📕 Creating a scalable growth process; A new SaaS metric for your tool kit; Building a sellable company...
What’s up, everyone, and congrats on making it to Friday! This week we’ve got some new metrics to add to your arsenal and a few interesting marketing tactics for you mull over the weekend. As always, if you have some great content of your own, shoot it our way. You might just find yourself in the Playbook.
Have a great Labor Day Weekend!
💯 Eleanor Roosevelt famously said it's best to learn from someone else's mistakes rather than your own, but there aren't always people willing to volunteer their missteps. David Skok kindly offers up his with the Zero to 100 Videos series, which covers the most frequent startup mistakes he faced as both a SaaS investor and entrepreneur. You can skip around the different video sections depending on your current focus, but we’d say that Part 2 (Repeatable, Scaleable, Growth Process) is a must-watch no matter what stage you are at.
🌮 App Sumo’s Noah Kagan recently sat down with Neville Medhora to chat about how SaaS marketers can make their copywriting more compelling. They suggest not just thinking of content as words on a page, but to loop images in as well because both are ultimately there to engage your audience. Playing with image placement in your content can work surprisingly well – when Noah added a taco image to his email pop up, it increased its conversions by 40%. They also touch on the length debate, and whether writers should focus on long or short copy. Loved their response, which was to quote legendary copywriter Joseph Sugarman in saying that “it’s ok to write long copy, just don’t write long-winded copy.”
📒 This week we want to shed some light on helpful metrics you might not be measuring, and Rippling’s month zero cash on payback (or ZCP) is a great one to add to your tool kit. It’s a cash accounting metric (not accrual) that tells you how long it will take to recoup sales expenditures (e.g., salaries and sales commissions) and see cash in your bank account, which is key for knowing if you are ready to expand your sales team. For example, if you measure your ZPC and realize that every $1 spent on sales would end back up in your bank account by the end of the month, you could add more reps without burning any cash.
⚙️ To most people, a conversion means when a website visitor decides to make your day and finally become a paying customer. But that’s just one type of conversion – there are tons of smaller actions which visitors can take towards your primary goal, called micro-conversions. These are split into two main categories: process milestones and secondary actions, the former being a key point in the overall conversion process, and the latter being used to measure engagement. Most micro conversions are obvious (email signups, video views, and Ebook downloads, for example), but one you might not measure closely enough is blog comments. Anyone willing to engage with your brand at that level likely has strong intent and worth tracking closely.
🚧John Warrillow’s Built to Sell dives into one of the SaaS founders' biggest mistakes – building a business that relies too heavily on them. Sure, having a hand in all aspects of a startup makes things easier for founders in the short-term, but when it comes time to sell, buyers will be wary of that strong reliance (even if you’re profitable). You should build a company to be sold even if you have no intention of cashing out because you will end up with a more valuable business that gives you flexibility. Here are a few of our favorite tidbits offered in the book:
No one client should account for more than 15% of your revenue. Customer diversity will make your business a much less risky investment.
Don’t generalize, specialize. It’s easier to own a niche than to conquer the entire world, even if that’s your aspiration.
Hire sales reps who are good at selling products, not services. They are better at making your existing product work for a customer, rather than customizing it for the user.