August 2020 – Cloud Computing and SaaS

2020-08-31

Redpoint Office Hours with Kimbre Lancaster on Hosting Successful Virtual Events

This post is by Tomasz Tunguz from Tomasz Tunguz

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    <img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/v1598975102/Redpoint_Office_Hours_Blog_Post___Sept_15th_2.jpg" alt="image">

On Tuesday, September 15th at 10 AM PT, Redpoint will welcome Kimbre Lancaster as the next co-host of Office Hours. Kimbre is the former Director of Global Events and Field Marketing at Gremlin where she managed the industry sponsorships program, Gremlin’s produced conferences (Chaos Conf, Failover Conf) and the new remote field program. Prior, she built and scaled the programs at both Split and Scalyr. During the presentation, we will cover the keys to success for hosting virtual events, including building audiences, managing sponsors, and programming. We have seen the lead generating potential of virtual events across our portfolio, and we believe this type of marketing will become essential in the next decade. This Office Hours will be a virtual event. We will collect questions from participants beforehand and try to cover them throughout the discussion. We’ll also answer questions from the audience at the end. If you’re interested Continue reading

2020-08-31

Why It Shouldn’t Really Matter If Your VC Loses All The Money They Invested in You — On The First Check In, At Least

This post is by Jason Lemkin from SaaStr

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Why do venture capitalists invest in lots of companies even though 90% of them go bankrupt?

Well, 90% of most venture-backed startups that don’t go bankrupt. They at least try to pick the best ones they can. That helps — a bit.

But many still do. The “loss ratio” at early-stage VC firms is often around 40% by logo, and 20%-30% by dollars. In other words, 4/10 may go bankrupt or at least lose money … but since the winners tend to get more than the losers, in the end, maybe “only” 20%-30% of the fund is lost in losers.

The thing is, that’s build into the model. Because if you do VC investing right, the winners far outpace the losers.

Let’s take say a

$50m fund
that does 25 $2m investments
each for 10% of a company

(to keep it overly simple).

Now let’s assume of those 25 Continue reading "Why It Shouldn’t Really Matter If Your VC Loses All The Money They Invested in You — On The First Check In, At Least"

2020-08-312020-08-31

How we saved 40,000 hours by moving off a Gmail shared inbox

This post is by Melissa Rosen from Groove Blog

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2020-08-30

A Quick Diagnostic to Determine if Your Sales & Marketing Teams are Aligned

This post is by Tomasz Tunguz from Tomasz Tunguz

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    How do you tell if your sales team and marketing team are working well together? There&rsquo;s a simple diagnostic that I&rsquo;ve come to use. Compare the slopes of marketing&rsquo;s lead generation efforts to sales&rsquo; bookings trajectory.

The marketing pipeline trend should be the pipeline for this quarter, pipeline that’s available to close (ATC). ATC is a concept I learned from Lambert Billet, the CRO at Looker. It means the prospect will buy this quarter. Sometimes, teams report aggregate pipeline generated, but prospects ready to buy 12 months from now aren’t relevant.

If the marketing slope is up and the bookings slope is up, the teams are aligned. Ideally, the marketing slope is greater than the sales slope, which means the marketing team generates more pipeline than sales can close. If the slopes are identical, that’s fine too. Marketing sources enough pipeline for sales to hit their numbers.

If the marketing

2020-08-30

The 3 Types of Day 1 Pricing: Low End of Normal. Identical. And Anchor High.

This post is by Jason Lemkin from SaaStr

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Q: As an entrepreneur starting out, is it better to overprice your product or underprice it?

For most of us, as we build up our confidence, the best initial pricing strategy to start is the Low End of Normal.

Why? It creates the least friction. And you want the least friction possible in sales when you are starting out.

What is the Low End of Normal?

First, just look at the competition. The market leader(s) in the space, the Top 1–3 players.
If you don’t have direct competition, look at “comps”. Comparables. Apps that provide roughly similar value. A bit more on that here. There is no commodity pricing in SaaS. But there are ranges.
Price at 80% of that, to start. If that looks too low, raise the price a smidge.

The Low End of Normal says the right things to start for a brand new app Continue reading "The 3 Types of Day 1 Pricing: Low End of Normal. Identical. And Anchor High."

2020-08-30

How You Can Help Your Sales Team in 2021

This post is by Jason Lemkin from SaaStr

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

2020 — the Strangest of Years in SaaS and Cloud. Global pandemic, economic destruction and yet … Cloud is on fire.

