📕 Why “Growth At All Costs” is Dead; Combating Disruptive Competitors; How to Think Strategically…
Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet?
⚰️ It’s still early in the year, but the majority of software has taken a beating thus far as rates rise and geopolitical tensions increase. But Orlando Bravo (Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo) and his portfolio are doing just fine, as he’s always championed fundamentals and profitability over high cash burn for a shot at hyper-growth. In a recent sit down with Delivering Alpha, Bravo goes in on the “growth at all costs” strategy, why you don’t need to burn cash to grow, and where the current revaluation of tech will end up.
💎 Companies with large customer bases often face what is called the Innovator’s Dilemma, where their audience becomes enamored with a new shiny product that is aiming to disrupt their own. It happens because these established companies tend to take their foot off the innovation gas as they become larger, siloing their departments, spreading geographically, and specializing positions. Former Yahoo Growth Leader Arjun Sethi is all too familiar with the dilemma, and wrote a good piece a few years back which explains what it takes to survive in a world of constant innovation and new competition.
🤔 The number of go-to-market roles within B2B software companies are not only increasing, they’re getting a bit confusing too. As startups increase in scale their roles typically become more specialized, and different companies will define these roles in their own unique way. So how should you decide who in your company is responsible for which areas, and for what size customers? Winning By Design would tell you that you can always use your funnel as a map to normalize and assign roles. We suggest the bowtie funnel (see below) or something else that breaks out your customers’ by annual contract value.
🐢 Leadership is always encouraged to just slow down and think strategically, making it sound like there is a one size fits all method to problem solving. But different approaches will work best based on the information available to you – author Fred Pelard runs through four key ones and when to use them in his How to Be Strategic. The final method he covers, the Rollercoaster approach, is probably most interesting to the scaling startups crowd as it’s built for problem solving when there is no clear answer to start and little data available. Sound like a familiar situation to anyone?