffa3166-e1570548255940.png), but there is an ever-increasing range of outcomes as spend increases per business. Less mediocre benchmarks are with the Sales vs Marketing spend ratios [which stay at about 2:1](https://dskok-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/img_5d9caac4cd7f7-e1570548437143.png) regardless of market-facing strategies (although Mixed is a bit of an outlier).

3. 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](https://medium.com/@brooke.land/professional-services-and-customer-success-in-saas-startups-7ea002826b4d), 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%](https://dskok-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/img_5d9cb5d8cdd26-e1570551296442.png) 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.

4. MISTAKES:

A somewhat morbid post-mortem article from Failory who[ analyzed over 80 startups who have failed and identified some of their common mistakes](https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-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.

5. SDRs:

The answer to the question "what does an SDR do?" is pretty unique to whoever is responding. So [here is some good empirical survey-based insight on the things an SDR Team does](https://www.dropbox.com/s/y793sj8bqz2sztn/Bloobirds-ebook-modern-sdr-role-report.pdf?dl=0) within a revenue organization to add to your job descriptions. It's way more than just prospecting including research, social media, content creation, and.....watch out all you AEs....closing.

6. CHURN:

I love myself a good infographic, so [take a good look at this one on Churn prevention](https://cdn.brightback.com/assets/State-of-Industry-2021/infographic-effective-ways-mitigate-churn.pdf) complete with steps to take at every stage in the customer lifecycle and the good old involuntary churn prevention - extra tactics on that [here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v04fp69gdyh30c2/B2B%20Saas_v2.pdf?dl=0) (another infographic!)

7. PREDICTABLE REVENUE:

It's the #1 reason investors love SaaS. I [may give Salesforce a hard time ](https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-salesforce-would-love-to-move-from-oracle-databases-muzzle-ellison-but-can-they-succeed/)occasionally - but over 20 years ago, they launched the methodology of Predictable Revenue, which then became a sales guide published way back in 2011 by Aaron Ross - [Crib Notes PDF pf that book is downloadable here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ctl93ikg24t7siz/Predictable-Revenue-Methodology.pdf?dl=0.).

8. REVENUE MANAGEMENT:

Tagging on to #7 above - revenue management is [the system of setting prices and adjusting them based on supply and demand](https://www.chargify.com/blog/infographic-the-evolution-of-revenue-management/?ref=saas-weekly) (thanks for the infographic Chargify). In SaaS, which is all about predictability, this is really important, with RevOps being a new category of practice within maturing SaaS companies.

9. [**A/B**](https://www.crazyegg.com/ab-testing)**TESTS:** Everything is a hypothesis in a startup and testing should be embedded into everything you try towards growth and product. When conducting experiments such as A/B tests, get started with [this Step-by-Step Guide](https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/ab-testing-google-analytics/). Go Practice has [some great advice on how to make these experiments run faster](https://gopractice.io/blog/ab-tests-take-longer-than-should/).

10. CASE STUDY:

Product hunt has the metric of being everywhere - so [how did it get to be the place to discover the new next big thing](https://review.firstround.com/Product-Hunt-is-Everywhere-This-is-How-It-Got-There)?

 POD OF THE WEEK:

Customer churn is the bane of SaaS businesses - [data can help understand the causes of churn and take action to reduce it](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FaTXmRHLSiyfrir3Wzbgl).