Visible Blog

Hey there – We wanted to provide a quick recap of all of the major functionality that we’ve launched in April. As always feel free to send us any feedback, questions or comments. Data Labels on Charts You can now add the actual value on the data point on your charts. This will display the actual values of the respective metric on the chart itself. We suggest using charts with 8 or less data points to utilize data labels or you’ll quickly overcrowd the visualization. Chart Annotations While you are creating or updating a chart you can now call out specific data points and add your own context through annotations. Simply click on any data point and add in text. Goals With any chart you can now add a goal, benchmark line or threshold targets. Simply navigate to the Options tab to customize your different goals and benchmarks. File Attachments in Updates Visible Updates now support file attachments. They’ll be available as one-click downloads and we’ll automatically detect the file type and add a nice icon for you! They are great for more granular financial statements, presentations or supplemental data sets. Table support in our text editor Our Updates text editor now supports tables. They are great for structuring any of your qualitative information in Updates. Other minor yet useful improvements: Better support for copying and pasting text from other text editors into Visible Updates! A very beautiful looking success message once you publish an Update in Visible. -The Visible Team

If sales enablement helps maximize your company’s efficiency and effectiveness, ignoring the importance of this training is essentially disregarding the need for real growth. But sales enablement isn’t as sexy as product improvements. There aren’t demo days to showcase a new hire training course. There are real metrics to track, but the relatively new discipline can still be a little vague. And in age where some argue that your software should be so good it sells itself, why not invest in new features rather than sales enablement? Why not bypass optimizing outbound efforts and implement irresistible new features instead? Because your organization will always be in the business of convincing customers why they need your solution, not just what it offers if you wish to scale effectively. “Even though the enterprise sales process has many steps and stages, it ultimately has to answer three questions for the customer: why buy, why you, why now,” Mark Cranney writes. To answer these key sales questions, you need to go beyond just hiring talented reps and effective managers. You need enablement pros to analyze, educate and build plans to avoid some of the sales’ biggest hurdles. But unlike a new account executive, a sales enablement hire won’t bring in 4x their salary in new contracts. Instead, over time they will empower the entire organization to hit goals and achieve larger multiples, but only with executive buy-in and a focus on the long-term. Here are some of the best ways your sales team and your enablement crew will work together to make this happen. You need to customize a unique value proposition Especially in the early days, the way you sell your software will often change quicker than the product itself. Understanding the needs and initiatives of each individual client and determining how your own capabilities and unique features solve their pain is crucial. You’re not going to recognize these factors simply with a freemium software offering that requires the client to go through the journey alone. And your sales team won’t be able to knock this part of the process out of the park without proper support and training. Sales enablement teams can help develop questionnaires and strategies for shaping a client’s unique value proposition. Your enablement team will also train your reps on the best way to demonstrate this value. As a result, you’re likely to experience a jump in close rate and greater success against competitors. Navigating an internal sales process Your sales team faces one of its biggest obstacles when it comes to actually getting the client to sign on the dotted line. A rep may come to terms quickly with a prospect, but getting your contact to return a signed document can be another ordeal entirely. Even if the person on the other end of the line is the decision maker, receiving proper authorization, filling out the right paperwork or allocating the necessary budget can really slow your sales cycle down. One of the main reasons you have an outbound sales team is to quickly learn the barriers these clients face internally and adapt to help assist them in the effort. One of the main reasons you have a sales enablement team is to identify the common problems that your prospects face and design better strategies to navigate a faster course to closing deals. No one else will focus on improving the entire organization Reps close deals. They have quotas to meet and little time to reflect on process improvements when they’ve turned their focus to individual opportunities. Even if your most senior sales members possess a wealth of knowledge, you won’t be able to disseminate their expertise without the right people in place to turn these insights into valuable courses. And it’ll be your job to champion these efforts and avoid the temptation to leave sales to learn without support or invest an unnecessary amount into product early on.

