📕 A B2B SaaS Sales Model Review; Dispelling The Confusing Aspects Of Dilution; Being Shameless In Your Pursuit Of The Truth…

Republished By Plato

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Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet?

👹 Early stage B2B SaaS VC, Senovo, released a three part, monster of a B2B sales model review geared towards companies scaling from PMF (Product Market Fit) to the growth stage. It does a great job of outlining all of the KPIs you should be monitoring (as well as their benchmarks), how these KPIs inform each other, and even provides a base model for you to plug your data into. This level of detail will help you answer essential questions like “based on our weighted pipe, how many opportunities do we need to generate in the second half of the year to hit goal”, and “what is the common denominator amongst all of our inactive deals”?.

🛋️ Kunal Shah, entrepreneur and founder of Freecharge (acquired by Snapdeal for $450m) joined The Knowledge Project to discuss humans’ true motivations, Western vs. Eastern culture, and how observing trends has made him successful. An example which covered the cultural differences of India and America as well as trend identification involved furniture. Shah was curious to know how a friend’s furniture store’s margins differed by room, and when they ran the numbers, they saw living room furniture had a significantly higher gross margin. His theory is that this is because “in Indian culture, the perception of your community is highly important to one’s self”, and as a result they are able to charge a premium for the items which are most frequently seen by guests. Our biggest takeaway was Shah’s message to be shameless in your pursuit of the truth. Using Twitter as an example, he often makes conjectures that he is not “qualified” to make, and while he is bashed for his misses, the corrections others make always lead to more learnings.

🧵 Dilution is a consistently misunderstood, yet obviously critical topic for software founders, so we always think it’s worth a quick refresher. This Twitter thread by Jason Yeh does a nice job detailing the most confusing aspects of dilution. For an even deeper dive, he also converted the thread to a more complete essay which gives additional background on the topic, a walkthrough of venture math, and a free to use dilution workbook (download required) so you can play with different scenarios you might be contemplating.

🏆 A common trend with founders is to make early leadership hires by pulling from their personal networks. But there are some shortcomings to that strategy. Liking who you work with is important, but being able to face challenges head-on and work through disagreements can be trickier when it’s with someone you have a history with. There’s a reason people hire from their networks – it’s convenient. So how can you create a strong leadership team on the fly without hiring your friends? The same way you decide what features to build into your product, experimentation. You can pretty easily create a test environment by running a trial period with the candidate for 2-4 weeks before hiring. That should give you enough time to gauge the fit, and is equally beneficial for the candidate as they are testing you as well!

As always, if you or someone you know is considering selling, taking investment, or even looking for a bit of debt (we do offer debt for growth) we might be able to help out. Just reply to this thread and we can get acquainted. We may or may not be a perfect fit, but we’re always up for meeting SaaS founders and extending our network where helpful.