📕 Ready... set... Blitzscale! 🏈 The Weekly CEO Email; Reviewing SaaS IPOs
Rise and shine from your favorite SaaS newsletter!
This isn’t the only weekly email we write, you know. We like to keep our team in the loop by sending a recap out once a month. If you’re a CEO wondering how to go about doing this, or what you might include your own, look no further. You can thank us when you cut the amount of time spent on all-hands in half.
🏈 We sensed you might be running low on tech buzzwords and are here to introduce blitzscaling, a fun new way to describe the classic VC model of pouring cash into a business in hopes of spurring rapid growth and providing a competitive advantage . It’s no secret that not all businesses benefit from this influx of capital, but when Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman is teaching a course on it at Stanford, expect more young entrepreneurs to try their luck and potentially blitzfail.
🚘 The largest businesses of today operate with extreme cash efficiency in order to self-fund new investments. So why do startups flock towards VC and external funding? Startup mentor Greg Dickens (check out his free finance course for founders) isn’t sure, and points out that unless you’re building the next Uber or Lyft, you probably don’t need that much outside investment (if any) to get going, and would be better served funding yourself.
🎒 Class is in session, and today we’re discussing RevOps. Commonly confused with Sales Ops, RevOps’ role is to consolidate businesses’ traditionally siloed ops teams. Instead of Sales Ops reporting to your sales leader, and Marketing Ops reporting to the VP of Marketing, both would look to RevOps, centralizing the function. It’s booming right now because of the realization that sales and marketing benefit from closer ties, and increased resource and tool sharing amongst teams.
🤝 When it comes to negotiations, understanding your counterpart’s personality type can give your sales team the edge needed to close a deal. While every potential customer is different, there are 3 general personality types to look out for:
The Assertive - Assertives like to get to the point, demonstrating a direct and almost aggressive communication style. Appeal to their logical side by summarizing their content and mirroring them to show tactical empathy.
The Accommodator - Accommodators are friendly, talkative by nature, and focused on developing relationships. Win them over by building rapport, but beware of letting conversation drag—they often get off topic.
The Analyst - Analysts are calculated and naturally skeptical, so don’t be thrown off if they exhibit cold or standoffish behavior. They will take time to win over, so be patient, and label them to show you understand their needs and are on the same page.
👶 As an early stage B2B startup, it can be difficult to negotiate customer contracts. You’re just a wee lad who isn’t established enough in the market to win a customer’s trust, so often, founders will be overly accommodating in these negotiations just to get the deal done. Andreessen Horowitz Partner Jad Naous warns that this is a mistake, and discusses the 16 most important sales contract clauses, as well as how they should be handled.
🔥 In Seeking Alpha’s recent pod Behind the Idea, tech investor Akram’s Razor covers the hot streak of SaaS IPOs over the last year, the most recent being cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike. The highlights: CrowdStrike’s increasingly popular end to end security approach has resulted in triple digit growth, albeit 50% coming from install base upsells. Akram’s Razor also discusses his thesis on PagerDuty, in which he theorizes the business will struggle against bigger players like Atlassian and Slack.