Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 7, 2019

1. SALES: Indirect sales are the Holy Grail of SaaS (as the Cost of Acquisition is low, or the burden of a third party). This article dives deeper into how to achieve this kind of sales success.
2. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Customer-experience transformations, just like digital-transformation are organizationally hard. Here are the seven deadly sins to look out for with customer-experience transformations.
3. INVESTMENT: From the Pitchbook team, 15 charts that show how 2019 could be a record years for US VC.
4. MARKETING: Providing the right metrics for ROI with marketing efforts in a very noisy environment is challenging and Google recommend updating measurement strategies constantly to better represent evolving priorities. How do marketers know how they measure up? Google partnered with Bain to create neat benchmarking tool called Measurement Advantage.
5. FAILURE (pt 1): This is a badge of honor in Silicon Valley and it provides so many lessons for future (or repeat) founders. CB Insights has collected the top 20 reasons why in this report and also listed 17 of the biggest Tech Frauds (this link is just good reading)
6. GOOGLE: Yeah…...you know you are a pretty big company when you produce an annual economic impact report of what you do and can also break it down domestically (in the US) by State. You can download Google's PDF Report here or check the interactive guide (which also breaks it down interactively by State).
7. WEB METRICS: What are the best website metrics to track? The hard and fast answer here is always “It Depends”. But this article from DataBox outlines some of the most important.
8. GROWTH MARKETING + VC's: Andrew Chen from a16z presents a deck on how the skills needed to grow new products can be used both to evaluate new startups that a16z can invest in. And once they have invested; to help them grow.
9. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: What does a good success management strategy look like? ChartMogul take a deeper look at best strategies and SaaSx give a great Org Chart.
10. MACHINE LEARNING: Great little primer from Google on what Machine Learning is and what it can mean for a business.

POD OF THE WEEK: "Scaling Your Startup” is a special 10-episode feature from the team at “This Week in Startups”. If you prefer Audio to Video - click here.

BONUS: Here is the slide deck from the podcast above (if video or audio isn’t your thing): https://thisweekinstartups.com/scale/