Did you ever wonder why TRUST by the consumers contribute 25% of Apple’s Market Cap – which is like $205B? Tomasz Tunguz wrote on what trust means in business – “Brands are so valuable because they are the encapsulation of years long efforts to engender trust. …. Trust accelerates sales cycles, creates long term defensibility, and increases the value of a business overall. It’s the core purpose of marketing.”
At the SaaSBooMi session this afternoon Vinod Muthukrishnan the Co-Founder and CEO of Cloud Cherry a customer analytics company – gave a ring side view of the learnings, difficult path to growth and rise, and the eventual acquisition by Cisco.
David Skok in this lecture at the Web Summit, summarizes the key metrics that you need to track to ensure success and growth of your Saas business. This is hands down one of the simplest presentations you will find on the topic.
We all know it. Building a product is relatively easier than selling it. One of the reasons founders keep pushing, first – the face to face with customers and after that asking for money from them – is because we want to keep the fantasy rolling. In many guises – the product is not ready, we need to add those two features, our market it elsewhere and so on.
Well let’s get real. Thanks to Tracey Ruff‘s list of 10 must watch videos for SaaS Growth, I found this great talk by Mark Roberge (MD, Stage 2 Capital, Prof, HarvardHBS and former CRO at Hubspot) and Michele Law (former CRO at Castlight Health and former COO at OpenDNS). And they list these four core issues failing SaaS sales, ergo – what not do to.
1. Pre-mature focus on growth/ Going into growth mode too early
2. The first sales hire
3. Ignoring sales impact on customer success
4. Aligning GTM by function rather than buyer
There is more advice on what To Do. It’s a 20 min listen. Go for it. hashtag
Where I learnt this #382
Learn from the Leaders: 10 Must-See Videos on SaaS Growth https://blog.userlane.com/saas-growth-videos/
Saastr Founder Jason M. Lemkin shared lessons learned from focusing on Social growth and here are the highlights.
Tomasz Tunguz wrote this piece last year and it is a great place to start 2020 for all of us working on a SAAS product. In multiple forums and columns one key learning has been developing the ability to ask the right questions at various times in your business lifecycle. If the answers surprise you – which most likely it will – you have your work cut out. Consider these 8 questions (of 13) focused on the customer any PMM should be asking –
With all the discussion of ‘What is your exit strategy’ it is refreshing to look at those saas companies who have been at it for over a decade and some going into their 3rd. Why would it be any different than, say, an industrial era company? The funding and exit eco system perhaps. So how come many of the contrarians are in this list of those heading into the 3rd decade?
I was looking at the 2019 update on SaaS industry – highlights written by Myya Daigle, published in ‘For Entrepreneurs’ blog by David Skok. The report is by KBCM Technology Group and headed by David Spitz.
Vik Singh, cofounder of Infer wrote about STC in his post in Latka B2B SAAS Blog and it brings a simple yet arguably a very effective way to assess the health and state of a startup (or any company for that matter) and apparently VC’s are paying a lot of attention to what Vik calls “STC”.
Most of us use CAC and CPA interchangeably – but according to Brian Balfour, founder of Reforge that would be wrong at the least and it could be very expensive mistake. Glossing over details can become a way of life at startups and we all know where the devil lives.
