# Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 24, 2020 Published: 24 July 2020 Canonical: https://www.top10in.tech/posts/week-ending-july-24-2020 ## 1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK **NDR. [Net Dollar Retention](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#)** is an important metric in the new world of Product Led Growth (SEE #2 BELOW). It’s used to help answer the following: Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend? [Tomasz Tunguz writes in detail about this](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) and Crunchbase does the work to calculate what [good NDR benchmarks should look like](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 2. VENTURE The 95 page CB Insights MoneyTree Report Q2’20 is [now out](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) with some optimistic news. The number of deals is up (1,374 for the Q compared to 1,336 last Q) and Seed rounds have seen gains after a long (pre-pandemic) decline. On the other side of VC town, the number of quarterly mega-rounds (rounds worth $100m) also hit a new record (69). Other notable metrics - M&A activity dropped significantly - 120 exits compared to 155 in Q1’20. Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 3. SECURITY, SECURITY, SECURITY Security should be [part of your dev cycle](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) but also know your weak spots. Founder Institute discusses [6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) that may be a bit leaky. Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 4. WEBSITE I was on a local cafe’s website earlier this week trying to check out the menu ahead of a meeting and the site was terrible, resisting all my efforts to access a menu (something I’m sure, beside an address or phone number, is the reason people would seek it out) so I thought of this article from Smashing Magazine this week, asking the question “[Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#)”? TL;DR - remove the noise and focus on the [jobs you want the website to do](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 5. BRANDS Just how much does brand matter in B2B?….put your bias away as it's apparently [a lot](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) according to [this article](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) and [this one](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). Need to get started or run a branding review? Check this article on [how to get started](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 6. PITCH Now you have your brand sorted via the above post. It’s time to sort the pitch. This is [part one](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) of a two-part series from [The Dyess Group](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) who a) do this for a job, and b) reviewed 50 pitch decks and analyzed 4 UX techniques to find out. TL;DR Delete a boat-load of words from your pitch deck right away. Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 7. CHURN In our current comic climate, crisis-driven product churn is a legitimate thing as most businesses are practicing austerity by default. As I’ve mentioned quite often [in the past](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) acquiring new customers is much more expensive than retaining an existing one. Creating a culture of customer retention is one of the best things to do, especially during a pandemic. [This article discusses ways to make that happen](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 8. GROWTH To complement the article above on retention - as well as focusing on customer retention, [now is also the ideal time for a startup to prepare for growth](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#) by getting data, CRM’s, processes, and lead get all in order. Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 9. DATA I don’t think I have more to add than the title of this article: "[You Cannot Be Data-Driven Without Experimentation](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#)”, well OK fine, I do have more to say: 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. Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## 10. FREE-ER It’s not necessarily a time to [rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#)? 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](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). BTW Freemium is not just for B2C businesses like [Dropbox and Spotify](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). Freemium is now a strategy [employed in gaming](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#), [Enterprise](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#), [Cloud](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#), and Online [Payments](https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit#). Link: https://sendgrid.com/marketing_campaigns/ui/campaigns/9288059/edit# ## POD OF THE WEEK A great discussion on [what the future of B2B marketing may look like](https://open.spotify.com/show/2NKl8ywpuEpyTFN2vGnxgr). Great insights in customer experience automation vs. marketing automation, changes in Go To Market and positioning/story. Link: https://open.spotify.com/show/2NKl8ywpuEpyTFN2vGnxgr