A tale of a support team – when Scrum leads to Kanban – Episode 2 – Mission Impossible « Control Your Chaos So the first thing we needed to do is to break that horrifying atmosphere. A manager sticking his nose into everything, knowledge transfer, to another company, organizational havoc, it all has taken its toll on the people. So I did something unexpected – I brought balloons into one of their meetings. This was the turning point. Changes in the technical elements were greater than ever. But most important is that they were setting their own goals. So what made the change possible? Breaking the lethargic atmosphere. You may not believe, but 4 months later this team got rid of the bug queue completely. Introducing new people got easier as well – due to tutorials and warning signs in the code, they at least didn’t mess up things. Their Definition Of Done evolved. Let’s sum up. Technology: as complex as it can be. I still remember one moment when on one of the retrospectives a team member that visited the customer organization the most told us story: But how does that lead to Kanban? Like this:
Pacific Crest's 2011 SaaS Survey Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a strong focus on SaaS, has surveyed a 70 SaaS companies with very interesting results. There is some great data on topics such as growth rates, cost of customer acquisition, churn/retention, expense models, capital efficiency, etc. The full survey, which was put together by David Spitz and his team (follow @dspitz on Twitter), can be found here. Details of the participating companies: 70 private SaaS company respondents, participating anonymously and confidentiallyAdministered to CEOs and CFOs, May-July 201169% multi-tenant/single instanceDiverse mix:–$0-$60M+ in revenues (~$13M median)(1)–25-250+ employees (~120 median)–10-2,000+ customers (~480 median)–$100s to $MMs median ACV (~$37.5K median)–~50% horizontal apps, ~50% vertical apps, infrastructure, etc. (ACV = Annual Contract Value) 2010 Growth Rates Vary by Company Size 2010 Growth as a Function of Median Annual Contract Value 2010 Growth as a Function of Sales Strategy Gross Churn Summary
The critical metrics for each stage of your SaaS business (Guest post by Lars Lofgren of KISSmetrics) [My friend Lars is a product marketer at KISSmetrics and loves helping SaaS businesses understand how their business is growing. He writes regularly for the KISSmetrics blog and his personal marketing blog. He wrote the following post about SaaS products and the metrics you use to evaluate their success level. Lots of great information in there. How healthy is your SaaS business? We’re bombarded with KPIs and an endless series of metrics to tell us how we’re doing. But instead of using data to measure our progress, it’s much more likely that we get lost and start focusing on metrics that are easy to track but don’t mean anything. For a SaaS business, there are a few core metrics that need your undivided attention. In this post, I’m going to break down the essential metrics for each stage of a SaaS business. What this framework will give you: Let’s jump in. Before Product/Market FitYou’ve just made the decision to start your business and you’ve got plans for world domination. Primary Goals:
User Profiles - Relocate to another Partition or Disk How to Relocate User Profiles to another Partition or Disk in Windows 8 InformationThe method described in this tutorial allows relocating user profiles and folders already while installing Windows 8, before any user accounts are created, as well as after installation on an already installed system.The advantage of this method is that it changes some internal Windows 8 environment variables, being a “Do it once and forget” procedure. Changing the variables takes care of all existing and future user profiles, locating them when created to selected drive or partition. The method is fail proof and reversible.When Windows 8 is installed, 5 or 6 system folders are created depending on chosen bit-version:PerfLogs (Performance Logs), where Windows stores performance and reliability logsProgram Files, where applications and software are installed.
Why Churn is SO critical to success in SaaS Summary: Illustrates graphically why churn is a huge problem a SaaS company gets larger. It also looks at a very surprising factor that can massively accelerate SaaS growth: negative churn. (This article is applicable to any recurring revenue business, not just SaaS.) Introduction As a SaaS company becomes larger, the size of the subscription base becomes large enough that any kind of churn against that base becomes a large number. The red and yellow lines show the lost revenue due to customers cancelling their subscriptions (churn). Looking at the graph above, we can see that Churn is really not that big of a number in the early startup months. The graph below shows the impact on Total MRR (monthly recurring revenue) of each scenario, which is fairly substantial. The Impact of Negative Churn It is possible to run a SaaS, or any other kind of recurring revenue, business in such a way as to get what I call Negative Churn. The result is quite shocking. It’s an amazing result.
