Mikkel Svane, Zendesk, From Day 0 to Today: Lessons LearnedCustomer Service Platform. Took 18 months to get to $1 million in Denmark (population 5.6 m approx.)

· It was not until he raised investment in the US, that he realized how much belief in what you are doing determines your success. Scaling is achieved with both resources and incentives. If you need to hit a number, then pile on incentives — spend time on your commission plan but add in extra incentives. Sales velocity formula — $1 to $10 m stage Planning — qualification — value identification — solution validation — negotiation. Put in % probability in each stage but that is not reliable. You might be at final stage but could have two competitors at last stage 80% but you only have 50% chance of winning. So BIG tip here is to research ideal customer and interview their buying process and match sales process do it. Only then % probability is semi-reliable. It is important because Forecasting is your BFF.

· Mikkel found he needed five + great performing sales reps to get over $5million and then start building a team around the sales reps such as Analysts, Lead Generation and Sales Operations to get beyond $10 million

Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint, AI: The new platform for SaaS

Not going to be called AI anymore, it’s Machine Learning (ML) and it will explode with the advent of self-driving cars. Compute, data and Algorithms provide us with deep learning which leads to automation. This is where monetization going. Wavenet speaks so well as humans that nobody can tell. We can replace humans to sell products but also to manage such as instant insurance claims, robots lay bricks 3 x faster. We can detect illness accurately. All that may be stopping explosion is investment.

1. Priority access to data
2. End to end applications not platforms
3. Enables go to market differentiator (reinvent operations and processes)
4. Experts in the field. Special talent is required
5. Algorithms!

SalesForce is actively looking for technology to make more intelligent go to market solutions. Analyzing sales conversations so they can have optimized. So identify a great market with not too many competitors who are active and raise investment to become the winners.

David Skok — 12 Key Levers of SaaS Success

I tried to take down the list as quickly as he talked — so many questions so if you are not asking questions, you are not learning!

1. Profitable, repeatable and scalable. Grow ARR or bookings. Top line numbers vs Conversion rate and average deal size how long? How many are at each stage — track over time Conversion rates — how long, how much
2. What type of customers do you get from each lead source to determine ROI? Fix conversation rate first before moving on to segmentation.
3. How good is product/market fit and fix value proposition. What customer segment are you in? Narrow down size to focus.
4. Narrow down your business value messages that relate to customer
5. What would happen if you needed 10 x? What will block you
6. Built a vendor centric funnel design. Design around what you think you need latest sales tactics
7. What’s the friction and concern that this step has what motivates them.
8. Driving traffic to site. Getting found problem — website grader — what’s wrong with your SEO? Trigger them to a buying process. Free tools help you drivel viral spread and build trust. Use them.
9. Show how the product team can impact the sales funnel. Build something to demonstrate. Get access to current data and Invite colleague to test feature
10. Is the data in. Scrape and pre populate? Do you have on-board? What is your wow moment for different buyers? Publish to get on customer on google search. Friction for customer, take out concern,
11. Test the customer like a bank account- put a deposit in before taking out.
12. Number of salespeople x productivity = growth. Sales productivity is quality of sales hires and sales training and on boarding. Track productivity over time and build trends. Start by diagramming your funnel. Draw the micro steps. Bring groups together every 2 months talk about what’s broken in the funnel Product/market fit Tip funnel lead flow Conversion rate numbers fakes people productivity Number of sales LTV — pricing retention rates = cash to grow.

Actually ignore that and learn everything from David’s website http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/

The best speaker of the final day for me was Promise Phelon, Venture-Backed CEO session. She was so engaging I stopped taking notes and got caught up in the story of how she set up Tapinfluence outside of Silicon Valley — Boulder, Denver to be exact. The big lesson was not just culture but the motivation of the individual that makes up the whole. Different motivations mean different approaches. The lesson I learned was making it personal enough that the whole company is engaged with the purpose but being a CEO that is engaged with people can make the difference. Discipline is her middle name and she has developed her very own playbook for personally developing her skills. Check out Twitter @PromisePhelon.

So just in summary of this crop of speakers, the main themes are:

• Build your formula for scaling resources per #customers in advance
• Really work on your purpose/belief in what you are doing to inspire EVERYONE
• SaaS sales and marketing is analytical so choose the metrics that will drive your business growth.
• Customer ROI is the value proposition — track and measure all the time.

Innovation is critical and focusing on finding how you can automate may open up new markets and help to defend with the advent of SaoS

My plan was to add the summaries together to create the template for a playbook. Two significant things happened. I visited a sales team we helped set up in San Diego who have developed a comprehensive playbook. During our review we discovered that the playbook is now a rule book — too many rules dictating the pace. That got me thinking about what a playbook really should be. “In American football a play is a close to the ground “plan of action” or “strategy” used to move the ball down the field.[1] A play occurs at either the snap from the center or at kickoff. Most commonly plays occur at the snap during a down. These plays range from basic to very complicated. Football players keep a record of these plays in their playbook. It is meant to be a series of strategies and tactics for various scenarios — not a rulebook. Where and how can you build in flexibility. Working through the template, our team got too structured and then became silos’.

The second significant thing that happened is on the plane home. I watched Ritchie McCaw film — Chasing Great. Blew me away because the playbook unravelled from — the All Blacks Skipper — Richie McCaw and on the execution from the All Blacks team in Rugby World Cup 2015- 34–17

“Success is not a good teacher”. The All Blacks learned by developing coping mechanisms for the failures, they anticipated the events that might not go their way and worked out how they could turn them into a positive challenge.

“Being present to the challenge not the outcome” — do you get that? Metrics, customer acquisition, retention and engagement etc.

“You have to give everything. Being better is what keeps you turning up” (Kind of what Mikkel was saying)

“I want to test myself. That’s where the biggest rewards are. That is what makes you sure you are alive”. Review, experiment, measure etc.

The Playbook is an enabler to focus on the challenge — it guides you. If you really want to be great, write it out on a napkin, what you want to achieve, figure out how to be great, watch the movie and then turn up to speak at SaaStr 2018 or 2019 — you choose!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In67DiC-U4E

Please note I am not a good proof reader of my own work but keen to get ideas out there.