📕 Dissecting the Innovation Teams structure, How to make boring B2B SaaS content engaging, Adopting a challenger approach to sales...
Morning everyone. KeyBanc and VentureBeat held their SaaS Benchmark webinar this week where the special topic was, you guessed it, COVID! Jokes aside it was a great webinar, they shared benchmarks from 325 private SaaS companies, of which 229 had more than $5 million and a median growth rate of 35.7%. So a solid group of healthy startups.
The COVID findings weren’t necessarily a shock – it turns out a pandemic increases churn (12.5% annual gross churn in 2019 vs.13.9% in 2020). The most interesting topic covered was probably the correlation of performance with ownership. Looking back at 2019, KeyBanc found that the average ARR growth for the VC backed companies in the group was 42%, while the bootstrapped company average was only a bit lower at 29%. The kicker — the VC backed companies did it with an average cash flow margin of -43%, while bootstrapped averaged a positive 8%.
If you want more details from the webinar check out the recording here.
📝 High-performing content sits at the intersection of being informative and engaging, which is a difficult balance to strike when writing about your typical B2B SaaS product. Contently shared a few easy ways to improve your B2B SaaS writing, starting with the avoidance of hooks or anecdotes. What typically happens is writers start their content with a strong narrative, but by the end of the piece, it’s totally lost and there is never a tie in. If you’re going to start a story, you need to complete it! Another suggestion was to avoid using jargon as a crutch. They suggest starting your writing by asking the question, “what do I want to achieve with this piece?” It’s simple but will help point out some of the fluff in your piece that doesn’t add value.
🗣 Everyone advocates for businesses to talk to their customers, but there’s arguably more knowledge to gain by talking to the people you weren’t able to close. You should try a win/loss analysis if you haven’t recently, it can give you actionable advice that many miss by ignoring their lost deals once they indicate they’re out. A good win/loss analysis goes deeper than the typical C-SAT survey by diving into the consumer perspective. There isn’t a fail-safe structure for creating one, but make sure you have an equal amount of wins and losses surveyed to keep things balanced. Ultimately, the real goal of the analysis is to create a feedback loop that optimizes your sales process, and eventually, guides your product development.
💡 The most important factor in creating an innovative company isn’t always the amount of dollars you dedicate towards new technology, it’s your ability to put people with different backgrounds together and encourage a culture of collaboration. We loved this feature in The StartUp which discusses how to organize people systematically to foster innovation and create customer value. It argues that the typical hierarchical team lacks agility because of its bureaucratic and task-driven nature, whereas the self-organizing, innovative team structure can move quickly based on it’s autonomous, value-driven focus. Our take – the innovative team structure is undoubtedly more flexible, but best suited for subsets of your team as it can be too fluid for a growing company in need of real structure.
🥊 In The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson take a research-driven approach that flips traditional sales practices on its head. The book is based on the hypothesis that solution selling is no longer effective, especially in B2B ecosystems. They found that most sales are lost during the discovery phase and that the highest performing sales reps are the ones who can push back when necessary, and teach prospects something in the process. They divide sales reps into five different personalities, with the Challenger approach outperforming the pack by about 40%. If you’re wondering where your team falls, the Challenger sales reps are measured by how well they do three things: