Visible Blog

Qualifying leads properly is one of the most effective ways to ensure a healthy sales funnel. In order to do it right, your sales team has to examine whether or not a company qualifies on three different levels. As Bob Apollo argues, a good prospect will exhibit behaviors that earn a sales qualification in three separate categories: “organization-level,” “opportunity-level,” and “stakeholder-level.” Let’s take a look at the kinds of questions Hubspot uses to determine what your team needs to ask and what they should understand about potential leads to find the right fit for your company. Organization level Is this company the right size? Do you sell to their industry? Is this a company that fits the buyer persona you’ve outlined? Opportunity level Can you actually fill a specific need for this potential client? Do they have the budget to make it happen? Stakeholder level Is this the person that can actually make the deal happen? Will the money come out of their budget? Who decides the criteria for making a purchasing decision? If the client is way off from your buyer persona, you can cross them off the list immediately. They don’t qualify on an organizational level. If they aren’t feeling the specific pain your company serves, you’ll be wasting their time. You should know how to solve their problem better than the potential client. If they aren’t ready for the solution, you risk on-boarding someone doomed for a bad experience and a quick cancellation. Remember the most important lesson: you don’t need to grow unnecessary leads. It’s one of the hardest lessons any sales staffs will learn (especially as sales development teams aim for lead quotas), but stuffing your pipeline with unqualified prospects will only clog your path to closing real customers. Reinvest your time into researching and listening to your best qualified prospects instead. Even if you close an unqualified lead, you’re setting yourself up to take a likely loss on lifetime value and won’t enjoy the negative churn opportunities with account expansion. Find incentives for your sales development teams to reign in only the best potential clients. You might consider developing a qualification framework to deliver to your sales staff. Many deals your team will close will share similar behavior and commonalities. Providing a specific framework can help reinforce that message and methodology across the organization. Ever since IBM popularized the method in the early days of software sales, BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) has been the go-to framework for determining a client’s qualification. To make adjustments for the realities of SaaS sales, SalesHacker argues for an updated version of BANT. As Jacco Van der Kooij outlined, the prioritization of BANT doesn’t jive with the needs of most potential SaaS customers. “When SDRs are given BANT to qualify a deal, it backfires as they essentially are starting to sell while a client is still in ‘education’ mode,” he said. “When AEs are executing BANT to qualify a deal, they are getting affirmative answers yet the deal is still not qualified.” For instance, budget will play less of a role for your SaaS sales efforts than it would for traditional software companies. Almost all your qualified SaaS leads won’t have to worry about clearing the necessary budget for the monthly or annual subscription fee. Your prospects will be more concerned about whether the problem you’re proposing to solve is worth prioritizing. Knowing that allows your account executives (AEs) or sales development reps (SDRs) to get more specific in qualifying. Let them ask “is what we’re offering something your company needs right now?” once a prospect has been properly educated on the product. Here’s how Van der Kooij would rework BANT to NTBA: N = Need = Impact on the customer business T = Time-line = Critical event for the customer B = Budget = Priority for the customer A = Authority = Decision Process the customer goes through Finally, if your company uses lead scoring—a quantitative scoring sheet to analyze potential leads—makes sure to take a thorough qualitative assessment as well. There are almost an endless amount of behaviors that any client could display that might tip you off on their qualifications, but they may not rise to the surface immediately. Plus, it may months to score all the characteristics you require to qualify, which could lead to the decay of the initial behaviors. Instead of waiting on the client to take the actions you need, spend more time evaluating their potential need for the tools you’re offering and identifying the person in the organization who can make that happen. Further reading http://www.saleshacker.com/bant-sales-qualification-new-era/ https://mattermark.com/effective-lead-scoring-includes-company-data/ http://blog.hubspot.com/sales/ultimate-guide-to-sales-qualification#qualifying http://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/95959/The-3-levels-of-sales-qualification-account-opportunity-sponsor What’s an Acceptable Churn Rate?