Visible + ChartMogul We’re excited to announce our partnership today with ChartMogul. ChartMogul provides analytics for building a better subscription business to over 800 customers (and growing!). By integrating with Stripe, Braintree, Recurly and more, ChartMogul provides turnkey metrics to give you instant insight into your customers. Visible customers will be able to integrate their ChartMogul metrics directly into Visible and use for their own stakeholder reporting. Our initial integration includes your recurring revenue metrics, customer metrics, churn data and LTVs. We’ll continue to improve the integration so send any feedback our way. You can find more info on the ChartMogul + Visible feature page. If you have any questions or comments about Visible + ChartMogul send them to hi@visible.vc. Current Visible users can read more about the integration in this knowledge base article. Up & to the right, -Mike & The Visible Team

With spring around the corner we wanted to provide the latest in the Visible world. Below we’ll highlight some key functionality that has been released over the past couple of months. Data Source Integrations We made some great improvements to our existing integrations, added new data sources and currently support 10 direct data sources in Visible. New integrations include Mixpanel, Advanced Google Analytics and ChartMogul. Update Improvements Updates can now be sent through a shareable and trackable link in addition to email. We also added support to save Updates as PDFs and improve the editor experience. View Example Update As always, please feel free to directly respond with any questions, comments or to setup a time to chat! Up & to the right, The Visible Team

Within a matter of years, sales enablement has rapidly changed from simply a topic of conversation to a vital part of any growing organization. Now, new leadership roles are being created in companies to drive sales enablement performance. The conversation around the future of SaaS even seems to be driven by the work of these nascent teams of trainers. What’s changed? While still a somewhat ambiguous term defined in different ways by individual organizations, the focus of sales enablement teams to better identify underlying product, sales and marketing obstacles and introduce more effective solution is an unavoidable function of growth in any B2B environment. A focus on effectiveness To earn that level of effectiveness, it will require attracting talent in a relatively new area of expertise. As Brian Lambert of the Sales Enablement Society wrote, the role of sales enablement will not be limited to recommending technology solutions to improve process. Instead, it will be essential that enablement teams are competent enough to collaborate with leaders across all departments “to improve revenue consistency through proactive and structured initiatives and coordinated efforts,” Lambert said. “The type of work that our members engage in goes beyond deploying a technology tool or platform.” Finding a differentiating strategy In his recent review of SaaStr, Chris Orlob noted that one of the key conference takeaways was that the function of sales enablement teams in the near future will to be focus not on differentiating features in the software, but instead better defining the “how we sell” question to create better sales strategies. “With so many SaaS sales tools focused on sales efficiency, sales effectiveness is now becoming the name of the game in the ‘sales acceleration’ category of software” Orlob wrote. Adapting to rapidly changing technology This outlook on sales enablement pairs well in an environment with dramatic technology growth in B2B sales. The role of sales will likely be greatly aided by a rise in tools like artificial intelligence, infinite computing, networks and sensors and robotics. As more customer behavior is tracked, processed, recorded and reviewed, it’ll be the role of the enablement teams to mold these insights into actions that drive sales growth. Key enablement metrics like reducing sales cycles and decreasing time to quota and pipeline obtainment for new reps should drop considerably if teams have better technology to get the job done. Scaling sales enablement internally Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, recently told me that the new approach to sales enablement will be to motivate employees outside the team to get involved in the training process. “As sales enablement scales, we need to be enabling managers, too.” MacDonald said. “What do we need to train managers on to enable the enablement team’s efforts? What do we need to do to make sure these training recommendations are being followed after the training ends?” Providing greater distribution of the day-to-day responsibilities of training frees the enablement team up to focus more on strategy, metrics and the best way to utilize new technology across the organization. Because of the greater focus on enablement, look for organizations to focus even more effort on recruiting, hiring and obtaining sales enablement talent as these roles will take on more prestigious titles with greater responsibility. There’s little question that the idea of enablement will continue to change as quickly as the companies that need it, but it’s almost impossible to see a future that reverts back to a time when enablement seemed like a luxury.

The success—or lack thereof—of a sales enablement team isn’t the easiest to track because the area itself isn’t always clearly defined. When a scaling company develops its initial sales enablement strategy, it’s often a struggle to determine exactly what the organization needs to focus on first. And that lack of clarity can present a real problem. “Enablement means something different in every company,” Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, said. “A lot of companies think they need enablement. But if there is not a clear understanding of the purpose of sales enablement, it can die very quickly.” So how do you start? Simply. Focus first on a handful of easy-to-identify valuable functions that drive performance in a sales organization. Here are three great ways to start: Decrease time to quota obtainment All new hires face a steep learning curve when entering a new organization and a new sales process. Providing the right tools that boost a new hire into peak productivity mode is remarkably important. And cutting down the number of days until that happens can wildly profitable. So the role of a new sales enablement team must start hacking at that time to quota obtainment with insights for into the sales process. Empowering new hires with basic strategies that overcome common obstacles that have slowed success in the past is a key component in enabling the sales team. Identifying selling pitfalls, core value propositions and common pain points and some additional tricks of the trade helps shorten the road to top performance. Decrease time to pipeline obtainment In order to hit that quota, reps need to fill the pipeline first. Most companies will use the 3x sales pipeline-to-quota-ratio as the goal for the sales team. For the sales enablement team, it’s essential to identify the best ways new reps can hunt for new leads. Your enablement team can provide information on the right customer types, how to best reach them and how to determine which opportunities might be better than others. Again, you’re providing new reps with a better roadmap to avoid obstacles others have already encountered. The bottom line is if your sales enablement team isn’t decreasing time to quota obtainment or pipeline obtainment, they aren’t providing the right boost to your onboarding efforts. Decrease sales cycles Finally, moving beyond new hires, sales enablement teams must deconstruct the sales cycle and find ways for the entire organization to cut down on the time to commitment. They have to monitor how deals track through the process and identify common factors that are often introduced and slow down the action. Sales enablement teams gather intelligence and data from across the team and synthesize the learnings into communication training that drives iterative improvement. That speeds up the process and makes enablement worthwhile in the long-run. There is almost no end to the avenues your enablement team may explore to keep your organization innovating and working smarter. But by focusing first on just a few key areas, you can convince investors of the need for sales enablement and earn buy-in from the rest of your leadership team of its value.

