Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 9, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ZCP: Repeat this metric 5 times as fast as you can: "month zero cash-on-cash payback”- this tongue twister is best referred to as ZCP. It’s a cash-based metric, as cash-in-the-bank is a critical number for a SaaS company to monitor. ZCP answers the question: if we invest $1 in sales costs (such as salaries and commissions), how long does it take to recoup that dollar spent and welcome it back to the bank account?  
2. WOMEN IN TECH: A new Girls Who Code and Accenture report has launched - check out this metric: By age 35, fifty percent of women leave their jobs in tech. This is primarily (37% of those surveyed) attributed to noninclusive company cultures. The call to action here is that the bottom 80% have big role to play: If all companies could score as well in inclusion as the top 20% performing do, attribution could drop by up to 70%!
3. REMOTE: Nearly all of us are working remotely or WFH. The big tech players in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc) are all doing it too and not really looking back too much. So take read of this article from Inc. Magazine (and rip it off): 9 great tips from Googles Remote Work Policy. Ars Technica expand beyond policy and dive into both technical and cultural changes in this article.
4. REVENUE TEAMS: Revenue teams are a combo of Marketing and Sales. Getting them aligned is a really trick and Tomasz Tunguz has a quick diagnostic to determine if your sales and marketing teams are working well together.
5. SAASTR: In-person events are a thing of the past and hopefully the future. For now, we are stuck attending and watching events from the comforts of Zoom. SaaStr Annual hosted an “At Home” edition recently, which was pretty good,  and Christelle Blanchet-Aissaoui from Proxi has written a banger of a summary for you to read.
6. PRODUCT LED GROWTH (PLG): Time for a refresher - read this to understand the 4 basic principles behind PLG. Traditionally companies have focused their marketing and sales efforts on external acquisition channels to drive demand, but in a PLG world,  your product is the driver for growth (such as Atlassian and Netflix). From ChartMogul here is the PLG Sales best practices to complement the marketing Cheat Sheet. OpenView have launched a Product Led Growth Maturity Grader  -  this tool is designed to give feedback on how far along your organization is on the PLG maturity spectrum.
7. CUSTOMERS: OK - so, umm, what exactly is the difference between Customer Success and Customer Support? Get started here to understand the nuances, they are both part of the same customer journey spectrum, and Totango posits, in this recent Start Annual presentation, that we need a fresher look at Success and Support that they coin the “Customer Operating System” (downloadable Google Slide presso).
8. LANDING PAGES: One of the most common reasons why a search engine based marketing campaign fail is that is does not have an optimized landing pages to continue the journey, take a look here at some best practices, real examples, and templates for Google Ad-based Landing Pages. Then also  Check this site out - a collection of the best landing pages around the web with a focus on copywriting and design - finally (this is a repeat-post) IceBreakerVC lists best practices for good landing page planning and strategy. 
9. FREEMIUM: If you are looking to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy for your business, take a good read of this article on “everything you need to know" But it’s probably a good time to think about more free as a sales strategy - according to Jason Lemkin from Saastr - more free seems to be working well these days. BTW Freemium is not just for B2C businesses like Dropbox and Spotify. Freemium is now a strategy employed in gaming,  Enterprise, Cloud, and online Payments.
10. ROADMAPS: I’ve been asked for product roadmaps quite a lot lately and I have to admit, I don’t like traditional versions of them, Too clunky, too rigid, too old-school. Discovering the flexibility that Atlassian have designed on their public access roadmap gave me hope, but Ryan Singer has a different and far more flexible opinion on roadmaps - don’t do them, instead create options. Ryan is also part of the ShapeUp crew. Their publications and toolbox of techniques are designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to designing, prioritizing and shipping product/features.

POD OF THE WEEK: From SaaStr:  Churn is dead. Long live Net Dollar Retention (NDR) with David Kellogg