Measure Your Churn. But What’s Even More Important is to Measure Your Almost Churn. 5 Tricks to Help You Here.
Churn is a paramount topic in SaaS, as we all know. If every dollar of ARR is worth $6+ in the long term, including upsells and second order revenue … then of course, by the same token, for every dollar of ARR that churns … you’re losing $6 of notional ARR. Lose a $100k customer? [...]
10 Great Questions to Ask a VP Sales During an Interview
Ready to hire your first VP Sales? But haven’t done it before? Let me give you a partial interview script that may help a bit. You’ll have to vary it for different types of SaaS businesses — a bit. But it will basically work for all SaaS companies from say $200k in ARR to $10m [...]
What a Great VP Sales Actually Does. Where The Magic Is. And When to Hire One.
In SaaS, #1 most common mishire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. In fact, there a VC saying that I used to really hate. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” [...]
5 Simple Ideas to Immediately Improve Your Conversion Rates in SaaS
Recently, I was asked a great question about Improving Conversion Rates. If you haven’t done this in the past, I’ve got my 4 best suggestions that will work to get your conversion rates up. If you’re past this point — my apologies. However, before we get there, let me state the obvious, that there are [...]
When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two
The time is probably going to come when you have to build a sales team in SaaS. It may be Day 1 if you have plenty of capital and are selling to large enterprises. It may be X months down the road, once you close a few deals of large enough size ($x,000 ACV) to [...]
Two SaaS Metrics That Actually Don’t Matter That Much: Churn and Sales Cycles
Ok, I know the title sounds a bit controversial, but bear with me, it’s not. Metrics are critical in SaaS, and you need to track them fastidiously. But it’s also important to focus on the right metrics, at the right stage, and not obsess about the less important ones at the wrong times. And I’m [...]
Yes, You Can Measure Everything. Marketing, PR, Dev, Lead Efficiency. Do It.
One thing so many people tell you, in small and big companies alike (especially the big ones), is “you can’t measure [XXX]“. PR firms always tell how you can’t measure the value of press. Engineers tell you that you can’t measure development, it’s a soft science. Corporate marketers tell you that you can’t measure the [...]
A Little Less About Pricing. A Little More About Deal Size. Please.
It’s not that this is rocket science. It isn’t. But if you haven’t lived it, understand that Deal Size is the single most important factor in your SaaS business model. Because it will completely define how you do sales and marketing, and to a just somewhat lesser extent, prioritize feature development and product/engineering.
Beware of the Confidence of High Win Rates
The other day I was meeting with the founder of a really cool SaaS start-up. Great logo customers, great early traction, plenty of capital, fun space. This founder pretty much had me until he told me the classic line, “And we win almost every deal.” >> If there’s any sign you aren’t pushing hard [...]
Customer Metrics for SaaS Companies
One of the key pieces of advice for SaaS startups (actually all startups really but in this case of particular relevance to SaaS0 is to measure everything. Over the last few years a number of different solutions have been developed which allow companies to measure different parts of their business
SaaS Sales Model and Organization Strategy – the eBook!
One of the most difficult SaaS challenges is choosing the right SaaS sales model. This eBook provides a a simple, powerful strategic framework for choosing right.
The Futility of Meaningless Business to Business Surveys
Some of you might know that I run my own company, and we have Amazon.com as an outlet for our awesome products. In 2011 we decided early on that we wanted to use Amazon-New-Detail-Page (Photo credit: kokogiak) FBA, Fulfillment By Amazon for our products that were top selling to help customers who were upset about [...]
Bruce Lee and the Art of Selling
Yesterday I had the privilege of delivering the closing keynote at the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco. My session was on Bruce Lee and the Art of Selling. As someone who loves kung-fu movies I thought it would be interesting to combine martial arts and the philosophy of Bruce Lee, with selling. Here are [...]
Bought vs. Sold (Why Jive is a dinosaur & Dropbox is the future)
Both Dropbox and Jive are successful companies that are much in the news recently. Jive just filed its S1 for its IPO, while Dropbox raised its first major round of funding at a $4 billion valuation. What’s most interesting to me is that they represent polar opposites in terms of business models. They illustrate the [...]
B2B Sales | The New Breed of B2B Buyer Series Part 3
The new breed of B2B buyer and B2B sales rep are engaged in an information arms race. Today’s B2B sales rep that fails to become a trusted adviser is at best irritating and at worst irrelevant.
