Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 1, 2022

​1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: The old classic Active Users! An active user is any user who interacts with your platform in some defined way during a specific time period that you can identify (depends on your business but can be daily, weekly, or monthly). Many consider this a vanity metric these days but here is why this is still important.


2. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: The Syms Method - another for your Tech Dictionary that goes beyond features vs benefits but is definitely more a guide on pure feature selection using some good old-fashioned Venn diagrams.


3. STORYTELLING: Adding onto last week's listing on a post discussing Emotional Moats as a competitive advantage: I anecdotally feel like my way of storytelling has shifted from pre-pandemic ways, and Google seems to agree with my sentiment.


4. GROWTH MARKETING: Some of us old-schoolers still use this phrase (it dates back eons, all the way to 2010). Take a read-through here to better understand the differences between growth marketing and traditional marketing. It includes some great examples of companies who execute growth marketing strategies well (such as Dropbox) along with some great infographics, including a reference to "Pirate Metrics" referenced in this newsletter.


5. SALES: ZoomInfo has unleashed an excellent playbook for all your business development teams, which I've already shared with my team. The PDF contains 16 of the best go-to-market plays from B2B sales and marketing pros across different stages of the sales funnel.


6. POC: We switched to proof of concept (POC) based paid trials as part of our enterprise sales process last year, and I like it! It's working well as part of our customer journey and is the fastest time-to-value metric we can deliver for various enterprise stakeholders. Want to get your POC up and running fast? The team at Work-Bench have a step-by-step framework AND a template of a POC Agreement for you here.


7. SECURITY: The RSA security conference happened IRL earlier this month in SF, and the big 2022 take home: If it's not yet, security should be a significant priority in your stack this year - legislation is coming. Take a read here on how early-stage enterprise startups should think through building a security foundation (great for the sales process too, ya know!) On the enterprise side of town, CIOs are expected to spend 90% of their budget on vital tech like cloud and security (the other 10% still in the mix for POCs (see above)) - it's also a pretty recession-proof budget line.


8. PERSONALIZATION: SaaS marketers use personalization more and more to increase their conversion rates as personalization reduces acquisition costs by as much as 50%. Twilio just released its latest report, The State of Personalization 2022 edition. 35% of companies surveyed feel they are successfully achieving omnichannel personalization, which is a 45% increase from last year. And about half of consumers surveyed said they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience.


9. CONSUMER BEHAVIOR: So what's really changing in the economic downturn of 2022? Each month, the Google Market Insights team analyzes billions of recent search queries and consumer behaviours to develop a deep understanding of what's happening. Read on more here, where wallet tightening, as seen via search, is a real thing in 2022, divided into 4 pillars: Inflation mitigation, financial knowledge, Consumer research, and online/offline shopping.


10. CASE STUDY: The Design Process. This article made me smile as it takes the reader through a deep dive across the entire design journey of something so simple (but so design challenging): Making the world's most satisfying checkbox.


POD OF THE WEEK: The weekly All-In Podcast was mysteriously on hiatus for almost a month. We find out why in the latest edition - TL; DL - Jason Calacanis did something awkward, and the uber-wealthy tech-boy band almost broke up.