Measuring productivity and finding the right number of hires is a key to succeed Last week, I touched on the paradox that exists in a SaaS world largely celebratory of the role SDRs play in a growing sales team: many boast of the value, few invest in the execution. But the mere addition of a SDR team can increase lead conversion by 35 percent and free up account executives (AEs) to focus on closing deals. That’s an unavoidably big advantage if you’ve created a process that avoids unnecessary pitfalls. This week, I want to drill down to the actual SDR work that’s needed to determine how teams can succeed and how many SDRs are needed to hit goals. There’s little doubt that a SDR team helps AEs focus on hitting quotas. Whether your SDRs are qualifying leads, setting meetings or doing both, they organize a necessary process that’s harder to tie to hitting specific deal quotas and revenue goals. So how do we know you’re using their expertise correctly? Measuring productivity SDR work is a grind. Certainly, there’s an art to learning the right things to say that gets a prospect to pick up that phone after a voicemail has been left. And there’s no doubt SDRs learn to finesse phone calls over time to get prospects to commit. But in between the opportunities to actually speak with potential clients comes a litany of unanswered dials. And the necessity of putting in the calls can’t be overlooked. If your SDRs are responsible for setting meetings, logging the number of calls and emails is an excellent way to introduce some method into the madness. Let’s look at the incredible effort it takes to land just one prospect alone, based off Craig Rosenberg’s very helpful breakdown: On average, 12.73 dials are needed to connect with a prospect when you have their direct phone number On average, 18.83 calls are needed to connect with a prospect when you have to be routed through a switchboard On average, between 22.5 to 30 calls are needed to have just one solid conversation with a prospect Finally, if we consider that it will likely take three calls to set a demo meeting, that leaves each SDR with a 60-90 call range just to land one session. Getting their reps in on the phones is essential, even if it’s tedious. It’s okay to cheat a little… Now if we consider that each AE needs about 50-100 qualified leads each month to hit their goal (if that goal falls between 8-12 deals), 60-90 calls per prospect can teeter on being unsustainable. It’s necessary to find ways to increase efficiency and improve the movement through your pipeline. This is where an account based strategy across your sales and marketing teams really shines. Setting up email sends to hit prospects’ inboxes 24-72 hours before a SDR calls can wildly increase the success rate of getting a connection earlier. Additionally, following and engaging on social media with the target company and the individual you’re trying to reach even further warms up the conversation. This keeps your company top-of-mind, provides enough reason for a prospect to do some research and hopefully entices them to pick up that phone and say hello. Big takeaway: Make sure your SDRs are putting in the necessary calls and helping to coordinate with sales and marketing to increase efficiency. Finding the right number of SDRs You never want to hire just a single rep, but just how many SDRs do you need? It depends on the organization. As David Skok writes “There is wide variation, much of which can be attributed to company size. Smaller SaaS companies in particular, deploy higher SDR to AE ratios, meaning one SDR supports fewer AEs.” But normally, the number of SDRs to AEs will fall somewhere between a 1:1 to 1:3 ratio. Your need for lead volume and lead qualification rates also play a role in how many SDRs you hire as you’ll need your team to be able to create sufficient opportunities to make their roles succeed. To determine the right number, consider the deal range you need each month to hit your goal. Then you need to be able to determine the average number of leads needed to close one deal. Do you actually have enough SDRs to create that many leads? In smaller organizations, this is less likely to be an exact science. However, attempting to identify these metrics adds discipline to the process and helps you better execute a hiring plan and protects you against the wasted time and money of an inefficient SDR team. That’s a system that succeeds.

4 questions to answer that help you avoid prospecting woes when you start specializing sales roles If we measured online chatter alone around sales development in scaling companies, I’d be hard pressed to think of many opinions that earn greater approval than the importance of segmenting your funnel and specializing roles to increase your bookings. Everywhere I look it seems my favorite thought-leaders in the industry are singing the praises of sales specialization roles. Yet a survey last year revealed that just over half (51%) the companies asked segmented inbound qualification and outbound prospecting into separate roles. Where’s the disconnect? I can’t think of any sales leader in any organization I’ve talked to in the past few years that isn’t at least mulling over strategies to optimize the funnel through specialization. But my suspicion is the reason there hasn’t been a greater wave of adoption to this method is the fear that specialization could lead to roles that don’t generate enough revenue quickly to justify their existence within a small company. When we talk about specializing roles, for most growing companies the first action item is to hire sales development reps (SDRs) and allow the current inside salespeople to stop prospecting a focus only on closing deals. As I’ve noted before, there’s no shortage of people championing the importance of the SDR. It’s even been argued that the best ROI you can get in sales is investing in top-of-funnel efforts. So why do some founders find their recent SDR hires pour endless hours into cold calls only to come up empty handed when it comes to actually setting up account executives with meetings or demos with quality leads? Usually, it’s your fault. In order for a SDR to succeed, you need the right structure in place to support their work, understand their value and measure their success. To avoid the pitfalls of a bad SDR hire, you need answer the following questions before you bring someone on board. When are you ready to hire SDRs? Timing is crucial. Your SDRs won’t succeed if you hire too early and don’t understand how the work of SDRs fit into your current funnel. David Skok outlined two great criteria to meet before you hire a SDR: There is enough lead flow to make qualifying potential customers a full-time job for SDRs There is enough budget to hire two SDRs–hiring only one SDR might give you an inaccurate view of how effective the role can be for your company In fact, Kyle Richless noted recently that hiring SDRs in tandem not only sets up the potential for exponential value creation but also helps your sales team develop a safety net to protect against potential failure. “SDR groups learn from one another and share best practices,” Richless wrote. “And if one hire doesn’t work out, the pipeline disruption will be less dire.” Do you know enough about your deal metrics to understand if SDRs are working? If you meet these criteria, then it’s time to determine if you have a good enough grasp on how your funnel works and what your customers are worth. Taft Love has developed one of the most thorough examinations of how to measure the ROI of your SDR hires. In his analysis, there are three crucial data points you need to know—but many overlook—before you can reasonably expect a SDR hire to succeed within your company? What’s your average deal size? If you can’t determine what an average contract is worth, you certainly won’t understand the measurable value prospecting new leads will create. Close rate –You and your current sales reps should be able to determine how many new opportunities will actually close. Otherwise, it’ll be impossible to determine how a SDRs quota for qualifying leads and setting meetings will impact your quarterly sales goals. Sales