February 05th, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Retention. Long-term retention is the foundation of sustainable product growth. Retention is viewed differently in different industries. Gaming companies have 1, 7, and 30-day retention rate metrics and Segment has a great guide on how to measure and improve customer retention
2. COLD CALLS: 2% of today’s cold calls actually result in meetings and 63% of sales professionals say it’s what they dislike most about their jobs. However - 78% of decision-makers have taken an appointment or attended an event as a result of a cold call - so how do you be the latter not the former? ZoomInfo has a download for you. Jason Bay also has some methods to optimize response rates and Gong has some additional recommendations on cold calling.
3. FEEDBACK: No-one likes to be told they are doing a poor job. Delivering this news can be pretty anxiety-ridden. But we all have to do it. Here are some great tips for delivering that news well and when it comes to management - I love some thought-provoking rules - so here are 6 counterintuitive ones from First Round Capital.
4. CAPITAL: In the current/post COVID tech world, it doesn’t have to always be about Venture Capital or equity (and dilution) when looking to finance. Revenue-based financing is quickly becoming a popular way for startups to raise funds without sacrificing equity, with the rise of significant services such as Lighter Capital and The 20-Minute Term Sheet in the past couple of years. Here is how it works and what these financiers care about. HINT: It’s ARR and growth. From the SaaS CFO here is the Founder’s Guide to Venture Debt with advantages vs disadvantages of Debt vs Equity.
5. FREEMIUM: It's a new year and a new Freemium posting. This is extensive, so definitely bookmark-able as it covers a lot of detail on how to make Freemium models work.
6. PREDICTABLE REVENUE: It's the #1 reason investors love SaaS. I may give Salesforce a hard time occasionally - but almost 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.
7. REVENUE MANAGEMENT: Tagging on to #6 above - revenue management is the system of setting prices and adjusting them based on supply and demand (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. 
8. SECURITY: Back-of-the-napkin Math tells us that about 88% of all SaaS is now sitting on public-cloud. But building on a major cloud provider’s platform doesn’t make your products secure. This is a great video and transcript hosted by HeavyBit covering the core tenets of modern cloud infrastructure security.
9. SILICON CLOUD: Here is a concept for you - (as I predicted daaaaaays ago) Geography is becoming way less of a thing. In the current portfolio of Initialized Capital (who I actually am not quite sure why they call themselves "the honeybadgers of Venture") fewer than one-third of the companies are based in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley. In this survey, more than 40 percent of founders say that the best place to start a company will be in the cloud.
10. SEO: For many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is some otherworldly voodoo - But discoverability trumps content marketing and needs to be an endless-part of any modern business strategy. So sign up to Notion's SEO MBA class and get learning! The resources linked are meant to be a comprehensive curriculum on everything you need to know about SEO for SaaS companies.

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POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting #6 above - 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.