📕 Properly incentivizing the sales team; Linking product and revenue goals; How to save a struggling startup…

Benchmarks are a great tool for understanding how you stack up against the competition, and SaaS Capital’s annual survey is arguably the best source for SaaS benchmarks. We feel it’s only right to participate in the survey given that we read them every year, so if you have a few minutes, we encourage you to as well! All answers are of course confidential and anonymous.

👶 There are plenty of growing pains when moving from the seed stage to the scaling phase, but Betakit had some solid suggestions for ways to set your team up for success. Developing strong customer relationships is a great place to start, and the way your sales team is incentivized has a big impact on that. If sales are commissioned purely on new deals closed and not how customers progress with your product, there isn’t any motivation for them to spend time on real relationship building. This idea should apply to all of those involved in the different handoff points your customer has in their journey. You would rather do a great job retaining and growing your customer base than focusing on new ones who will just fall through a leaky bucket.

📝 We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that your data needs to have context and create a narrative about your business’s overall health. Otherwise, it’s all for naught. Step one is understanding the different roles your KPIs play in telling your company’s story, we liked this idea of dividing your data into two buckets: summary and growth. Summary KPIs would provide an overview of how you are currently performing, while your growth KPIs are indicators of long-term success. Understanding how the two work together and identifying trends can help you catch potential points of failure faster.

💰 When developing products, many default to making tweaks that improve efficiency or give your business a new feature the competition lacks. But, there’s a more impactful factor which should be at the root of all of your product decisions – your revenue goals. Connecting product goals to your revenue goals will help your R&D teams do a better job of prioritizing their time, and increase your overall team’s alignment. It also should push you to take a more strategic vision as opposed to just focusing on the now, which we of course can all be guilty of sometimes.

🦅 Your customers’ product experience is the core piece of their overall customer experience, but the two are far from the same. Chameleon created a great in-depth guide on this concept to get into the nuances. While product experience might sound like it falls solely on the VP of Product, it’s really a shared responsibility between all teams, while customer experience is mostly rooted in perceptions and personal feelings. They suggest using micro surveys to kill two birds with one stone, and continuously monitor both product and customer experience.

🚣 Flow’s David Scrivner found himself in a precarious position in 2019, with customers fleeing and no obvious way to stop the bleeding. Flow’s product hadn’t changed much in 10-years, and new entrants to the already competitive workflow management space had reduced their competitive advantage. That led David to an 18-month journey of simplifying product – pulling the most used features to the forefront and making sure that backend systems could support what customers wanted to accomplish, with speed. This enabled them to turn around what looked like a sunken ship. One of his biggest learnings was understanding the concept that all things compound. Optimizing and improving your product is never an “I’m done” situation, it’s a series of tests and learnings.

Source: https://thesaasplaybook.substack.com/p/-properly-incentivizing-the-sales