cycle length –It’s the job of the SDR to provide new opportunities for the AEs. But unless you’ve got an outline for the length of time until deals close, you may be saddled with the cost of a SDR for long stretch while you wait for their work to generate real revenue. That’s no issue for large organizations, but for cash-strapped startups the waiting game can be excruciating. Understand the sales cycle length and you’ll keep from underestimating the value of the SDR’s work. Have you provided your SDRs with the right incentives? Once you’ve mastered these metrics, you can back into a quota each SDR must meet to make their hire a success. Add up their projected base salary, the costs to train and hire, the costs of equipment and tools and any employee benefits for a new SDR. Then determine how many quality leads you need to justify these costs once you’ve multiplied the goal by the close rate and average deal size. Also, use sales cycle length to determine how lead generation impacts cash flow. The only thing missing from this equation is incentives. In order to properly motivate your SDRs, it’s necessary to provide variable payment components on top of their base salary. Richless advocates for a simple, quarterly payout system. “An SDR should be able to explain to a friend how they are paid in one sentence,” he notes, “I.e. ‘Schedule 20 qualified demos/month, completed by an AE partner.’” That’s a great start. It’s best to keep your SDRs accountable to a measurable quota of meetings with qualified leads rather than anchor their bonus to the number of leads they produce that ultimately result in a closed deal. Making an SDR responsible for the work that occurs after the lead is handed to the AE doesn’t make sense. Keep your criteria objective and consistent on what you need the SDR to deliver to the AE and they will be much more likely to hit quotas and feel motivated. Are you enabling your SDRs to succeed? Your SDRs are entry-level employees with one of the hardest roles to play in your company: cold-calling potential leads or emailing prospects to set meetings. It’s essential that you recognize the magnitude of this task and provide all the necessary tools to set them up for success. Get marketing involved. Allow copywriters to review email communication and punch up their language. Let marketing specialists sit in on calls to ensure that your product’s value is being effectively demonstrated and the SDR is showing how your company can solve the prospect’s pain point. This type of marketing-sales coordination benefits both departments and creates a collaborative environment where employees feel more buy-in and SDRs don’t feel like they’ve been sequestered to Cold-Call Island, where no prospects ever want to speak to them and their own co-workers don’t value them. Are you promoting SDRs? Finally, to get the best effort out of your SDRs you need attract a talented group to execute. And in order to hire and retain talent, you need to offer upward mobility within your organization. Conner Burt, Chief Operating Officer at Lesson.ly, has noted that one of the greatest values adds you obtain from hiring a SDR is only realized in much later on. “Your building a bench that you can use to promote SDRs to quota bearing sales people,” Burt said. “That’s an intangible benefit.” Once you bring in a new SDR, make sure they have an understanding of how to work their way up your organization and that the long-term prospects for their career are bright. That sets everyone up for success.

A couple weeks ago, I attended High Alpha’s marketing forum and was reminded by one of the speakers of the simple, yet remarkable function of all marketing efforts: enable sales to close more deals. That doesn’t mean marketing plays a subservient role when sitting at the table with sales executives, but it does serve a measurable purpose and it’s time marketing is held to a regular revenue commitment. So how do we help marketing help sales? Specific directives and clear goals. Here are some questions you need to ask your team to make sure they’re moving in the right direction. Is your content really king? Easily one of the greatest tools marketing can provide sales with is valuable, in-depth content that establishes the company as an authority and the product as a solution. eBooks, articles, emails and infographics can all play a vital role in properly educating the prospect and getting them comfortable with the buy. You must evaluate your current deliverables and decide if your sales team is being armed with the necessary ammo to hit their targets. Are you communicating clearly with prospects? Having the right content will keep the message clear and help your customers understand the product’s value while they’re not on the phone. But are they hearing the right message when it comes to demos and closing calls? That’s not only the responsibility of the sales team. Marketing reps should be sitting in on calls, stationed near the sales team and developing materials to improve communication in the sales process. Creatives should be helping with email communications and even provide some coaching with sales development reps (SDRs) and account executives (AEs) to help develop the right language that gets clients to commit. How do you measure if it’s working? Your marketing efforts should be every bit as accountable to quarterly goals as sales employees. Look at these data points—and more at Hubspot—to measure if they are making headway on their enablement efforts. Content production goals Quality content drives real results. But everyone has to hit numbers, right? Your marketing team should deliver quality at scale and hit regular production goals. Not only does it help predict traffic, boost SEO and create inbound leads, but it also helps the sales staff how many new assets they’ll have to dangle in front of potential clients. Sales team NPS Survey your sales team like you would any customer. Figure out if they are able to use marketing’s efforts to close deals easier. Is their feedback being considered? Does the content being created truly demonstrate value and explain the ways a customer’s pain points? If your sales team isn’t comfortable with the deliverables, your organization won’t maximize the value of your communications strategy and cause a riff that prevents true marketing-sales alignment. Other metrics to evaluate conversions Marketing is far from the only department that chips into sales enablement. The following metrics will help you measure marketing’s impact on sales enablement, but take into account that many other factors will move these metrics. Measure lead-to-customer conversion rate of marketing qualified leads Measuring lead-to-customer conversion rate help identify the success of a given channel. Marketing is no different. Evaluate the performance of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to check the effectiveness of your inbound efforts. Finding a drop in this number over time can signal a drop in the quality of content (and vice versa for improvement) or determine if a change in messaging has brought in a crew of unqualified prospects. Measure revenue per lead As we’ve mentioned before, revenue per lead is really important to track. Use the following formula to figure it out: Revenue Generated/Number of Leads = RPL RPL helps to determine if your funnel is healthy and your leads are quality. This is also a great way to check if leads are being converted well and if not, it might be time to refigure the enablement efforts. Earning more revenue on each lead can be one of the strongest indicators of a startup that’s growing right. Are you beating your competitors? One of the metrics that can truly determine if your startup is healthy and your sales team well-equipped is a good win/loss rate against your competition. You may feel your content delivers better quality and the messaging is clear, but if it isn’t providing the winning differentiator that edges out the competition, marketing efforts may be the problem. Tally these columns and share it with your team each month and tweak communications as necessary. Related Resource: What Should be in an Investor Data Room?

