Top 10 in Tech - What to know for the Week ending March 19, 2021

1. .SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ACV or Annual Contract Value is one of the most popular metrics in the SaaS world, this article from Chartmogul goes into detail about what it is, how to calculate it, and how to leverage it in your business. This article also looks at Annual Contract Values (ACV) and groups them into animals we can all relate to (Mice, Rabbits, Deer, Elephants, and Whales) - Animal Contract Value :-) - anyone, anyone???? This analogy can then be used in turn for what it takes to build a $100m business and how different segments contribute to total revenues over time.
2. SDR SALES: Chorus.ai has built a great report of what high-performing outbound sales teams are doing to close deals (this is an analysis of over five million sales calls!). You can add in the kind of business you are (SMB, Mid, Enterprise) to see how you measure up. Key nuggets: An SDR dials, on average, 106 people to schedule just one meeting, and the typical win rate of a sales-qualified lead (SQL) is 19%.
3. ENTERPRISE SALES: Moving upmarket into larger organizations is a pretty standard SaaS growth strategy. Increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per Customer) is good! But there is a lot to learn and a bunch of time, learning, and effort required to be successful in this market segment. It's not easy, but it can be done. Here is a great guide from Outreach on breaking into deals over $100k ARR.
4. ONBOARDING: 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.
5. SALES (& PLG): Product Lead Growth (PLG) has proven that your business can grow while having little if any traditional sales interaction with prospective customers. So how to best figure out Sales Forecasting within a product-led strategy? Chartmogul expands on this with a breakdown of traditional sales forecasting methods combined with product-led forecasting methodology.
6. SECURITY: There is an ever-increasing demand (and value) seen in good security practices when investors evaluate startups. Even more so when evaluating mid-market and (even, even more so) enterprise targeted tech. Here are a couple of great articles from HeavyBit discussing this in detail - from what investors are looking for in a team's response to security to how to pass that awkward, sales-friction-inducing, Enterprise Security Audits/Reviews….and also how to get started.
7. SPEED: First Round Capital always has a good perspective on speed at the business level. This is because top tech companies and are 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. This kind of adaptability is something we all need after last year.
8. LOW CODE/NO-CODE: While we are on the topic of speed. Here is one emerging technology that can really provide a non-cultural turbo-boost to a department or organization - Low Code and No-Code. 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. of speed and this is a guide to getting started in Low-Code
9. CAPITAL: Here is another term for your dictionaries - Entrepreneur Capital. It's a nuanced take on traditional VC - but one that is much more human-centric where the author differentiates VC and EC as Venture Capital = Companies + Money vs Entrepreneur Capital = Teams & Companies + Resources & Money. Seems superficial at first glance - but the more I sat with it, the more I realized it's all about assembling the right team.
10. CASE STUDY: Upwork - I have awesome full-time staff that came from shorter-term gigs on Upwork, who is now worth $6 billion and at $400m+ in ARR. 2020 gave them a chunky Covid boost and they are only just getting started with the good ol' fashioned "move-upmarket" strategy (see#2 above) with an absolute classic 80/20 rule in effect. 80% of clients are SMB's but 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of clients.

POD OF THE WEEK: Stripe just raised a new round (remaining private) - so here is a little blast from the past via the How I Built This Podcast on how a couple of Irish Brothers built a business now valued at $95 Billion (which is 2.6x the amount they were valued at this time last year).