Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending November 13, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: EXPANSION: A lot of SaaS companies are fixated on customer acquisition, leaving customer expansion as an underrated growth strategy that SaaS companies often gloss over. Hard facts: Every dollar of new customer revenue in 2020 costs $1.60  - expansion is the growth bargain - with each dollar of expansion revenue costing $0.69. Using the analogy of Ice Cream (you had my attention right there) this article goes in-depth to identify and separate out three differing kinds of expansion along with five strategies you can deploy.
2. DATA: I don’t think I have more to add than the title of this article: "You Cannot Be Data-Driven Without Experimentation” but the opposite of that is also a truth to hammer home "You Cannot run experiments successfully without being data-driven”. We all overestimate our experimentation skills AND our Data collection skills.
3. MARKETING: I like the fact that the authors of this article didn't use the words "ultimate" or "top" in their B2B SaaS Marketing Guide - 2020 edition. It's a collection of learnings for founders and b2b marketers who are looking to build their b2b marketing programs - very much a book-markable link.
4. FORWARD MULTIPLES: This is a preferred metric used to value SaaS companies, who generally carry very few assets, little to no profitability, but all kinds of potential. That number is wildly variable and often bonkers - as of June 2020, the median SaaS valuation multiple for public companies stands at 11.4x ARR. So how is that number calculated? The answer?.....it depends: But a companies revenue growth and sales efficiency dominate the model. Cash flow margins, net income margins (profitability), gross margins, and many other metrics are largely irrelevant.
5. SALES: Deal mechanics! How can Account Executives who are getting the same amount of meetings booked by SDRs out-perform their counterparts? According to this article - best-practice deal mechanics. It's about what also happens between meetings, using video, phone, and LinkedIn to engage all the decision-makers involved in complex enterprise deals, giving your prospects an out, and setting next steps. Jason Lemkin also swoops in this week with some top tips on tips to help sales execs close more.
6. NO CODE: Codeless apps have been here for a while! Technology infrastructure has become so commoditized and abstracted that we have now reached a point in time where web services, apps, and integrations can be provisioned visually with zero amounts of line-based code written. AWS has legitimized this practice into the main-stream via Amazon Honeycode, a tool that makes it possible to build web and mobile applications without coding and this article goes into depth outlining the current squad of no-code players, tools, and haters.
7. CI/CD: Continuous improvement (CI) is not just a process that dev teams use to iterate and ship software quickly, the process identifies opportunities to reduce waste and streamline work within any department or team. CI can easily be confused with Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery - but they are not the same. This article from Angel.co helps clarify the differences and makes the case why CI is the optimal dev strategy for delivering great customer experiences.
8. PRODUCT: Product Management - what exactly is it? This article highlights what it is and also what it isn't (in comparison to the role of a project manager) as does this one and this article highlights a more subtle difference - one between Product Managers and  Product Owners. Unfortunately for professional growth, in-person conferences for all you Product Managers out there is on hold for the foreseeable future so here are some thought-provoking presentations for product managers from years past.
9. TEST TEST TEST: Evaluating the functionality of a software application at every stage is critical to shipping something awesome.  Take a good read of this PDF guide (along with real-life examples) and then bookmark this Google Site (blast from the past) page for a comprehensive list of the Stages of Test Development.  Thats list is kind of old school though - so take a read and sprinkle some of  this more modern (ie Agile) take on testing. into your QA world.
10. LINK BUILDING: This kind of seems like an SEO tactic of the past, where businesses build links to create a more organically positive Search rating. So is it still a relevant practice in 2020? Well......yah! But the rules have changed quite a lot. Check this article on how to optimize (by careful curation and intent) what to link.

POD OF THE WEEK:  A continuation from #5 above:  Deal Mechanics: How to Work (And Close) 3x The Deals with Nick Cegelski