So it’s time now to start thinking about how to help the team for next year. Your job is to help. What are some things you can do that are actionable? A few ideas:

Hire dedicated sales ops. Many of you will have little to no dedicated help in sales operations. Who’s making sure the reps have the right collateral? Getting routing the right leads? Are being trained properly? Are being paid properly? If that’s you, or your VP of Sales, or even your VP of Marketing … that’s a bad use of time. Hire a director+ of sales ops to take the administrative side of sales off the plate of folks that should opening and closing.
Invest (more) in training and onboarding. Sales teams often do the worst Continue reading "How You Can Help Your Sales Team in 2021"

2020-08-28

The Top 10 Mistakes Made in Hiring Your First Sales Team

This post is by Jason Lemkin from SaaStr

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

I know we’ve hit a number of these points individually before on SaaStr, but after getting asked about the top mistakes hiring your first sales team so many times over the years, I thought it would be worthwhile to assemble a Top 10 List. Because it seems like so many of us just make these mistakes again, and again. And again. Make fewer of them and you’ll scale faster with less stress. Here’s my Top 10 list: #1. You hire a sales rep to sell before you can prove you can do it yourself. You have to prove it’s sellable first. You can’t outsource this. Yes, you may be terrible at sales. But you are the CEO. You know the product cold. You can do it. Or you need to find a way to do it. More here. #2. You hire a VP of Continue reading "The Top 10 Mistakes Made in Hiring Your First Sales Team"

2020-08-28

15 Low-Cost Shopify Tools for E-commerce Entrepreneurs

This post is by Nathan Collier from Groove Blog

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

Shopify tools to help you grow your online store. COVID-19 has driven a massive growth in E-commerce spending. To put it in perspective, consumers spent more online in April and May of 2020 than they did during the entire holiday season last year. “According to our data, it would’ve taken between 4 and 6 years […] The post 15 Low-Cost Shopify Tools for E-commerce Entrepreneurs appeared first on Groove Blog.

2020-08-28

SaaStr Podcast #367 with Zoom Head of Global Sales Operations and Enablement Hilary Headlee

This post is by Amelia Ibarra from SaaStr

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Ep. 367: Hilary Headlee is Head of Global Sales Operations and Enablement @ Zoom. Prior to joining Zoom, Hilary was VP of Global Sales Operations and Productivity @ MindBody and before that enjoyed similar roles with Alteryx, Invoca and Lynda.com. At Lynda.com, Hilary grew the support teams from 6 to 60 people and supported more than 60 net new reps in just 3 years. If that was not enough, Hilary is also a Limited Partner in Stage 2 Capital, the venture firm focused purely on go-to-market.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

How did Hilary make her way into the world of SaaS and come to be the sales leader she is today with the global communications leader, Zoom?
When thinking about sales ops vs revenue ops, what are the 4 key points to consider for founders? How does lead management and onboarding alter the question of sales ops vs revenue ops? Where does Hilary see operational debt the most? How does she advise founders on removing it?
Given the broad scope of sales ops and engagement, is it not just rebalancing culture, comms, and change? As a business scales does there not come a time where it unbundles and scales out of sales vs revenue ops? How do the roles change with time and scale? Where do the breakpoints occur?
Why does Hilary believe documentation is so important today? What is the toolset Hilary uses for documentation? How does Hilary train her team around the right strategy to document their processes? Where do many go wrong here? Where can you pick up small wins?

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin
SaaStr
Harry Stebbings
Zoom Below, we’ve shared the transcript of Harry’s interview with Hilary. Continue reading

2020-08-28

The 10 Most Popular Sessions for SaaStr Annual at Home (So Far)

This post is by Jason Lemkin from SaaStr

Click here to view on the original site: Original Post

We’re off to the races for registration for 2020 SaaStr Annual at Home on Sep 2-3. 1000s of folks haven’t chosen their sessions yet. And also note a handful of super-popular sessions like the COO of Github and SVP Product at Zendesk have just kicked off reg, so those likely will soon be in the Top 10, just give it a day or two. But for now what’s the most popular — so far? Take a look below, and if you want to join them, just click on them and sign up! #1: “The 5 Things That Kill Startups After Their Seed Rounds and the Secrets to Avoiding Them with Y Combinator”