Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 18, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Customer success has many metrics to track (in 2020) - here is a comprehensive list of the top 15. NPS making the top of the list.  From Asknicely, This White Paper reviews NPS and some other common user experience metrics.
2. SHAPE UP: A refresher for your tech dictionaries. Software product development requires innovative strategies based on today's cadence expectations of continuous integration, micro-services, feature delivery, and scale. The team at Basecamp (I’m an old school fan) have developed ShapeUp, their publications and toolbox of techniques designed to eliminate chaos when it comes to designing, prioritizing and shipping product/features.
3. DIFFERENTIATION: Standing out in a saturated sea of SaaS is a tricky problem to solve - pro-tip - never do it on price alone. So ask yourself - why should someone buy from you? It requires balancing familiarity and differentiation - read this article to get you thinking on the topic more.
4. CUSTOMER PROFILE:  Here is a great tool for anyone. Sales can be a real uphill battle when sales teams don't truly understand their ideal customer, building out customer profiles is an incredibly useful way to identify your best customers. So download this Profiler kit pdf and use these questions and survey generator to quickly generate the ideal questions and template for your customer profiles. The rest is all on you.
5. DEADLINES: Author Douglas Adams once wrote “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”. It’s funny because it's true. So when it comes to software development, how do you make peace with that whoosh? Check this article from Free Code Camp that discusses the art of managing the deadline - part of it is complimentary to a reference to the sub-art of saying NO from a couple of weeks back.
6. OUTREACH: Things like “Let's catch up for Coffee” is sooooo 2019. Given our less-social lives that are mainly digital, check these fantastic tips and tricks for creating outreach that matters. We can all do better.
7. COOKIES: (not the chocolate chip kind). Love them or hate them, the reality is that browser cookies are headed the way of the Dodo, which creates a new attribution problem to solve. Conversion modeling is a way forward, so if attribution is a necessary part of your business or your channel/partners Business, take a read of this article from Google on why conversion modeling will be crucial in a world without cookies.
8. EMAIL: A few weeks back I referenced a power point deck from Predictable Revenue on the four pillars they think constitutes a quality sales based email campaign. Quality resource for anyone with email marketing as part of their businesses. From Better Marketing this week is a complimentary deep dive into a single cold email and why the author actually opened it (TL;DR - yes it’s all about everything in the emails design, but more  about how targeted the message is).
9. NOTE TAKING APPS: Yup - this is a random headline. But with all things 2020, this sector is pretty hot right now. Roam is a new competitor that has achieved a whopping $200 million valuation at SEED STAGE thanks to the shift to remote work (and some interesting pricing models). The other new competitor, Notion, is valued even higher - currently about $2 Billion. How???? Well, I got you covered with that question. Check this incredible deep dive from Foundation on how Notion used community and templates to scale.
10. VIDEO: Nailing introductory and Demo videos is a bit of an art form. Don’t know where to start or have video-block? Get inspiration from this curated collection of some of the best and here is a list of 6 videos every SaaS Company needs. (TL;DR Explainers, Company, Testimonials, landing, page, FAQ and Personalized Sales)

POD OF THE WEEK: Trade shows/travel are so not 2020. So listen to predictable revenue talk about how to build a content strategy to replace trade shows and travel.