With Q3 in the books, we put together a wrap up of all the improvements that have been introduced on Visible over the past 3 months. Recurring Updates We launched recurring updates so companies can focus on telling their story to their stakeholders without having to worry about the cadence or creation of the Update. Recurring Updates help build a rapport with the most influential people in your business. They are great for frequent team updates, investor updates and for fundraising. Read more about them on our blog: https://visible.vc/blog/recurring-updates/ Business Intelligence Layer With our new BI layer, we are automatically calculating 5 additional metrics for each metric provided. Easily show growth changes, rolling averages and more. We also improved charting so you can add as many axes as you wish! Read more about the BI layer on our knowledge base. Shareable Dashboards With Shareable Dashboards you can have tight control over who can see what. You may want certain data available to your board which could be different than your team or potential investors. Shareable dashboards are part of a much larger push towards what we are calling Visible 3.0 which you can read more about on our blog: https://visible.vc/blog/visible-3-0-note-ceo/ Other Improvements In addition to some major features above we also launched the following: Ability to search Updates & pagination to increase speed. New color palette options to give your data a unique twist. Charting frequency improvements to customize when charts start/end. Exporting Metrics, great for pivot table analysis. Coming Soon… We have some exciting integrations lined up with Zapier, appFigures and Mixpanel. Should you wish to get on any of the beta programs and provide feedback email us at beta@visible.vc

Our New Chart Builder Colors We recently added 3 new color palettes to our color picker in the chart builder. The first row of colors (which have always been in place) are from the original Visible color palette. They’re what you would currently see in any Visible charts presuming you haven’t changed the default colors (and let’s be honest – nobody changes the defaults!). But in case you’ve been looking for an easier way to brighten up your charts, we’ve added 3 new color palettes. The 2nd row is inspired by Visible 2.0 and reflects the more modern colors we use throughout our app. The 3rd color palette is inspired by the simple and smart colors of Google’s Material design. The 4th is inspired by the bright colors of Apple’s iOS. It’s best to coordinate on one color palette for a Dashboard. So if you’re going for the blue in Material, it’s best to use the green in material for your next chart. We plan to make it easier to ‘Choose a theme’ so you can easily stick to the color palette of your choice in the future but in the meantime this should help!

Calculating Your Customer Churn Rate How do you know how many customers you can lose? Of course, you want to lose as few customers as possible and save as much revenue as you can. However, the reality is any startup is going to shed some clients no matter how well they perform. But both churn rates can help answer two vital questions facing your company: are you targeting the right customers? Is your company big enough? Customer churn isn’t the same as revenue churn. The first refers to the number of customers that cancel their subscriptions. Revenue churn is simply the amount annual money lost in a month or year. In the early days, you should have a higher churn rate than what your company will average over its lifespan. In your first few years, you can expect as high as a double-digit churn rate and not need to hit the panic button. But if you’re not seeing a steady drop year over year, you may have the wrong client base or need to invest more money in your client success team. Talk to your clients that renew. Why did they continue the service? If they love what you offer, they may be the key to unlocking the best set of customers you can target. You don’t want your startup to waste time worrying over cancelled subscriptions if these clients are a natural mismatch and your current set of renewals can help find signal for your product and its go-to-market fit. Sometimes the best strategy for reducing churn rate happens at the acquisition stage. When it comes to determining an acceptable churn rate, it’s every bit as important to understand the size of your customers’ business as it is your own company. You can accept about three to five percent of your small to medium sized businesses portfolio every month or less than 10 percent annually. As enterprise level businesses go, aim for a churn rate less than one percent. Your churn rate should continue to decline in subsequent years until you reach negative churn. Reaching negative churn—monthly or annually—is going to be one of the most attractive metrics your company can showcase to its investors. It’s good to have a portfolio of customers “that are like high-yield savings accounts.” Negative churn, also known as account expansion, occurs when the new revenue you are earning from current customers (whether it comes from upsells or cross-sells) exceed the revenue you are losing from customers that cancel their subscriptions. As Lincoln Murphy writes: “Remember, it’s a lot easier to get more money from a customer who’s happy and already paying you than it is to get money for the first time from non-customers.” Negative churn can also serve as one of the key metrics to judge your client success efforts, as expanding your account revenue beyond your subscription loss will help determine if your team is moving in the right direction. Tomasz Tunguz has even advocated for startups to aim for negative churn when deciding their pricing model and developing a customer success strategy. You’ll want to keep your eye on your minimizing your churn rate and show a sharp decline as years go on, but make sure to set forth on a path that will reach negative churn as your holy grail. Related Reading: How To Calculate and Interpret Your SaaS Magic Number

