Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 19, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Activation Rate: According to Jason Lemkin, Activation Rate is one of the 3-4 most important metrics in SaaS. His observation is pretty pragmatic: 90% or more of your customers need to activate in the shortest practical time.  And you need to track this, measure it, and discuss it weekly.  Every week. If you don’t, so much of that hard work is down the drain. Read more on his thought here.
2. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: This is a getting-started deep-dive. We all have a pretty good idea of what Customer Success is and why it’s important (if not read this), but getting started can be a bit tricky and overwhelming. Read this article to better understand how to create a customer success journey
3. PRICING: Should always be viewed as a continual experiment of never-quite-right. Chargify has a list of 5 pricing scenarios to test as a SaaS company, with real examples to compare.
4. VENTURE CAPITAL: So, are VC’s still investing? This was a great presentation from Point Nine Capital during last months virtual SaaStr Summit and here is the accompanying article.
5. COMMISSIONS: How to pay your different sales channels? Commission levels of sales are pretty stable across sale types at about 10-14%. Commissions on renewals is only 3% and up-sell is 9% - however about 50% of the time this is not paid at all. (Bringing up another subject on how much revenue a Customer Service Manager can manage).
6. RENEWALS (deep dive): To add onto above, I’ll keep banging this drum: Customer Success is CRITICAL to the sustainable growth of a modern tech business. Landing a customer is (obviously) important keep in mind costs - being just acquisition focused is WAAAY expensive (Costing about $1.10+ per $1 of ARR). Compare that to the cost of retaining or up-selling existing customers (about 12c-15c per $1ARR) - that’s 8 times cheaper. Finding a repeatable scalable sales processes is something required to scale. But don’t be a purely acquisition focused business, give some love and attention toward building out the same repeatable-scaleable process for renewals. Also both of these revenue teams need to be aligned.
7. OUTBOUND SALES: Forget Netflix, do you want some Outbound Sales TV? Yeah! The team at predictable revenue have been running over 50 outbound sales experiments using good ol’ scientific methods to find out what works best (and what doesn’t.). Watch the whole series on YouTube!
8. DESIGN: Bringing good design into different elements of a business actually has massive benefits. Design led businesses outperform the FTSE 100 by 200%. Marvel have got you covered on how to get started and growth based Design is my new my sub-specialty fav - merging typical HCD/Empathy Design but adding in the pragmatism of designing the jobs that need to be done
9. ZOOM: Dramatic post title - but also a fascinating read: Why Zoom doesn't have product/market fit. Say whaaaaaaaat now? Full disclosure: I participated in this survey by Hiten Shah. Based on the survey results (but also accepting that the respondents may represent a bias population) Hiten makes that case that Zoom has zoom work to do - esp correlated to it’s new fangled NPS of 21 (not terrible, just not great).
10. PITCH: So the days of an in-person pitch meeting to a VC are mostly behind us (at least for now). Pitching over Zoom is where we are. Before you focus on getting the perfect lighting though - check these 16 rookie errors founder make pitching to VC’s from Jason Lemkin. 

​POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting number 8 above is the First Round Podcast on getting started with Growth Design from head of Growth Design at Dropbox and Pintrest