📕 The Bowtie Model and Other Key SaaS Frameworks; Beating the Innovator's Dilemma; Take your Loonshot
Project management tool Monday started the week off by raising $150m in Series D funding. The Monday blog is a fantastic example of a compelling company announcement: rich storytelling, speaking like a real person instead of some press release robot, and giving readers a little taste of what’s to come.
These same principles apply to pretty much all announcements, and are good to keep in mind as you look toward your next PR event.
💔 Companies with big customer bases often face what is called the Innovator’s Dilemma, where their audience become enamored with a newer, sexier product that disrupts their own. It happens because companies tend to cool it on the innovation front as they grow, siloing departments, spreading geographically, and specializing positions. Former Yahoo Growth Leader Arjun Sethi is all too familiar with the dilemma, and explains what it takes to survive in a world of constant innovation and growing competition.
🚅 There is almost too much advice on how to spur that innovation all businesses seek—designers will plead you to focus on the end user, while Clayton Christensen and the academics will tell you that’s exactly how good businesses fail. The truth is that there’s no silver bullet for your next big breakthrough, but we do like Greg Statell’s take on some rarely heard ideas on the subject that are worth considering.
👔 When the recurring revenue model hit the scene in 2008, sales was shook. The standard funnel didn’t cut it because it didn’t account for future revenues—SaaS really needed its own framework (something closer to the bowtie model), which focuses on upgrades and other revenues earned over time. Winning by Design breaks down that model along with other methodologies that govern B2B SaaS, capping things off with actions you can take to better implement them.
🧢 When your sales rep puts on their entrepreneur cap and morphs from Rachel the SDR into Rachel, the dynamic go-getter, the results will blow you away. Just this slight change in mindset towards entrepreneurial selling has been shown to improve close rates because it encourages employees to focus on the bigger picture (your business’s vision), analyze their opportunity from different angles, and scrap for ways to stand out.
🤡 To be a successful tech entrepreneur, you have to get used to others viewing your ideas as crazy. After all, the most important innovations—the ones that have changed the course of history, science, and business—have one thing in common: they were initially dismissed as foolish or impossible. Safi Bahcall dubbed these ideas as Loonshots, which we must patiently nurture for them to have a chance to actualize. Bahcall points to five laws for effectively nurturing Loonshots, summarized in his recent LinkedIn post.