When to make the first client success hire Is there a simple revenue mark you need to hit to justify your first client success manager? Not really. Most large SaaS companies add one client success manager for about every $2 million in annual recurring revenue, but you can’t wait until you reach $2 million to make a client success hire. As Jason Lemkin wrote, “hire your first CSM as early as you can afford to, as soon as you have even 1 large customer, or even a handful of medium-sized customers.” Lemkin believes once SaaS companies gain initial traction they can plan to spend anticipate about 10% of existing revenue base on the client success efforts. “At $2m in ARR, budget $200k in headcount for the CSM positions + support. At $4m, $400k, and so on,” Lemkin wrote. “You may be able to pare this back a bit later, but probably not too much.” Using that benchmark is an easy way to keep your company from putting too much pressure on your client success team and keeping you accountable to growing the team. It’s also a simple way to justify your hiring plan. As a SaaS company, so much of your success will not only rely on your ability to get clients to renew, but also upgrade and provide additional revenue to the deal. A good client success team could be responsible for handling as much as 75% of revenue. Don’t wait too long to make that first hire or risk losing quite a bit of that. What is a customer success manager? A client success manager centralizes communication efforts. In the early days, everyone from the head of IT or CEO might field questions, which sets up a potentially confusing system for solving client problems. Once a client success manager is in place, not only does it organize the customer service process but it also provides clients a regular contact. That adds a personal touch to the feedback loop and it will make your customers more comfortable using the product and reaching out when they have issues. Why hiring a customer success manager is important Especially in the early days—when you’re scrapping for revenue and closing last minute deals to hit quarterly goals—it’s easy for SaaS startups to overlook client success. Making a hire on the client success side doesn’t provide the immediate returns like a sales or marketing addition. It won’t improve your product like an engineering addition. But a strong client success strategy offers enormous value and is every bit as important as sales, marketing and product. It’s a long-term investment in growth and also an indicator your company will grow faster than your competitors and do it with less capital. Delight Your Customers One of the biggest benefits of making your first customer success hire is that they are someone that will be able to delight and expand your existing customer base. Having someone solely dedicated to delighting your customers will help ensure any potential problems, cancellations, or churn are picked up before it is a problem. Grow Your Business Efficiently In order to best grow your business it is vital that your existing customers stick around. No matter how fast your sales team is bringing on new customers if they are cancelling or churning shortly after. A customer success manager will be essential in growing your business as your customer acquisition continues to expand. Free Up Time of Other Team Members Generally in the early days of a business everyone kind of owns customer success but no one truly owns it. By having someone dedicated to owning customer success you’ll allow the rest of your team to focus on their day-to-day to grow the business in their respective areas. How much does a customer success manager make According to PayScale the average customer success manager makes around $68,000/year with the range being anywhere from $49,000 to $120,000. Generally speaking a customer success manager’s salary is largely their base pay with the occasional incentive or bonus plan. However, the location of the employee can also make an impact on their compensation. For example, a manager in New York City will make more than one in Denver. Do customer success managers get commission? According to data from PayScale and BuiltIn, customer success managers generally do receive a small form of commission. PayScale shows that the range floats from $2k to $31k whereas the average from BuiltIn floats around $10k. Generally, commission is not widely expected for the customer success role but including incentives and commissions can be a valuable tool to hire top talent. What responsibilities does a customer