Why Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) Is The Most Important Metric in SaaS One thing that is great in SaaS, from a 20,000 foot perspective at least, is You Can See The Future. It’s the benefit of a recurring revenue stream in a B2B model. If you did $100k last month, and have grown 6% a month each month for the last 12 mos, I can pretty much say you’ll be a $2m+ ARR business in the next twelve months or so. The thing is, sales is variant, and sales pipelines have big data quality issues — and worse, sales as a metric is a lagging indicator. >> But there’s a better metric, your Key Metric, you should track and score yourself to, and hold your VP Marketing and marketing team to – Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR), your growth in qualified leads, measure month-over-month, every month. As long as you are using Qualified Leads, and you use a consistent formula and process to qualify them, you can then See The Future: If the leads keep coming in, and sales growth does not track your lead growth, you’ll know you have one of two problems: And you know what? Like this:
Personal VPN Services Providers. Easily unblock Skype, Hulu, Netflix and Facebook - WiTopia Understanding the Customer Buying Cycle and Triggers This article looks at why customers expect different interactions with you depending on where they are in the buying cycle. It also examines how specific events trigger them into a buying mode. It then explains how you can use this information to make your marketing more effective. The Customer Buying Cycle A simple way to look at the buying cycle is to break into three stages: Awareness – when a customer first becomes aware of your product. How Buying Cycle impacts the sales approach needed Imagine that you wandered in to a clothing store while walking around the neighborhood. Now imagine that you have gone into the same store. What’s the difference? The difference between these two examples is where you are in the buying cycle. Depending on where you are in your buying cycle, your expectations for how the sales people in the shop should treat you are different. How do you adapt Marketing to a buyer’s stage in the cycle? What to do with visitors that are not ready to buy? Conclusions Thanks
How SaaS Marketing is Different from Every Other Type of Marketing SaaS marketers have a tough job. Marketing is hard. But what about marketing something that has no physical presence? Or marketing something that is constantly changing? Or marketing something that has some goofy name? You get the idea. SaaS marketing is not for the faint of heart. In this article, I want to point out some of those differences. Giving away free stuff is actually a good thing. If you were selling physical merchandise, you would not give away a ton of free stuff. But giving away the full product? But that’s exactly what SaaS marketing should do. The free model has dozens of iterations — free trial, trial-to-paid, trial with credit card information, trial with no credit card information, freemium model, 90-day free trial, limited version free, etc., etc. You’ll see this just about everywhere you look. Here’s the landing page for Visual Website Optimizer. SproutSocial provides social media monitoring. The sales cycle is remarkably short. SaaS sales is all about rapid sales.
HubSpot's Best Practices for Managing SaaS Inside Sales Best practices for inside sales managers. An interview with Mark Roberge, VP of Sales at HubSpot, discussing how he blends science and process with the art of selling. HubSpot is a SaaS company selling Inbound Marketing software. HubSpot has grown revenue over 6,000% in the last four years, placing them #33 on the Inc 500 fastest growing companies list. They now employ about 300 people. Mark’s background is unusual for a VP of Sales. How did MIT Sloan School influence the way you think about managing? It taught me to seek out science and data whenever possible to understand the business and make decisions. What are your goals as a sales exec, and what is your strategy for achieving them? Goals are Predictable, Scalable Revenue Growth My Strategy is best summed up as: Hire the same type of successful sales personTrain each sales person in the same way Provide each sales person with the same quantity and quality of leadsEnsure sales people work the leads using the same process Hiring Onboarding