Top 10 in Tech - What to know for the week ending May 7, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Renewal rate: You have to scroll down this article before you get to the informative bit on how to measure this metric but don't because I could just link you to this one). So read the first part anyway: Don't be a jerk when it comes to renewals. If you have to be, maybe it's you, not your customers (keep scrolling again to see the 5 main reasons why people unsubscribe). The difference between retention and renewals is described more in this comprehensive Profitwell article on Renewal Rates.
2. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Take a (deep) read of this extensive guide for building great customer success teams - CS is not just about limiting churn, but it also creates 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 expands on this and explains its approach to a (successful) success management strategy.
3. FINANCE: Founders - take a good review of this! How many of these mistakes are you making? (I'm making a few but less than I was) : 8 Finance Mistakes Growing SaaS Businesses Make (and How to Fix Them).
4. FRAMEWORKS: Beyond metrics, a successful framework can distill 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!
5. PRICING: Usage-based pricing 2.0. Usage-based pricing helps minimize friction during customer onboarding, as customers only pay for what they’re using. This strategy typically sees best-in-class net-dollar retention results. The cool thing is that the current understanding of ways UBP is being applied in forward thinking SaaS companies is so fresh that this article is an updated understanding of UBP from November 2020 - but here is that playbook anyway (as a downloadable PDF) It's evolving fast as a new best practice. One of my favorite slides in that playbook is slide 324 - a flowchart that helps organizations decide if a usage-based pricing model is for them.
6. POC’s: (aka Proof of Concepts) are a powerful sales tool and a critical part of a customer journey, especially when it comes to those long-ass enterprise sales. But oftentimes they can be just as big an anchor in sales as an accelerator (hands up if you feel me on that one?). Here are some pro tips if your POC’s get stuck from Heavybit with some pro tips on Leveraging the PoC to Move that deal forward.
7. CUSTOMER JOURNEY: When it comes to measuring success, clearly mapping out a Customer Success Journey via a visual map is a great way to know at what areas a Customer Success Team needs to be involved in (and what their responsibilities will be) via a variety of engagement models. You can also access a sweet design process here.
8. FINANCIAL FORECAST: Your new financial year is just around the corner! Just kidding, but now is always the second-best time to get started(the first being two months ago). This is a great article with a complimentary excel download here from The SaaS CFO - it's a SaaS Financial Plan for Startups (and also works for most SMB’s). It also comes with a handy complimentary video tutorial to the worksheet.
9. MARKET RESEARCH: Love it or hate it - knowing how big the market is of people willing to pay for your stuff is kind of a big deal. Here is a pretty comprehensive step-by-step guide for startup market research and this article has a great template for all of us B2B market researchers (which is harder than B2C).
10. CASE STUDY: Netflix is my favorite case study regarding a speed-focused tech company,. They (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy-experience solutions.

BONUS: Bringing this one back from the archives - because of #10 above and also as it's so relevant in our Zoom-dominated world now some are returning to offices: It is a hilarious Chrome Extension featured on Product Hunt called Netflix Hangouts. It basically disguises Netflix in a fake four-person conference call. Such a terrible idea? yeah, but nah, but yeah.


​POD OF THE WEEK: You may or may not have heard about NFT's lately and the number of money people who are prepared to pay. You may also squint at this news and still not understand what it is. Me too, but it's not just art - a16z got us all covered on explaining what NFT's are (and why they are seeing these remarkable payouts).