success manager have As the old adage goes, “it is cheaper to keep an existing customer than to find a new one.” Customer success managers are responsible for engaging, upselling, and building relationships with current customers to make sure they are getting the most out of your product or service. A few of their key responsibilities: Build Relationships Arguably the biggest responsibility of a customer success manager is to build and maintain relationships with existing customers. They should have a good understanding of the customer base and should not hesitate to reach out when needed. Educating the Customers A customer success manager has the ability to educate your customers and get them deeply engaged with the product. Upselling & Renewing Another key role of a customer success manager is the ability to upsell and call on existing customers to upgrade their plan. This is generally done at the end of a period (month, quarter, year, etc.) so strong task management and a follow up cadence is a good trait to mave. If they’ve properly educated a customer an upsell should be an easier accomplishment. Onboarding Depending on how the business is structured a customer success manager might own customer onboarding as well. This goes hand-in-hand with educating the customer but this is essential in getting them setup and ready to dive into the product or service. Understanding Customer Needs A customer success manager also has the opportunity to impact the product roadmap and help with decision making on where to invest the time of the team. As they are the voice of the customer they should advocate when they notice a trend or gap in the product or service. How many accounts should a customer success manager have? There are many varying takes on what a customer success manager’s workload should look like. Some argue it should be a set number of accounts while others say it should be counted by a revenue number. Managing Accounts Having a set number of accounts can be tough to translate across different businesses. For example, if the maintenance and contract value are higher they will likely have less time to manage accounts. As the team at ClientSuccess put it, “I prefer to keep the number of accounts in the 25-35 range, but many CSMs can manage up to 50 accounts and still build meaningful relationships, pick up the phone, respond to emails, and eliminate customer challenges in a reasonable amount of time. Any more than 50, though, and a CSM’s ability to proactively engage starts to diminish and the CSM will need to use additional technology and automation to improve his ability to manage the larger number of customers.” Managing Revenue On the flipside a more relatable metric might be managing revenue. While this certainly holds true for SaaS businesses it can also make sense for other businesses. When speaking to SaaS companies the contract and customer type impacts the $ of revenue a customer success manager can handle but generally speaking it is anywhere from $2-$5M. As Tomasz Tunguz puts it, “The truth is most CSMs manage between $2-5M in ARR and somewhere between 10-500 accounts. But it varies by segment.” Tomasz Tunguz charted the data by segment in his chart below as well: What skills should a customer success manager have? There is no one size fits all when it comes to a customer success manager but there are a few traits that you can keep an eye out for: Empathetic Generally speaking a customer success manager needs to be able to step into the shoes of the customers and understand how they are feeling. Not everything goes smoothly so they need to be able to help during down moments and show empathy to the customer base. Transparent Being able to have an open and transparent relationship with customers will only strengthen the trust and improve likelihood of an upsell or renewal in the future. If the core responsibility of a customer success manager is relationship building it all starts with building trust. Proactive Customer success managers need to be incredibly proactive. They need to sense problems before they happen and not be afraid to reach out before it becomes a real problem. Proactive outreach and communication will keep they ahead of the curve and will help strengthen their relationship. Customer success manager vs account manager As a SaaS company, every renewal is a referendum on client success. Each time clients get a bill they have to decide if your software is worth the money. So your client success manager cannot adopt the onboard and release approach, where an account manager typically spends 90 days getting a customer comfortable and then fade away. Instead, your client success manager needs to commit to a multi-year process that involves getting your customers acclimated to your company, developing a rapport and quickly tending to any issues they encounter. That’s what helps keep the renewals coming and increase your customer’s lifetime value. And your customers will be doing you a service as well. Through solving client’s problems and answering their questions, you’ll be acquiring essential product feedback that will help inform the next wave of iterative improvements. To learn more about hiring and building culture in the early days of a startup, check out our guide to startup company culture here.