When your startup hits growth stage, scaling the number of sales from channel partners is a no-brainer. For one, the customer acquisition costs are lower. A 2014 survey showed that companies spent about $0.53 for every $1 it attracted in new annual contract value (ACV)—almost half of what is spent on field sales: $1.02. Sales from channel partners also allow you to secure deals without scaling staff. Furthermore, your partners are likely hitting different customer and geographies. As Tomasz Tunguz notes, new channels diversify acquisition efforts “insulating the bookings number from the episodic underperformance typical of a single channel go-to-market.” That produces more predictable revenue and a greater multiple when you’re ready to raise money or sell the company. At first look, growing partner sales seems like the closest thing to a magic bullet. But your channel partners will not simply provide passive income. In order to achieve efficient and effective growth, start by interrogating your reselling efforts with the following questions: Are you actually securing more deals each quarter? It’s a simple question but one that needs to be quantified and shown to investors each quarter. Your partners need to produce and make reselling an indispensable part of your growth strategy. But if you’re just starting to create your first partnerships, this won’t come easy. Channel sales for partnerships require a lot of work upfront to get going. Be clear with investors when you embark on a reselling program that you need time to train your new partners. Nevertheless, after a few quarters, it’ll be time to show the program is working. Jim Somers at Openview has a great list of metrics for judging your partners. Here are some numbers he recommends for founders to record: How many partner deals are currently registered? What is the deal registration value? How many deals have been accepted/denied? How many deals have been won and lost? What is the value of the deals won? What is the deal velocity? Are you training partners properly? You can’t ignore your partners and expect the deal cash to flow. Channel partners may have experience in your industry or even share a similar business model, but will still need as much training like any account executives. “Developing reseller channels do require building a dedicated internal team to cultivate relationships, educate resellers, align internal and external incentives, and ensure success,” Tomasz Tunguz wrote. David Skok recommends creating marketing materials and programs specifically for channel partners to use. Sometimes, your staff will even have to convince your partners to help out with webinars and events to share these marketing efforts. Two things Somers recommends keeping tracking of is the number of courses your partners have attended and the number of training courses your partners have actually completed. Are your partners improving? Your partners have different priorities and, if the company is at a later stage, a different pace of business. It’s your job to prove the value in their participation and create a reason for them to be a better partner. You also need to figure out how to hold them accountable. “Establish partner quotas,” Jim Somers writes. “Both the supplier and the partner to agree to revenue goals and the required investment each must bring forward to be successful.” Assess your sales and training partner metrics and determine how you can improve each partner. Are they attending enough training sessions? What’s there close rate? Could their attempts be improved with more customized marketing materials? Working closely with your partners that are slumping will require a time investment but can pay off huge dividends in the long run. Moving a second-rate partner to a first-rate reseller can be as easy as looking at what’s worked for your top performer and figuring out to replicate the process. If a couple strategies don’t pay off, it’s worth both your time to end the partnership and move on. Are you adding partners? Treat your referral channels are an extension of your product. With new partners you have to test, measure and determine which fail and which scale. Provide incentives for your internal team to research new partners and develop leads. Measure the amount of leads generated, meetings set and deals made just like you would for your field sales squad. Scaling your sales from new partners protects you against saturation from other partner’s markets or a lackluster few quarters from otherwise reliable resellers. By going through this exercise each quarter and answering these questions, you’ve provided a framework for growing your partner channel, improving results with consistent focus on training and measuring any potential weak points that can be fixed or abandoned. If reselling is one of the most efficient ways to scale, evaluating the results and adjusting for future performance is one of the best ways to spend your time.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways to ensure a healthy sales funnel is to reevaluate the quality of your leads. Better leads produce better results. And taking a product-first approach to qualifying leads can help optimize your funnel. But first, let’s look back at how Categorizing leads Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, qualify your leads by placing each in three separate categories: “organization-level,” “opportunity-level,” and “stakeholder-level.” Then ask specific questions that will determine if your product actually fits their needs or if this is a customer destined for failure. This filter alone can save your customer success team a great deal of headaches in the future. Types of lead qualifications Beyond categorizing leads, it’s important to assess where your leads are coming from and what teams are qualifying these customers. Traditionally, lead qualifications have come from two areas: Sales qualified leads (SQL): Some of the hardest earned customers come from SQLs, when your sales team identifies one of the customers in the previous three categories through research and deems them viable for a follow up call. With SQLs, you’re relying on a sales development rep (SDR) to cold-call to set a meeting or demo to get these clients into the funnel. These clients usually require a hefty amount of work to educate them on your offering, explain why you’ve identified them as a good fit and how your product solves their current pain points. Marketing qualified leads (MQL): Inbound marketing efforts produce leads that engages with your company through a number of actions—like requesting a demo or downloading a buying guide-that help educate users before they ever receive a sales call. Before they are passed on to an SDR or account executive (AE), these clients will have some familiarity with the pain point your company can solve. While effective strategies to help fill your sales pipeline, increasing the close rate on SQLs and MQLs can be difficult. One of the best ways to identify the potential customers with highest probability of purchasing is through product qualified leads. Product qualified leads (PQL): When a potential customer is already using a version of your product—whether that be a trial participant or user in a freemium model—they can qualify