Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 11, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CAC payback (and accounting for the upsell) Often time many of the base metrics (CAC, CAC/LTV, etc) are in service to VCs and operationally don't tell us enough to make great decisions. This article takes an operator view on CAC Payback that includes (and celebrates) the value of net revenue retention.
2. CUSTOMER SUCCESS - Quota: this is an expansion of celebrating CS's contribution as NRR and CAC payback referenced in #1 above. In past newsletters, I have referenced AE and SDR metrics and quotas. But what about quota expectations in renewal and cross-sell/upsell within a Customer Success Team? Tomasz Tunguz takes a look based on a report a couple of years back from Gainsight. Most Customer Success Managers can handle between $2-$5M in ARR and somewhere between 10-500 accounts (but it varies based on segment/ACMR).
3. FREE-ER: It’s not necessarily a time to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy. But it’s probably a good time to think about more free-as-a-sales-strategy - according to Jason Lemkin from Saastr - more-free seems to be working well these days. BTW Freemium is not just for B2C businesses like Dropbox and Spotify. Freemium is now a strategy employed in gaming, Enterprise, Cloud, and Online Payments.
4. SALES: 68% of Companies miss their forecasts by 10% or more according to this report - 2021 Sate of Sales Forecasting (this is from a survey of about 400 B2B enterprise organizations). It's a pretty good report and you can see other benchmarks (such as ARR and ACV) across industry peers. Great! So now what? Well get started by checking this article covering Sales Forecasts and Pipeline Reviews: Why and How from a cash perspective.
5. AGILE MARKETING: Hold on to your hats Marketers - Agile processes are coming for ya! This is another one for our Tech Dictionaries - it's how to really validate learnings, make mistakes and deliver impactful results. Hubspot covers this concept in detail and outlines how DoorDash hardcore-leveraged this methodology to increase revenues from $885m to $2.89 billion in a YEAR!
6. DUNNING: Hah - how did I not know this? I just learned about this term via a client who provided a requirement to me to automate a "Dunning Letter" - huh? What? Turns out it's a real term with a weird-ass name for involuntary churn (aka bad payments) - according to Baremetrics SaaS and subscriptions businesses lose around 9% of their MRR due to failed payments on average. Learn more about a successful dunning (and pre-dunning) process here.
7. CX REPORT: According to Forbes, Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers. All companies, not just SaaS, are under pressure, especially after 2020, to deliver optimal customer experiences (CX). It's difficult to know where to make investments that are likely to pay off when getting started so download and read this in-depth Report (78% of respondents said that customer-centric agility has increased in importance as a result of COVID-19).
8. CLOUD: The 2021 Cloud Report is out (from Cockroach Labs) which is a benchmark comparison of performance across the three major cloud providers — AWS, Azure, and GCP. TL;DR. AWS continues to dominate public-cloud market share - but GCP performs the best with impressive throughput metrics.
9. SALES vs MARKETING: Great (and relatively short) read from Jason Lemkin here for all you early-stage people discussing how a startup's growth problem was misdiagnosed as a sales one (when it was actually a marketing problem).
10. CASE STUDY: Uber made the call to completely re-write their app in 2016 - with the constraint of this being less than a 100MB download (as that's the max size of an iOS app available for cellular download, which most first time customers need as they often decide to download the app while curbside). This is how they did it - it's a pretty crazy developer ride.

POD OF THE WEEK: Scale-up Marketing listening to compliment Agile Marketing in #5 above - How marketing delivers growth with the Chief Growth Officer of FreshWorks.