📕 Being A Bias To Action Company; What Is Market Churn?; The Sales Development Playbook...

Republished By Plato

Followers: 0

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?

🏎️ At a certain scale, companies can start to lose the scrappy, “do whatever it takes to win'' mentality which catapulted them to where they are today. Carta CEO Henry Ward noticed changes within his business in early 2020 which signaled they were slowing down, so he penned a memo to his team explaining why Carta needs to be a Bias to Action and a Bias to Yes company, as those were two of their early competitive advantages. There are 5 ideas covered in the memo which he felt would help them reach those goals, including being high-velocity (which does not equal high haste), iterative, non-bureaucratic, and unafraid to try new things. It’s a great reminder to not lose sight of what made you successful in the first place.

🐸 A typical weekly 1 on 1 is only 30 minutes because let’s face it, it’s hard to spend significant time on what may not seem like a revenue generating activity. But that doesn’t provide a lot of time for you or your report to context switch out of whatever you last meeting was. VP of Engineering coach Don Neufeld compares context switching to your computer’s cache – the more data you have in common between the tasks you are switching between, the easier it is to context switch. This is why he suggests task batching and putting all of your 1 on 1s together to make sure the context switch occurring is minimal. You may not want to spend that much time on 1 on 1s without a break, but like Mark Twain we would suggest eating your frog first thing in the morning.

🗣️ If you asked a few of your friends at other companies how their business reinforces its culture, we bet you would get a variety of answers. But one way many do (whether they know it or not) is by using basic cues, or rich words that convey meaning while imposing simplicity. The linked article covers the cues Bain & Co. employees learn in their early days at the company. A great example of one is “Zero Defect”, which is not just a noun and verb for them – it’s a mindset. They are taught that their work should be Zero Defect, as one small error in a model could totally alter the company’s recommendation to their client. That paranoia prompts them to “ZD'' all of their work to make sure it is perfect. The result is a high quality product and brand image of detailed, thorough work.

🚩 Every fund, whether it’s Venture, Private Equity, or somewhere in between, has metric guidelines they look to when assessing an investment opportunity. These are not always hard thresholds, especially on the Venture side, where investors' primary concern is if there is product market fit. AirTree Ventures’ Andrew Yeo shared which specific metrics signal strength or red flags for them, as well the average of each metric across their portfolio. Defining what is “market” net churn is always a fun debate, and Airtree’s view is that anything below -.05% per month is terrific while -0.5% to .05% is good. 1-2% net revenue churn per month is where they start to get spooked.

💖 As we know from the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, the best products don’t always win, it’s the ones with the best GTM that often do. A pillar of your GTM will always be a frontend sales process, which is why this week we are showing some love to Trish Bertuzzi’s Sales Development Playbook. It focuses on top of funnel sales activities and shares best practices on conducting outbound prospecting, qualifying inbound leads, and other early process activities which generate sales pipeline. The book is split into 6 sections ranging from high level strategy and hiring to retaining employees and execution (our favorite section by far). Let us know what you think!