as a PQL. With a PQL, the customer has hit a designated trigger that lets the sales team know they are ready for a follow up call. As Christopher O’Donnell notes, by using the product to educate the customer first, you’ve given your sales team a huge advantage. “If we flip the traditional model 180 degrees and start instead with product adoption, we find ourselves selling the product to folks who understand the offering and are potentially already happy with it, before they even pay,” O’Donnell writes. Scale Leads, Create Focus PQLs rely on the product selling itself. With this approach, you’re providing the best possible introduction to demonstrate how the product can be a long-term solution. That’s an easy process to replicate too. “[PQLs] are scalable because they require no human touch and they are high-quality leads,” Tomasz Tunguz writes. “When the sales team calls PQLs, customers typically convert at about 25 to 30%.” If you have a freemium offering of your product, you can gain the benefits of the potential velocity of incoming leads while also earning the financial rewards of an inside sales price point. Furthermore, a focus on PQLs can improve your product roadmap as well. Tunguz notes that PQLs actually serve as a management tool as well because the focus on customer action gets everyone onboard with revenue as the key performance indicator. are a “Typically, the product and engineering teams don’t have goals tied to revenue which bisects a team into revenue generating components (sales and marketing) and cost centers (eng and product).” That can create a lack of effectiveness when it comes to creating a product that sells itself and providing the best ammo for a sales team to finish the job if needed. Of course, your product and engineering teams will have longer-term features that will not be revenue significant in the short-run. However, a mix of both can help get everyone on the same page and quickly end potential arguments. That’s a great addition to any company culture. “PQLs provide a rigorous framework for prioritizing development,” Tunguz writes. “Each feature can be benchmarked to determine the net impact to PQL which is ultimately funnel optimization.” Measuring PQLs If you’re ready to track PQLs, determine which triggers require an AE to follow up with a call. Product feature limits, a number of days in the free trial or specific actions in the product can all be good reasons to get in touch. Because you’re relying on customer actions, a large volume of PQLs may be tough to attract at first. However, learning how to optimize all your sales efforts to create more PQLs is essentially one of the best ways to constantly be improving your funnel. Track the number of PQLs each month and see how that compares to MQLs and SQLs. Share these results at monthly or quarterly investor updates to help make the argument that the team is determined to create an exceptionally efficient sales process as the company scales. Adding more PQLs could be one of the best KPIs for your company’s growth in 2017.

Q2 is here. Now every startup CEO will set out to accomplish the big wins that will catapult the company forward. But big objectives will ultimately come down to small details. So the very first question must be answered: are you prepared to hit this quarter’s goals? Surpassing your quarterly goals won’t happen by accident. Instead, careful planning and the right expectations to execute are the best ways to set up your team for success. Before you allow a few errors to knock you off a great start to 2017, ask yourself the following three questions: What does each rep need to do to hit their goal? The best way to hit the big revenue number for the quarter is to break it down into small steps. Jason Lemkin has a great breakdown that helps identify the component parts that can drive a successful sales performance. To start, plan for each rep to close about eight to twelve deals a month. With that as a baseline range, here is Lemkin’s outline for what needs to be done to stay on track: Deliver 50-100 qualified leads to a rep each month Allow time for at least three demos and three phone calls to close each deal Expect reps to have time for 30-40 demos and 50-60 phone calls each month (at least 20 works days are needed for the month) Multiply your average contract value (ACV) by 24 and 36 and you’ll determine the range of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) an account executive (AE) is expected to reel in for the quarter. Divide your Q1 revenue goal by the median expected MRR each account executive is expected to add over the course of the quarter. Do you have enough AEs to earn the revenue needed for the quarter? And do you currently have the pipeline to feed enough qualified leads? It’s essential to have a formidable group of SDRs filling the funnel so AEs can hit their marks. It’s also important to relay your expectations to AEs of the numbers of calls and demos they should expect to achieve their quota for the quarter. Do you have the right kind of leads? While it’s easy to look at the quantity of sales leads and feel confident that the formula Lemkin lays out will pay off, one of the easiest ways to slip up and miss your quarter numbers is having your team take their eye off the ball of quality. Never forget: you don’t need to grow unnecessary leads. I’ve written previously about the importance of categorizing your leads and filtering out the bad ones. This is a crucial step to ensure you haven’t stuffed your pipeline with junk that will only burn an AE’s precious time over the course of the quarter. Get your SDRs focused on delivering quality prospects or else they may serve as the weak link that keeps you from obtaining your goal. If you’re worried about the long-term trends on the quality of your leads, use why revenue per lead–an essential metric for any startup hell-bent on building a solid and robust pipeline. Who do you need to hire? (and when do you need to hire them?) Two of the biggest mistakes that will keep you from hitting your Q1 numbers are 1). Not appreciating how much time it’ll actually take to hire high-quality people 2). Not appreciating how long it will take those people to be up-and-running at 100 percent productivity. New hires may not arrive as fast as you’d like or be as productive as you’d hoped. However, if you run the numbers on your sales pipeline and you don’t have the headcount to qualify enough leads or land enough deals, hiring will be your first objective of the quarter. Determine the company’s greatest weakness: Is it a lack of AEs? Not enough SDRs? Are there too few inbound marketers to help build the funnel? Headcount may be your first priority of year if an insufficient staff threatens your revenue goal. You don’t want to hoist unrealistic expectations on your team and hurt morale when the group fails to reach its ultimate milestone. Regularly updating investors on the pace of lead qualifications, hiring plans, and the number of deals your team closes over the course of the quarter is one of the best ways to maintain great communication while you aim for these goals. Seek their feedback if you encounter problem areas, as your group of investors if often one of the best resources to rely upon for specific problems to solve.

