Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 10, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Retention. A blended retention/acquisition strategy is critical for the long-term sustainability of a SaaS business, but what are the core retention metrics to monitor? Take a read here of how to measure and improve the ones on the list.
2. QUOTA 1/2: Hands up if you're forecasting or re-forecasting for 2022! Compensating SaaS Sales Reps is complicated and expensive. This blog post from Kyle Racki of Proposify has a pretty comprehensive guide on setting quotas and commissions. But here is a quick shortcut to make it easy for all you Account Executives: The average annual quota in this report from David Skok and Co is $770K in ACV, and on average, the quota was  5.3X OTE. An expanded top10inTech teardown of that report (which admittedly is from 2017, so starting to get a bit long in the tooth) can be found here.
3. QUOTA 2/2: Thought-provoking article: Your Sales Team has a Sales Quota. Your Marketing team has to have a quota too - as they are also part of your revenue team. Getting both sales and marketing teams aligned beyond quota is a fundamental trick, and Tomasz Tunguz has a quick diagnostic to determine if your sales and marketing teams are working well together.
4. FORECASTS: Outside of setting quotas, running a SaaS business relies heavily on cash flow - so it is imperative to forecast future revenue to avoid a cash crunch when trying to scale. So check this article covering Sales Forecasts and Pipeline Reviews: Why and How from a cash perspective.
5. PITCH: The days of mandatory in-person pitch meetings to a VC are mostly behind us (at least for the foreseeable future). Pitching over Zoom is where we are at. Before you focus on getting the perfect lighting, though - check these 16 rookie errors founders make pitching to VCs from Jason Lemkin and read here on how you will be Zoom-judged by the VCs you are pitching to.
6. OPTIONS and ESOP: Stock options are necessary for hiring and retaining the best talent in this hyper-competitive Startup Land. So how can companies build an effective option plan? During a call this week, I was referred to this site earlier this week that has compiled a set of benchmark data, comprising over 20,000 option grants from more than 1,650 startups across the US and Europe sorted by Seed or Venture stage.
7. SOCIAL MEDIA: 2021 was a bit bonkers (ask Google), especially in the Social Media world. So how will 2022 fare? Take a read of this report from HubSpot and Talkwalker for 2022 Social Media Trends - they have a pretty good Top 10 list.
8. MULTIPLES: Public SaaS and Tech companies suffered a beat down earlier this month. Did it have any significant impact on multiples of their revenue? Overall Stats: Median: 12.3x, Top 5 Median: 49.0x, 3 Month Trailing Average: 15.5x, 1 Year Trailing Average: 16.0x - that's a measurable downturn but keep in mind these numbers are still 86% above pre-covid highs.
9. UX: Optimizing a User Experience is critical to the long-term success of any service or product. Google has Web Vitals, a program that offers developers guidance about best practice benchmarks on user experience. First, Round Capital has a DEEEEEP dive/crash Course for Founders on the principles of UX Research from people at Zoom, Zapier, and Dropbox.
10. CASE STUDY: Category Creation is the Holy Grail - we all want to be up, and to the right is one of those Gartner/Forrester Quadrant reports. So here is how Neo4 did it. Here is another story from Gett and a warts-and-all case story about how OKTA made their category creation happen via Bessemer Venture Partners.

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POD OF THE WEEK: Financial Reporting for Startups is something every founder has to up-skill at - this webinar (replay) covers operational and financial forecasts. Answering all those hairy questions - such as how do I forecast ARR when in startup mode?