SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK
Renewal and Up-sell Rates. in SaaS you need to understand more than the headline ARR metric; you need to understand the layers of recurring revenue and also the health of that recurring revenue.
Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending November 29, 2019 EMAIL
SALES
A lot of it is a management problem. Given the high turnover rate of productive sales reps (average tenure is currently under 1.5 years), optimizing their time is key for optimizing their value. Chartmogul covers the ways good management can help optimize value and minimize, or automate, the mundane.
MARKETING
Marketing is a practice covering many different disciplines and specialties. Which one should a startup hire first?
CAPITAL
First Round Capital have a sound article centered on the much-needed strategic approach to raising capital, with MondayNote looking at the five mistakes entrepreneurs make misunderstanding VCs.
SEGMENTATION
Great article on how Segmentation can be combined with LTV (Life Time Value) to grow MRR (from a subscription box startup).
When it comes to outbound marketing, email still works really well! Digital Olympus has a great guide on effective email outreach. (HINT: This takes time and effort!)
SCRUM
Agile methodology is a modern software development process that encourages flexibility. It's an umbrella term for multiple management frameworks on how to get things done. Scrum is one of those frameworks and AngelList provide a primer on Scrum based techniques.https://angel.co/blog/agile-methodology-a-primer-on-moving-fast
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
A pretty succinct article from ChartMogul on what and how to get started with your customer success efforts - especially as a remote team.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
A lot of SaaS businesses require flat fee based Implementation and deployment cost charges, often captured as revenue from Professional Services. This naturally increases with customer size (and complexity) capping out as an average of 11% of all revenue at Enterprise size customers.
SCALE
Salesforce is currently the only $100B ARR pure SaaS company - Jason Lemkin says there are many more coming and asks the question of what would it takes for a business to reach this kind fo scale. Great nuggets in this article of how companies like Salesforce sell to their customers.