📕 SaaS growth benchmarks; The right amount of customer feedback automation; Apple's not so Genius Bar
Morning! Before we get too deep into SaaS land we’d like to start the day with some leadership essentials which can help you #liveyourbestlife. Founders as a group can get caught up in the excitement of growing a business and forget about their own personal growth as a leader — these high level habits are great for a gut-check.
Lead by example by continuously learning and taking care of yourself.
Be organized and intentional with a scheduled template.
Conduct weekly reviews to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
If things stagnate, revisit your initial vision to make sure you haven’t drifted.
⚔️ Everyone views sales and marketing as that couple who fights all the time, but sales and customer success have issues of their own. You know, where customer success blames sales for selling to bad fit customers, and sales blames them for not being able to retain them? Traditional counseling won’t save the relationship, but sales pods and LTV based comp plans can create some much needed alignment.
🍎 Flashback to the early 2000s; Apple is the epitome of stellar customer success with folks lined out the door to hang at The Genius Bar. Fast forward to today and it’s more like the C+ Student Bar due to poor hires forced by their rapid expansion (70,000 be exact). Adding that many new employees is never going to be easy, but there are some common traits you should look for in the customer success field.
🏁 It can be tempting to automate your customer feedback process from start to finish, but a blend of sequenced emails with some human interaction on top is the winning recipe. CRMs like Drift, Intercom, and Hubspot (our top pick) make setting up your feedback system easy, and Founder Coach Dave Bailey would even suggest using an email client like Superhuman if you prefer something more lightweight.
🏒 Ever ever wonder how your company’s growth stacks up to the rest of your SaaS peers? Look no further than Baremetrics’ Open Benchmarks, where the subscription analytics tool offers public data on their 800+ SaaS users. You can give a big thanks to CEO Josh Pigford, who recently shared some insights on their customer’s growth figures.
Starting slow: Most companies only reach $40k ARR by the end of year one.
Scaling up: Once hitting $100k, companies double to $200k in 1/3 of the time.
When you’ve made it: It took businesses 2 years to reach $1m ARR. That is, if they lived long enough to get there.
Put up the hockey sticks: 10x’ing from $1m to $10m is usually a 4 year journey, not exactly the ludicrous speed growth we dream of.
🚌 We hate to throw digital marketing agencies across the nation under the bus, but there’s more to search engine optimization than editing your title tags and doing a bit of back-linking. The only constant in SEO is that it’s constantly changing, and whatever tactic is hot today will likely have lesser importance in the future. If you really want simply things, just provide a solid customer experience and you will inevitably rank higher on SERPs (search engine result pages).
Behind the Cloud tells Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff’s incredible story of disrupting the sales market during the dot com boom and ultimately leading the cloud revolution. It’s separated into different playbooks (a novel idea at the time…) including technology, sales, leadership, corporate philosophy, and our favorite — marketing. If we could offer one takeaway from that section, it would be to also market to your end users even if you’re B2B. They have a bigger impact on the purchasing process than you may think!