A Google Sheet Template for SDRs Last week, we talked about the importance of SDRs. Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) have become an increasingly popular position to hire the past 10 years. Just check out this Google Trend from 2010 to now: If you want to learn a little more about the history and progress of the role, PersistIQ has a great post here. When it comes to SDR teams, the process and metrics always vary depending on multiple factors like company stage, contact sizes, sales cycles and more. There may be no one size fits all playbook and the strategies and processes to get there could vary by a wide amount. But in our research we found one important commonality in success SDR teams: handing off qualified leads to Account Executives (AE) is an essential goal. Some teams consider a qualified lead a company that schedules a demo. Other teams wait for the AE to officially qualify the lead after a demo. Either way, you must allow AE’s to work on the most relevant deals to maximize their time and increase their likelihood to close. Every company should also know the progress of their SDR team, the goals they need to hit and make sure management understands the return. Don’t forget about the intangibles either. Conner Burt, Chief Operating Officer at Lesson.ly, said the long-term prospects for SDRs can often be about more than just filling a funnel. “Your building a bench that you can use to promote SDRs to quota bearing sales people. That’s an intangible benefit.” With this in mind, we built a simple SDR KPIs template for sales teams in Google Sheets. It is flexible so you can remove any irrelevant info, manipulate it or add anything missing that fits your process. The template will also easily plug into your Visible account! Get it below! Click here to get the Free SDR metrics template! Feel free to copy the sheet and drop in your own goals, metrics and KPIs. Hopefully this is a great reference to get you started! Send any any all feedback our way to marketing at visible dot vc. If you want to integrate with your Salesforce account schedule a demo!

The Call for Sales Development Reps Sales development reps (SDR) are an extraordinary tool to help you efficiently scale your startup sales staff. Reallocating some of the early work to SDRs can help experienced account executives focus on closing deals. But despite the value of specialization, a recent survey by Bridge Group revealed that just over half (51%) the companies asked segment inbound qualification and outbound prospecting into separate roles. What are they missing? The Bridge Group listed out four key advantages to specializations: A more focused, accountable sales force A well-aligned process to match prospect behavior Clearly defined career paths in your organization Role-specific innovations Of course, not every company will have enough employees to segment its sales staff. In the article, David Skok provided two provided criteria to know when you’re ready to hire a SDR: There is enough lead flow to make qualifying potential customer a full-time job for SDRs There is enough budget to hire two SDRs–hiring only one SDR might give you inaccurate view of how effective the role can be for your company Related Reading: Breaking Down the Nuances of Annual Contract Value (ACV) When adding SDRs, your return on investment may take an initial dip as the added staff may not be remarkably efficient out of the gate. But even if metrics slide, Conner Burt, Chief Operating Officer at Lesson.ly, said the long-term prospects for SDRs can often be bright for your business. “Your building a bench that you can use to promote SDRs to quota bearing sales people. That’s an intangible benefit.” Since 2010, there’s been a steady rise in the number of SDRs hired, which has resulted in a drop in the level of experience for the position. The average experience now is 1.3 years. The number of companies that hire SDRs with less than one year of sales experience has quadrupled since 2010. So ready to hire? While not all organizations are equal, Tomasz Tunguz does recommend having an average contract value (ACV) over $3,000 to justify building out your sales pipeline. Once you’re ready and looking for SDRs, Hubspot has a list of 19 questions for you to ask candidates. Here are some examples of the kind of questions they recommend: Pretend I’m a potential customer: how would you describe our product? Why do you want to sell this product? What would you ask potential leads to determine if they’re qualified? How would you research a potential customer? What resources would you use? What do you think will be the most common objections you’ll hear from potential clients? Lastly, while we’re on the subject of scaling your sales staff, be sure to check out this post from SalesHacker on the topic for further reading.

