Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 23, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: WORD OF MOUTH - guess we are calling this one WOM? it's something that is very hard to measure, this article calls it a coefficient. Sure. Let's run with that! The WOM coefficient. Want something more WOM intellectual? Fine, McKinsey also has this deep dive on WOM Science.
2. INCLUSIVITY: From my buddies and old crew at SecondMuse comes a new report:"The State of Entrepreneurship in the U.S." Only 17% of Entrepreneurs interviewed view the U.S. Economy as inclusive. 91%of women entrepreneurs don't view the economy as inclusive, and 69% view COVID as an opportunity to rethink the economy.
3. PITCH DECKS: It's really hard to craft the right narrative in pitch decks at the earliest stages, but here’s a great Tweet thread on how to think best about telling you startups story. Then start with part one of a two-part series from The Dyess Group who a) do this for a job, and b) reviewed and analyzed 50 pitch decks to find out that y’all need to delete a boat-load of words from your pitch deck right away.
4. SALES: Last week we did a bit of a 101 to Marketing. This week, let's try the same with Sales (of the SaaS kind). LighterCapital has a great intro to everything SaaS sales - cycles, commissions, metrics and models. ScaleVP has a really good primer on SaaS sales efficiency (with some metrics) and I need to acknowledge it’s just a weird time to sell anything by referencing this article on leading sales through the COVID-19 Crisis.
5. DATA: The data hype is definitely back! I’ve certainly heard it hyped at a few events lately as kind of savior of industries and the Snowflake IPO was just bonkers. Let's unpack the data hype and focus in on what it means. Starting here with 5 trends in Data and what software buyers are looking for in tools. Tomasz Tunguz also presented at the first conference on cloud data lakes earlier this year (link to the slides here). TL;DR - data systems are no longer just the domain of IT and are now owned by a variety of different departments and tools now exist to sanitize, query, instrument and interpret the data in ways that were un-imaginable just a handful of years ago.
6. FREEMIUM: Don’t call it a comeback! But Freemium is gaining popularity again as an effective growth strategy for B2B SaaS companies. Canva and Slack have contributed to the re-emergence of this growth strategy. So, why is Freemium becoming  popular again? Read more on that here, then check these 3 Famous Freemium SaaS Strategies (And Why They’re So Good): 
7. ONBOARDING: It’s something I’m deeply into right now. Doing this well is key to increasing value, lowering churn and creating advocates - so here is how some of the best do it: Leveraging email, this is how ZenDesk document their comms flow and ChartMogul have a guide to their non-email version too.  From HeavyBit here is a 4 phase plan and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality.
8. ABANDON: This is the sibling to the post above as abandonment can be a signal of poor onboarding. Here are 3 reasons why users abandon the onboarding process (identify verification, slow onboarding experiences, and being asked for too much data) and AppSee have another 8 reasons in this article (adding Privacy and Ad clutter to the list).
9. CSM ATTRIBUTION (Customer success managers): How do you account for or budget the cost of a CSM team? The team at Gainsight dive deep into this question and come up with some fantastic insights - even though the question itself is complicated and the answers end up being more non-monetary than you would probably like. Owning the renewal, up-sell, cross-sell are key delineation point s between expense attribution to different departments who CSM teams may sit under. 
10. SEO: SEO is dead! Just kidding - thats #1 in this top 10 SEO myths article. Discoverability trumps content marketing and needs to be an endless-part of any modern business strategy.  Moz has a great little guide on keyword research complimented by their other article on Search Intent and here is a pretty good (current) guide from Founder Institute.

POD OF THE WEEK: For some the concept of ’salesperson’ is cringe - so listen to this podcast from Predictable Revenue that explores the idea of social selling and bringing back the human element of sales