📕 Why it’s time to retire the MQL; Board meetings for beginners; Expert outbound sales sequences...
Welcome to the end of the week. We’ve got some big news, as we’ve just launched a brand new website featuring a SaaS Playbook library! Now if you’re looking for great B2B SaaS content in a specific area, you can filter through our historical playbook features by topic to quickly find the best of the best. Historical features are being added as we speak so you should have access to the full library soon... excited to see what you think!
🐡 Did you know that waiting longer than just 5 minutes to follow up with a webform submission decreases your ability to connect with the prospect by 10x? Goes to show that buyers have the attention span of a goldfish, and thus should be prioritized based on their demonstrations of buying intent (like a form submission). Measuring MQLs does this to an extent, weighing prospects based on profile and interactions they’ve had with your brand. But where MQLs fall short is the time it takes to process that data, because as mentioned, just 5 minutes can force a buyer to move on. It’s why Drift are big fans of conversational marketing, and the stats shared in their liked Ebook will probably make you one as well.
🥫 The amount of emails which buyers receive on a daily basis is getting to levels of absurdity, making the quality of emails that sales reps send even more important. NextHunt CRM interviewed 5 SaaS sales stars to see what their secret sauce to getting responses (and closing deals) was. It’s a long read, so if you only have time for one, we’d suggest skipping down to Samantha Gallagher’s section, who’s a Sales Development Manager at Intercom. Ensuring emails are sent with enough frequency to build rapport, being persistent until you hear a hard no, and consistently including language which adds (or shows how you) can add value are her strongest pieces of advice.
👔 Most bootstrapped SaaS companies don’t have board meetings because the board only consists of its founder! But we still think there’s value in holding boards even if you aren’t forced to – it’ll help you summarize and digest your quarterly progress as well as polish your board skills, which you and your company may benefit from down the line. This simple board meeting structure is a great one to follow for those looking to dip their toes into water. It tackles key KPIs like growth, runway, and retention up front when your team will be most engaged, and keeps your total meeting time to a concise 2 hours or less.
☕ When it comes to raising capital from SaaS lenders, growth is the metric which founders and CEOs tend to think will have the greatest impact on their success. And while that’s not totally off, the truth is that not all growth is weighed equally – lenders and investors will be specifically zeroing in on your growth efficiency to understand your ability to pay back their capital invested. In the linked article, Espresso Capital explains how to calculate key growth efficiency metrics, what they can tell you about your business, and the important role they play in financing.
🎒 Education can be a difficult vertical to sell into – the sales cycles are long with multiple decision makers involved, and your product better be squeaky clean to get past IT. GoGuardian founder Advait Shinde recounts how he faced these obstacles on The SaaS Podcast, receiving countless rejections for his classroom management software in their first years of the business. He and his cofounder’s young age and lack of experience didn’t help their case, but he kept a positive mindset and was persistent with his prospects, who slowly but surely started to come around. Fast forward to today, and they’re used by 18 million studies and above 50m in ARR. Of course there are many reasons why Shinde was able to succeed, but as you’ll hear in the pod, he credits persistence above all else.