Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 26, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Customer Loyalty - it’s actually an amalgam of metrics - Net Promoter Score (shout out to Ask Nicely), CSAT (shoutout to Thematic), Churn Rate, and MRR. Profitwell describes a five-step process to develop a customer loyalty program here.
2. MARKETING: So how do you measure up as a business? Get started here with the 9 marketing disciplines of great SaaS companies, created by the former CMO of Zendesk and Slack, then complete the Marketing Scorecard Spreadsheet here, scoring each on a 1 to 10 scale. A deeper explainer is on this post.
3. EXPANSION and RETENTION: Acquiring customers Isn’t enough, expansion and retention are growth practices any good SaaS company needs to get a grip on. They are both deeply related so in this deep dive let's get started with benchmarking. Here is what good expansion looks like and here is what good retention goals should be benchmarked against and how to optimize them.
4. SECURITY: The ever-increasing adoption of cloud-based software creates more exposure to bad actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities. Tech companies should be continually concerned about the security of the software being built. OWASP can help you out here - it’s a foundation working to improve the security of software and maintains a Top 10 list of the most critical security risks to web applications.
5. PITCH: If you are looking to raise capital, burn this into memory: You have 2-4 slides tops to grab the attention of an investor. Use those slides wisely and don’t go beyond 12-15 TOTAL. Oh and also do these 4 things as a business to be VC friendly.
6. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: It’s a weird open secret that a lot of B2B SaaS businesses generate a significant amount of revenue from implementation and deployment projects, often captured as revenue from Professional Services, due to deployment and configuration complexity. So what are the revenue benchmarks for a SaaS Business to captured revenue through professional services? On average it caps out at 11% of all annual revenue with Enterprise focused businesses but even at the lower end of town it’s still 5% of revenues with SMB focused businesses.
7. SALES: The Series A funding round is a stamp of approval, product-market-fit is evident and the capital is expected to be spent on growth. PointNine Capital has a great article on how to build a sales engine at Series A.
8. BUILD or BUY: I’m constantly in a debate (mainly with myself) of whether to build or integrate with an existing app/service to solve a problem in my business or introduce a new feature on behalf of a customer/feature request. So (like me), you should read this article to get a better grip on assessing the pros and cons of either a build or buy strategy.
9. ED-TECH: Not often referenced in this newsletter - but the sector has become a hotspot and a lifeline in eduction during the COVID-19 pandemic. So how impactful are the technologies to learning pedagogies outside of the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom? McKinsey have an extensive report here  TL;DR - it depends on who, how, where and what - there are gaps.
10. WEBSITE: GrowthInsider have released a great and comprehensive list of the biggest mistakes made on websites and to flip that in a more positive light, here are some ways you can supercharge your website (using research). 
    ​
    

POD OF THE WEEK: I love good growth stories and I also love DataDog (I'm a customer). So check out how they got to over a half BILLION in revenue with their product led go-to-market strategy.