It’s simple: if customers are happy, they are more likely to renew. Customer experience is essential—it can make-or-break your retention efforts, determine whether you’re at an acceptable churn rate and potentially drive your SaaS startup toward the all-important negative churn milestone. After all, as Tomasz Tunguz wrote, “startups that manage customer renewals better than their peers grow faster and require less capital.” What are you customer experience metrics? You wouldn’t avoid measuring marketing leads or quantifying the success of your sales staff to hit its quarterly goal. So if you’ve avoided measuring and evaluating customer experience until now, you’ve ignored an indispensable part of assessing your business. Luckily, your current client base likely offers a wealth of data you can quickly tap into if you ask your customers the right questions. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use Net Promoter Score (NPS). How to start measuring NPS It starts with a simple question: How likely are you to promote this company or product to a friend or colleague? Survey your customers and this will give you initial insight into the overall direction of your customer experience. Use a scale from 1-10 to measure their response. Here’s how the different scores are grouped. Promoters(score 9-10) – These are the most loyal customers likely to renew and make recommendations to their friends and colleagues. It’s this group that will drive your company’s growth. Passives(score 7-8) – Consider these customers satisfied, but unlikely to recommend you to others. Your company is vulnerable to losing this client base to a competitor if you’re not careful. Detractors(score 0-6) – This is your unhappy customer base who can actually harm your company’s reputation and prevent referral growth. To get your NPS average, subtract the percent of detractors from the number of promoters. According to Zendesk, a good average for a SaaS company is 29. Establish your company’s first average as the baseline. This will help you determine whether future efforts work. Also, it will help as we move into the second part of developing NPS feedback: segmenting. Filtering NPS Paid vs. Trial A one-size-fits-all approach to NPS can be limiting for a growth startup. In order to best measure customer experience, parse out different customer segments. Start by separating free trial signups and paid customers. Determine how each scores individually on their level of satisfaction. Trial customers won’t have enough experience with the product to deliver a quality assessment. However, they will provide insight into your conversion efforts. By evaluating this group’s NPS trend over time you’ll be able to measure your trial performance improvements. NPS can be the most important indicator of whether any new efforts the company is making actually produces customers. As for paid customers, they can provide essential feedback on how well your product improvements work. After a new release, measure the NPS performance in the subsequent weeks to find how your customers are responding to the product tweaks. Location Customer experience can vary by location, especially if where a client lives determines how much they interact with your sales or customer success team in person. For international companies, different countries can have very different renewal or customer experience patterns. Job Title Are you selling to right customer? How is your company performing when the C-suite is using your product versus middle management? By segmenting NPS scores by job titles, you’ll know which groups like and dislike your product the most. That will help you improve messaging to the low-scoring groups and double-down efforts on selling the segments performing well. Plan Type If something like price point is causing dissatisfaction or an expanded offering of your product is driving customers to deliver high scores, segmenting plan type will reveal these sentiments. Parse out your different plans and you might find that some of your current offerings are weighing down the rest of your customer experience. Number of users By creating different segments by a range of the number of users, you develop an understanding of whether your products start to perform poorly at a certain number. If adding more users is a large part of your strategy to scale, identifying a breaking point in customer satisfaction by number of users could be a crucial red flag that the product needs immediately attention. Determine your own No one knows your company better than you. If the above groupings aren’t the best segmenting options, create your own based off the demographics that are most essential to improving your product. Select experiences Now that you’ve created customer segments, ask for feedback on specific experiences with your product. Do you have an appealing interface? How is your customer service response time? These kinds of questions can help you isolate problems and make necessary changes. Qualitative feedback Metrics aren’t the only things that matter. Once you’ve asked your customers the first NPS question, allow a free-form feedback option and/or an additional survey to drill down into specifics you might not catch in your segmentation. Zendesk found that 63 percent of customers that gave negative reviews left additional feedback—that can be remarkably important to your business’ growth. Changing minds It’s important to segment and identify who is unhappy early because changing a customer’s opinion is incredibly hard. Zendesk found that more than 70 percent of surveyed users that gave negative reviews in the past didn’t change their mind. The majority of positive reviewers maintained their high marks, but to a lesser extent than their negative counterparts. Zendesk also found that more than half of NPS respondents rate a company 0 or 10, so your product is likely to produce a pretty strong reaction from the people paying for it. Share the results Now that you’re receiving more customer experience data points, be transparent about the performance of different segments with your team and investors. This level of detail helps your organization focus and will inspire confidence in your investors that you’ve parsed the necessary numbers to make big improvements.

