who's up for a sales and marketing brainstorm?
We just grabbed our tickets for SaaStock Remote on June 10-11 so mark it on your calendar now! As always they have an awesome speaker lineup including some of the best in SaaS, and this time around there will be virtual networking and exhibition sessions to at least make it feel like you’re getting out of the house.
You can use the discount code in the pic below for 20% off your tickets, hope to see you there!
🏠 Since our recent crisis, work from home rules have been more flexible than a sales rep’s discount at the end of month. Document search tool FYI dove into the data to see exactly how the trend has evolved—from 2016 to 2018, the number of job posts on LinkedIn mentioning “work flexibility” rose 78% and “flexible work” became a major consideration for over 75% of the workforce. Technical roles had already started to skew towards remote, so sales and marketing are the departments seeing the biggest increase in remote work as of late. FYI reported that 90% of employees who test remote work don’t want to go back to on site, a stat we’re assuming was taken pre-pandemic, because we can’t be the only ones itching to get back to the office.
💳 We finally had a chance to check out all of SaaStr’s talks from their virtual conference and thought Profitwell’s Patrick Campbell killed it with this 20 minute presentation. Given that growth is hard to come by during a pandemic, the focus was on retaining existing customers. Some good news shared was that while B2B SaaS has stopped growing at an aggregate level, it hasn’t started shrinking like B2C. He recommended looking at payment failures, which seem to take a backseat to active churn despite accounting for 30-40% of total churn. We were surprised to hear that 80% of customers don’t even know their payment failed—to make sure customers are aware, enable payment retries rather than sending a warning email. And if all else fails, consider offering a discount or deferral of payments to avoid losing them altogether.
🚦 It seems like every marketing email that lands in our inbox is telling us exactly how we will get through COVID-19. So we found it refreshing to read Coatue partner Caryn Marooney’s brainstorm ideas on how to conduct sales and marketing right now. She caveats that the list isn’t a playbook, which makes sense because no one has a playbook for something we’ve only dealt with for a couple months. Her suggestion to conduct micro experiments seems like a smart way to test ideas in an unstable environment, and goes hand in hand with another one of her suggestions: finding new ways to fill the funnel. Video could be a great choice here as YouTube viewership hours are skyrocketing.
😡 Commission structures vary by sector and business priority, but this list covers some essentials that are good to keep in mind when creating a new plan. This may sound obvious but it’s probably the most common thing people get wrong: make the plan simple and understandable. If you overcomplicate commissions, your reps might not understand them, and will end up disappointed when their take home isn’t what they thought it would be. The list also recommends higher sales commissions for annual plans versus monthly to reflect the higher revenue and stability they afford. And AE’s will hate to hear this, but we agree they shouldn’t be paid for renewals unless they’re owning the support activities (which typically the CS manager does).
🎶 In What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben Horowitz covers the nuances in creating an awesome work culture, calling upon examples from Genghis Khan to Amazon. As the title suggests, the key to creating your culture is through the actions you take as a leader. Just writing out a few core values on your website isn’t what is going to influence your team—they need to see that you live and breathe them! Horowitz acknowledges that most company cultures will differ, but that the two virtues every good company should embody are loyalty and trust. That starts being upfront and transparent with your team, and being able to give them the bad news when it’s needed. If you don’t, tough situations will continue to get worse.