Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 30, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Customer Renewal Rate measures the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions at the end of each subscription period. High renewal rates inform companies about lots of things - product-market-fit, market, pricing fit, value, business model viability, etc. The authors of this article from Profitwell describe the formula and also make the point of differentiating between renewal and retention - one is actively renewing, the other is not actively canceling.
2. USAGE BASED PRICING: v 2.0! Usage-based pricing aligns with customer growth and helps minimize friction during customer onboarding, as customers only pay for what they’re using - it's right-sized. 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 a UBP Article from November 2020 (but here is that playbook anyway as a downloadable PDF).
3. CUSTOMER OPERATING SYSTEM: What exactly is the difference between Customer Success and Customer Support? Get started here to understand the nuances, they are both parts of the same customer journey spectrum, and Totango posits, in this recent SaaStr Annual presentation, that we need a fresher look at Success and Support that they coin the “Customer Operating System” (Like the presso? Here are the Google Slides deck).
4. SDRs: Last week I referenced the varied roles that can sit under an SDR. So this week let's take a look at their Compensation. Once again it's a tricky one to manage and understand - this 'complete' guide (I say that as it's really on 12 pages long) has some great frameworks for you on variable pay structures and the difference between outbound and inbound SDRs - it also included a simple Google Sheets Worksheet to take with you. As part of Betts 2021 Compensation Guide, however - you can interact with the report on actual remuneration stats broken down by US geographic regions.
5. ROADMAPS: Always seems old-school, clunky, and too rigid to me in today's Agile workplaces. But Agile teams absolutely need them as the teams still need some overarching direction and sense of what’s to come beyond Sprint cycles. Read here on the reasoning why along with 5 roadmap templates to use. I'm personally a fan of how Atlassian has designed its public access roadmap.
6. SMB vs ENTERPRISE: As a startup - which way to chase? Firstly this obviously depends on the product being built and market size, but in general, the Old Skool guidance was to start chasing the biggest contract values as soon as possible, which is Enterprise. But according to Craft, newer school thinking is to focus on SMB, which has been a sleeper category, as sales velocity is a better strategy than chasing contract size.
7. SEARCH: Here is a really insightful KB article via Google on causes for various organic search traffic drops and how to categorize them and analyze your own search pattern drops using Google Search analytics. Twitter also liked the article and had some hilarious responses of suggested new category types.
8. INTERNET: I spent waaaaay too much time cruising around this infographic this week - it's a map of the internet (in high res) and has several thousand of our most visited websites, sorted as distinct "countries" and grouped with others of similar type or category.
9. TECHNICAL DEBT: This article has made me really think more about my underlying assumption that all technical debt is bad (see page 5 of this report). The authors make the case that all technical debt should not be classified into a single bucket of "bad" and that some technical debt is good to have with real-world examples such as Twitter.
10. CASE STUDY: Relevant to #6 above. Xero is the SMB master! The accounting software company is approaching $1B in ARR so SaaStr takes a look at how they go there: Nailing a niche and an LTV of 81 months helps! Markgrowth also has a great complimentary article on how Xero acquired 350k SaaS users in 2018.

POD OF THE WEEK: Adding onto #6 and #10 above (and because I didn't listen to much this week, so it's a repeat), Profitwell runs a pricing page teardown on Xero.