The weekly top 10 for B2B tech operators · Every Friday
Retention. A blended retention/acquisition strategy is critical for the long-term sustainability of a SaaS business, but what are the core retention metrics to monitor? Take a read here of how to measure and improve the ones on the list.
Hands up if you're forecasting or re-forecasting for 2022! Compensating SaaS Sales Reps is complicated and expensive. This blog post from Kyle Racki of Proposify has a pretty comprehensive guide on setting quotas and commissions. But here is a quick shortcut to make it easy for all you Account Executives: The average annual quota in this report from David Skok and Co is $770K in ACV, and on average, the quota was 5.3X OTE. An expanded top10inTech teardown of that report (which admittedly is from 2017, so starting to get a bit long in the tooth) can be found here.
Thought-provoking article: Your Sales Team has a Sales Quota. Your Marketing team has to have a quota too - as they are also part of your revenue team. Getting both sales and marketing teams aligned beyond quota is a fundamental trick, and Tomasz Tunguz has a quick diagnostic to determine if your sales and marketing teams are working well together.
Outside of setting quotas, running a SaaS business relies heavily on cash flow - so it is imperative to forecast future revenue to avoid a cash crunch when trying to scale. So check this article covering Sales Forecasts and Pipeline Reviews: Why and How from a cash perspective.
The days of mandatory in-person pitch meetings to a VC are mostly behind us (at least for the foreseeable future). Pitching over Zoom is where we are at. Before you focus on getting the perfect lighting, though - check these 16 rookie errors founders make pitching to VCs from Jason Lemkin and read here on how you will be Zoom-judged by the VCs you are pitching to.
Stock options are necessary for hiring and retaining the best talent in this hyper-competitive Startup Land. So how can companies build an effective option plan? During a call this week, I was referred to this site earlier this week that has compiled a set of benchmark data, comprising over 20,000 option grants from more than 1,650 startups across the US and Europe sorted by Seed or Venture stage.
2021 was a bit bonkers (ask Google), especially in the Social Media world. So how will 2022 fare? Take a read of this report from HubSpot and Talkwalker for 2022 Social Media Trends - they have a pretty good Top 10 list.
Public SaaS and Tech companies suffered a beat down earlier this month. Did it have any significant impact on multiples of their revenue? Overall Stats: Median: 12.3x, Top 5 Median: 49.0x, 3 Month Trailing Average: 15.5x, 1 Year Trailing Average: 16.0x - that's a measurable downturn but keep in mind these numbers are still 86% above pre-covid highs.
Optimizing a User Experience is critical to the long-term success of any service or product. Google has Web Vitals, a program that offers developers guidance about best practice benchmarks on user experience. First, Round Capital has a DEEEEEP dive/crash Course for Founders on the principles of UX Researchfrom people at Zoom, Zapier, and Dropbox.
Category Creation is the Holy Grail - we all want to be up, and to the right is one of those Gartner/Forrester Quadrant reports. So here is how Neo4 did it. Here is another story from Gett and a warts-and-all case story about how OKTA made their category creation happen via Bessemer Venture Partners.
Get the top 10, every Friday
Curated SaaS and tech insight from around the web, repackaged for people to put to good use — free.