SaaSX — Execute Better. Grow Faster.

Who hates annual employee performance reviews? Everyone, that’s who. Employees hate them, managers hate them. HR probably hates them. There are plenty of studies and articles and trends to back this up. Like this one.  And this one. Publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker are spreading the word. And there’s even a book about how much performance reviews suck.  So, what’s the solution? Resigning ourselves to stick with something that doesn’t work? There has to be a better way.  I’ve experimented with many different ways to conduct performance reviews. Formal. Informal. Annual. Quarterly. Ad hoc. Paper. Online. 360 reviews. You name it, I’ve probably done it.  The problem with performance reviews has been written about extensively (as evident by the links above). The bottom line is that they are: * Not agile and therefore not aligned with the rhythms or realities of the modern workplace. * Often not specifically relevant to the employee’s role or their actual contribution. * Too time-consuming & too cumbersome to administer, so managers and staff just go through the motions. * Potentially damaging to the employee/manager relationship unless the manager is highly skilled at giving the right feedback and coaching for improvements.  * Not consistently effective at getting the outcomes you want from the employee. * Easily buried away in some folder and quickly forgotten about just a few days after the review (i.e. not relevant to the realities of work). My solution: Just do away with the annual review. It’s a relic.  My biggest problem with annual performance reviews as the primary formal feedback mechanism with an employee is that workplace goals, strategies and tactics change too frequently for a yearly review to be relevant. People also ebb and flow too frequently for an annual review to be relevant. Yes, employees have certain characteristics that don’t change much over time, but they also have so much that can impact their situational work performance—from the specific nature of their most recent projects and responsibilities, what is happening in their personal life, even what’s happening within the walls of the office or the company culture. I am not saying an A player drops to a C player. Individual performance is nuanced and never really static.  If you want to throw traditional performance reviews out the window and take a more agile approach, here is what I found worked best for me: Frequent, regularly scheduled meetings Meet with each of your team members regularly, without fail.  When you approach reviews as something that should be agile, the nature of the meetings will shift over time. Sometimes one-on-one meetings will be perfunctory. Sometimes you will dive deep into issues or trends you are seeing. Sometimes it all be a ‘roll up your sleeves’ working session to hash so...

A sales methodology is just a standard approach to selling. It’s the how.  Not to be confused with a sales process that describes the steps in the methodology. It’s the what.  Do you need a sales process? Yes. Do you need a sales methodology? Yes. They go hand in hand. Without a sales methodology, your sales team will not know how to sell. And more importantly, they will not know how you want them to sell. Even if you have a team of very experienced salespeople, this is true. It’s your responsibility, as the sales leader to prescribe the approach you want your team to take. You can’t leave this up to each individual. That’s not scalable, and it’s also not effective. Even the most experienced salesperson needs and wants a guide for how you want them to sell to your buyers.  “The sales methodology is like a set of rules for how you sell your products or services to customers.” Sales Hacker How to implement a sales methodology The first step, of course, is to select which sales methodology is right for your organization. I’ve listed some popular ones at the bottom of this article. Familiarize yourself with the options and determine which makes the most sense for your type of sale.  Once you have selected the sales methodology, you will need to: * Create sales playbook materials in support of the methodology* Train existing team members on the new sales methodology* Incorporate training into your new hire onboarding materials* Conduct periodic refresher training via lunch & learns, workshops, etc, to ensure the methodology is adopted and used correctly on an ongoing basis* Lean on the sales methodology during pipeline reviews, coaching, opportunity huddles, and deal strategy sessions Rolling out a sales methodology will fail if you don’t incorporate it into your sales culture and make it part of your everyday conversations. Only you, as the sales leader, can ensure the sales methodology is successful. Avoid the “we don’t need one” trap  If you hire experienced salespeople, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “we don’t need a sales methodology”. You think they are experienced and they know how to sell so why get in their way. I’ve made this mistake myself and it resulted in poor sales execution and salespeople approaching every deal differently, making deal management frustrating for everyone—the customers, the sales team and me.  Every salesperson needs a framework for how you want them to sell. And every team needs to use the same approach to selling. Without one, you are no more than a loosely held together band of lone wolves, each making things up on the fly, or randomly pulling in various approaches based on the situation.  You’ll find yourself being unable to coach and provide deal strategy, because each deal will be in a different state. Some sellers will use X as a qualification criteria, others will use Y. Some will handle objections this way, some that way. Some will have a late-stage deal with fundamental information still uncovered, others will have deals stuck in the first stage because they are digging too deep. If you hire experienced salespeople, it never hurts to hear about what type of methodology they have used in the past, what’s worked and what hasn’t. A sales methodology can be adapted as you use it and find what’s working best.