Today’s feature announcement is relatively minor (yet awesome) but its meaning is much greater. If you just want to read about Shareable Dashboards head to the bottom. If you want to hear what we are up to, keep reading. I’m really excited to share Visible’s focused vision for our product and business. When we on-boarded our first customer almost three years ago (thanks Iron Yard!) our goal was to solve the pain that came with monitoring and managing a privately held portfolio. We constantly heard the same thing from investors over and over again, “I never get investor updates or know what is going on with my portfolio!” We set out with a grand vision to build a product used by companies to provide KPIs, updates and cap tables to their investors in addition to a product that would roll all of this information up to the investors and for their own reporting to their investors (LPs). We learned two valuable lessons from this initial product and go-to-market strategy: Companies have to want to communicate with their stakeholders and respect their relationship with them. (Btw – we’ve also found that the best ones do and are 200% more likely to get funded) We were trying to solve too many problems for too many people. We built very average features for all of the end-users which were not 10x better than current workflows in the market. Despite the issues above we were able to prove that there is a big problem in the space and that we could execute. We raised some funding and started to build a world-class team. We went to the drawing board and launched Visible 2.0 last summer (if you want to check out the technical considerations read Karel’s post). With Visible 2.0 launched and in market we saw many interesting use cases develop (including but not limited to): A distillery in NYC sharing depletion and market data with their sales team. A team at a 900 person travel company providing Updates internally Marketing and branding agencies sharing campaign and other KPIs with their clients Innovative CFO & Accounting firms like Xcelerate Financial, Scalability, and LiveCA integrating their clients into the Visible ecosystem. A church in New Zealand providing updates to the congregation. And of course our original use case where Unbounce is providing monthly investor updates about their $12,000,000 a year business! With our learnings and and evolving use cases we started to greatly hone in our product focus and strategy. We removed the cap table, improved our Updates editor, invested in creating great content like our ebook on data distribution and model for total addressable market. Our goal was (and is) to create a frictionless product while helping educate the market. So what does this all mean? In short, we want to empower companies to share the story of their data with their stakeholders. It doesn’t mean that we are getting out of the investor reporting or portfolio game…quite the opposite. We are doubling down but also building a platform to elegantly handle all the uses cases mentioned above. What about the product? Starting with this launch we are merging the idea of “companies” and “funds” in our product architecture. Our current customers and users wont know the difference; however, it opens up to handle more use cases & complexities for the future. The first step in this endeavor is sharing dashboards: Sharing Dashboards Starting today you’ll be able to share specific dashboards with individuals directly or with one of your Contact Lists. We’ve received a lot of feedback that companies want to only share certain dashboards with certain team members, investors or clients giving them more control over who can see what. Those with access to shared dashboards will have a feed at the user level of all of the dashboards they have access to along side Updates they have received. So what is next? Over the coming weeks and months you can expect the following from the Visible team: Improved data integrations – If you are using our Quickbooks, Xero or Google Analytics integrations give me a shout. More advanced charting, Updates and ways to present data outside of Visible. The ability for an individual assign Dashboards or Updates to an entity. E.g. if you are a VP of Sales and getting an Update from a sales manager, you can assign it to your sales entity in Visible or if you are a GP of a VC fund and get a dashboard from a company, you can assign it to the proper fund in Visible. “Data Pipes”. That is what we are calling them internally for now. Sometimes you need to get raw data from one entity to another for analysis. We will be enabling (on a per metric level) to share a metric with an individual or list similar to Dashboards. I’m truly excited for what is ahead and to share the journey with our customers and community. Up & to the right, -Mike

Even the best companies will eventually face one of the unfortunate inevitabilities of startup life—the investor update that’s littered with bad news. But delivering dissatisfactory results doesn’t make you unique. How you handle adversity, on the other hand, can make you stand out and serve as a test that separates the strongest founders from those that crumble under the pressure. Related Reading: How To Write the Perfect Investor Update (Tips and Templates) The irony of investor updates Entrepreneurs on a hot streak tend to be better at keeping investors up-to-date than those struggling to hit KPI goals. Makes sense. We’re happiest to show our work when we’re assured accolades for our hard work. But it’s the entrepreneurs missing their goals that need to be the most transparent with investors—even if the next report resembles an S.O.S. message. You can’t lose sight of the fact that investors are bought into the company’s future as well and willing to assist. Let them help. Shielding a group of experienced mentors from chipping in with their expertise on issues they’ve likely faced before is a