Introducing Xero Chart of Accounts We originally launched our Xero integration into the Add-On marketplace just over a year ago and it has quickly become one of our most popular accounting integrations. Xero is a cloud accounting platform that has gained in popularity and is beloved by their power-user accountants. Our initial integration was great. We pulled in your high level financial metrics from your Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. We started to hear more and more that our customers wanted to get granular reporting on their Chart of Accounts — after all, being able to compare your Online Ad Spend to Budget has become increasingly popular as “unit economics“ has become the in vogue term of 2016. We’re excited to release our Xero 2.0 integration to all that not only pulls in financial metrics but will query and pull in any account from your own chart of accounts. By pulling in your unique chart of accounts you’ll get to fine tune how you present and tell the story of your most important data. Protip: Use your actuals from your Xero chart of accounts and compare them against a budget or forecast by utilizing our Google Sheet integration. We’re excited to be improving the initial set of integrations we used when we launched Visible. Should you have any requests for future integrations or current ones, send us a note to hi at visible dot vc. Up & to the right, Mike & The Visible Team

Last week in a post about hitting revenue milestones to prepare for a Series A, I mentioned the importance of achieving true growth rates and avoiding false indicators of success. The problem for many founders comes when they try too hard to show exciting growth numbers at the expense of a clearer picture of the company’s performance. Avoid Misleading Metrics You don’t want to look like an idiot in front of your investors. At the same time, you want to excite your backers with some of the new accomplishments that are adding to the bottom line. So how do you avoid misleading numbers? Be honest with the size of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) numbers and your month over month growth (MoM) percentage. Your investors are likely assessing revenue figures from a number of portfolio companies, which means they know where to find weak spots. Don’t look unprepared. Here are some of the most popular mistakes–according to Amplitude–that founders make when outlining revenue growth figures: Don’t pass off big growth rates on small numbers If you’re still gaining traction as a startup, your month over month numbers may be tiny. So boasting mega percentages in MoM growth will be laughable to seasoned investors if you’re passing the rate off as sustainable growth at scale. January February March April May June July August September MRR 1000 1300 1800 2500 3300 4100 5000 6200 7300 MoM Growth Rate 30.00% 38.46% 38.89% 32.00% 24.24% 21.95% 24.00% 17.74% Don’t hide MoM fluctuation It isn’t sustainable unless you can show a detailed strategy for sales and market growth. An early stage startup with 30 percent growth MoM may not wow new investors, but it is a sign that you’re moving at a strong pace. That’s only a problem if you’re passing off your big digit percentage as a large MMR number. Your numbers can fluctuate. That’s perfectly normal. Especially over the course of quarter, a SaaS company can often begin their first two months hitting only 50 percent of its mark, but rally for more than 50 percent in the final month on the back of the groundwork down in the beginning. Make sure your founders now how your numbers may fluctuate from month-to-month. Showing the chart below and claiming a steady 15 percent growth rate over the course of nine months is inaccurate, even though the company hits that average over time. January February March April May June July August September MRR 10000 13000 14000 18000 20000 22000 26000 31000 32000 MoM Growth Rate 30.00% 7.69% 28.57% 11.11% 10.00% 18.18% 19.23% 3.23% Instead, show your investors a list of your monthly numbers and explain the factors that cause the fluctuations. If you’d like to calculate your compound monthly growth rate to have the metric on hand, use the following formula: Compound Monthly Growth Rate = (Last month/First month)^(1/Number of months difference) – 1 Don’t disguise declining growth rates Using the compound growth rate (CMGR), the following chart shows a 15 percent average over the course of nine months: January February March April May June July August September MRR 10000 13000 16000 19000 21500 24000 26500 28500 30500 MoM Growth Rate 30.00% 23.08% 18.75% 13.16% 11.63% 10.42% 7.55% 7.02% But as you can also see, as this startups numbers continue to climb, the growth rate is slipping. That’s not always a red flag. Sometimes scaling your MRR is going to come at the cost of maintaining your growth rate. However, you don’t want to lead with your CMRG during the period without discussing the difficulty of holding that percentage moving forward. In the long run, it’s only going to benefit you to share any bad news with investors, invite their help and be as transparent as possible to get everyone on board for the future. As Archana Madhavan said, distorting your company’s revenue picture can really damage your reputation moving forward. “When you fudge your growth models, you’re not just deluding yourself and your team,” he wrote. “You’re not just giving potential investors the signal that you don’t know what you’re doing.” Be clear about your MoM goals and how they impact your company’s long-term success strategy. Your month-to-month performance isn’t going to be the only indicator of your company’s growth, especially if you’re sacrificing in the short-term to improve product or reformat with your team. Nevertheless, discuss these numbers with regular updates to investors in order to allow for the necessary information to be shared and everyone to feel confident in the future direction of the business.