The bigger the addressable market and how much it is needed by the market indicates how much effort is needed for the customer success function. Customer success is your product. Your product is customer success. Period, end of story. It’s time to change the culture of expectation for customer success. Having worked with products that had incredible product-market fit (PMF) and products that didn’t, I can tell you that perfectly executed customer success plays do not make or break a product. What makes or breaks a product is how good it is, and how the size of the total addressable market (TAM) is for that product. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.Mark Andreesen What customer success can’t do No amount of customer success brute force can convince customers to adopt a product they don’t want, need and find valuable. No customer success intervention can get a customer to use a product they don’t find easy and useful. Customer success can’t be held accountable for: * Getting a customer to adopt your product.* Getting a customer to use your product. * Getting a customer to renew their subscription if they haven’t been using your product and receiving value leading up to the renewal term. What customer success can do Assuming product-market fit exists, what can customer success influence? * A customer’s relationship with, and affinity for, your company and brand.* A customer’s strategy for successfully using your product to meet their business needs.* A customer’s vision for how and where your product can be used, leading to deeper adoption and organic expansion.* Your customer’s willingness to renew their subscription, assuming the customer has been using the product and receiving value from it. Customer success as a push or pull function Customer success follows a fairly standard playbook, especially in SaaS. The motions are onboarding, adoption, engagement, expansion, and renewal. 80% of these apply to any SaaS company, with the 20% being specific to the company and product. As you think about the strategy of your customer success, consider how push/pull it is (using the rudimentary chart included in this article). If you need a “push” customer success strategy, you will need more customer success staff and resources, because it’s more effort. You may even want to consider shifts in overall market and product strategy to help move it up and to the right on the chart. That’s not easy, but it is what’s required to reap the rewards of a more “pull” customer success strategy which is considerably less effort. Don’t get me wrong—customer success motions are rarely effortless. But as you move up and to the right, they do become easier and the strain on customer success as a function is lifted.

Growing a SaaS company at >50% YOY (at scale) is hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. One of the big reasons it’s so hard is that you’re constantly trading off between short-term results and long-term scalability. This is true in technology,

Nurturing the characteristics of a charismatic company to inspire devoted, loyal advocates to provide social proof. Social proof is huge in SaaS marketing. What people think and say about your SaaS has a lot to do with its momentum and market fit.

Many SaaS companies go through due diligence in a less-than-ideal state. That’s a lot less stressful when you know what that means. A while back I wrote about what to expect in SaaS due diligence and provided an interactive institutional readiness repo...

A commented Google Slide Org Chart Template to help you look at SaaS marketing roles and responsibilities from the CMO to the coordinator. I’ve been working a lot recently with SaaS marketing org charts. That work has been in the form of growth plannin...

A lot of SaaS marketing is made up. The best marketing is not. And the reasons for that may be way deeper than you think. Yes, this is another post espousing the value of authenticity in SaaS marketing. But it’s much more than that.

I have been thinking a lot about the continuum of maturity in SaaS customer success organizations. It really boils down to degrees of a spectrum ranging from reactive to proactive. Here are the 11 areas I evaluate when assessing a customer success orga...

Even experienced leaders can easily forget that one voice shouldn’t drive change. I try and write from recent inspiration and this post is far from an exception. Over the last few weeks, several of the CEOs we work with have all reinforced the problem ...

If you are in SaaS sales, you know a great demo can make or break your chances of winning the deal. But what you may not know is what actually makes a demo great. Most demos—yes most—are simply terrible. Which is a shame,

Agile is great, but we need to continuously process and ingest what we learn. Here’s how. Agile management across the majority of a SaaS organization provides the framework for rapid, innovation, iteration and improvement. Ultimately,

When looking at a problem, I have a simple framework for evaluating what’s wrong. Is it People, Product, Playbook or Process (or some combination thereof)? When the 4 P’s are all aligned and functioning well, great performance follows.

If your teams don’t understand and believe in your data, they won’t leap with you. I’m a huge practitioner of data-driven SaaS management. I believe that almost everything in a SaaS business can and should be measured.

Let’s get another cliché out of the way. Talk is cheap. Hmm. In SaaS that’s actually not so true. A lot of talk gets funded. And a lot of decisions get made based on plans (nice, formalized, talk). From there,

A new sales leader reached out this week to ask when she should hire her first sales development representative (SDR). What a great question, and luckily, it’s a pretty black and white answer. Let’s start with when it’s not time to hire your first SDR....

SaaS products rapidly evolve with release cycles that feel almost continuous. In fact, some are actually continuous. Regardless of your release cycle, communication is critical to success. And that communication involves the majority of the organizatio...

Last week I kicked off our SaaS marketing tactics series with attribution planning. Since most SaaS marketing is content marketing, assets are the foundation of success. Managing those assets at scale is incredibly challenging. For those reasons,

I’m working with several companies on the advisory side that have similar marketing challenges around tactics and execution. So, beginning today with SaaS marketing attribution, I’m going to address some of the most common and basic executional failure...

I’m taking a quick side road from my marketing art & science articles of the last couple of weeks. I’ll get back to that series shortly, but this week I have to speak to hiring SaaS talent for the stage of your company. Why?