Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 14, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: All of it! ChartMogul have compiled their version of the “ultimate" SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet 
2. COMPENSATION: Ready to hire some salespeople for your team? Read this post from Jason Lemkin on how to construct a framework for the first SaaS sales compensation plans. Then (shameless-plug) - check my deeper dive articles on SDR and AE compensation benchmarks.
3. PERSONALIZATION: SaaS marketers are turning to personalization more and more to increase their conversion rates, improve customer success, and increase the quality of sales/marketing funnels. Great article here from Chart Mogul on the (modern-day) personalization fundamentals. As a teaser: Personalization reduces acquisition costs as much as 50% and 87% of companies see a lift in key growth metrics when they employ personalization.
4. CONTENT: Just like Sales, at the early stages, the creation of content also sits with the founders. I’ve put together a nifty 3 step guide from FirstRound Capital: Step 1. How to position your startup, Step 2. how to write well, and Step 3 top tips for telling stories.
5. INVESTMENT: When taking on money from investors, they often request a very specific kind of share from you - preferred stock (or "preference shares" in the article). Here is what this means and why.
6. PRODUCT: This one is for all you product managers. Lenny Rachitsky has curated a list of templates and frameworks for Product Management (there are also a bunch of others in there too) - definitely a bookmark-able page!
7. WEBSITE: Do you have a pretty high churn rate from your home page or landing pages? Maybe you have a trust problem. This article outlining the Trust Pyramid is very much worth a read but TL;DR A website must meet users' basic trust needs before a visitor can be expected to engage meaningfully. With the Trust Pyramid, there are 5 distinct levels of trust-based engagement, each with separate design requirements.
8. SALES: Hands up if you like cold calling! To quote the opening from this article "Cold calling is like a neat suit. It gets the job done and it never goes out of style”. But read it! It’s a seriously comprehensive guide to getting cold calls done successfully!
9. ENTERPRISE: SaaS in the Enterprise is so hot right now! But it’s hard! This article equates it to riding up and over a rogue wave - it’s a bit extreme but to add pragmatic layers on top of that dramatic metaphor Enterprise SaaS margins are experiencing significant downward pressure as commoditization and competition pressures increase.
10. REVENUE GROWTH: This one is from the archives as I consider it one of the best presentations at SaaStr Annual - it’s from Mark Roberge of Stage 2 Capital and Harvard Business School. Providing a handy step-by-step guide to revenue growth (downloadable PDF!)