lose-lose scenario for investors and founders. So regardless of company performance, keep investor updated early and often. “Transparency is the foundation of all great companies,” Entrepreneurial coach CJ McClanahan says. “Everyone is going to figure out what’s going on eventually—your team, investors, the marketplace, everyone. So live by this adage: tell the truth fast.” How to avoid the big blow up Hit your investors with some unpleasant news after months of radio silence could be seen as a sign of disrespect. Thus, an unnecessary blowup could ensue, taking everyone’s eye of the ball of what’s really important: turning the company around. Regularly send your investor reports. There’s no reason a bad quarter has to turn into a company crisis, but slumping numbers will shock investors if they haven’t been able to track the company’s progress in months. This approach is also a great strategy for securing future funding. Early stage VCs tell me they are twice as likely to invest again in later rounds with companies that kept them up-to-date on performance. When it comes to the bad news, don’t be afraid to get specific. If there’s been a plan or decision that you’ve executed that didn’t work, walk your investors through your process. Explain why it didn’t work. And always justify. Even if you’ve made the wrong choice, backup your decision making with what you knew at that time and what you expected as a result. You don’t want your investors thinking you’re acting careless with company strategy. A Columbia study showed people are much more likely to empathize with poor results if they understand the process. By doing this, you’ll also preemptively answer many of the questions your investors will want to know about the company and use the moment as an opportunity to showcase your preparedness. Plus, the extra level of detail will help investors identify where you may be able to improve or how they may be able to help. After you explain your process for previous decisions, let your investors share how they would’ve done it different. If you allow the room to debate the merits of a decision, investors will feel more confident that their voice will be considered in the future. Finally, as Joshua Margolis, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, explained to HBR.org admitting that you’ve made a strategic mistake can help you maintain credibility as a founder and provide a rallying point for everyone to work harder on making the business a success. But your message won’t motivate unless it’s delivered well. It’s essential to walk into a meeting ready to deliver bad news without ambiguity. Don’t make investors guess which metrics underperformed or what efforts didn’t work. Outline the problem right away. Make sure you’ve prepared your remarks before you give them and practice, practice, practice. Go over your updates with a co-founder or a friend and double-check that you’re clearly conveying the information you want to get across. Even if you’re not a natural presenter, rehearse enough to allow yourself to stand in front of room full of investors and speak with confidence. You don’t want your body language to say something more negative than your underperforming numbers. How to turn the ship around Now it’s time to move on to the future. Like Don Draper said, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” That’s not always easy when you’re looking at hard numbers, but a shifting the conversation to a strategic focus on the future can get all investors onboard. Don’t just beg for help, get into specifics. Assign tasks to individual investors (based on their strengths) and share with the group what you expect in return. Then show what you and your team are going to do to solve your biggest problems. Much like walking through the process that lead you to poor results, show the specifics of what you plan to do to jumpstart your KPIs. Open the floor to questions and feedback after. Allow your investors to tweak the process. Strong collaboration will create additional buy-in and get everyone excited for what’s coming next. You’re in a great position to turn this situation into a big win for you and your company. Never forget that adversity is a necessary ingredient in all great startups.

It’s an endless debate: product, market or team. Which matters most? That depends on whom you ask. The beauty of this startup conundrum is often in the eye of the beholder VC. Even the most prominent firms rooted on Sand Hill Road can’t agree on what matters most in funding decisions. “The difference between venture firms in a lot of ways is how they rank the importance of market, product and team,” Marc Andreessen said. To better understand why, we took a look at the reasons given from a few notable groups. Product There may be no better advocate for the creation of the undeniable, unbeatable product than the “Competition is For Losers” spouting investor Peter Thiel. The Paypal co-founder and famed Silicon Valley contrarian even developed a seven-part test to determine if a founder’s new technology meets his criteria to make a bet on its success. Is your team good enough? They’ll pass the test. Is your market big enough? Who cares—create a new one if it isn’t. Thiel argues good innovation sells itself. “If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough.” He wrote in Zero to One. “Technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.” The Founder’s Fund, which Thiel co-founded, has a longer manifesto here that explains in greater detail their investment philosophy on startups. Market Don Valentine keeps his philosophy simple: “great markets make great companies.” Dubbed the “Grandfather of Silicon Valley,” Valentine, who founded Sequoia Capital, famously fired Sandy Learner and Leonard Bosack, the co-founders of Cisco Systems, from the company they started and the technology they built. Without its founders, Cisco continued to succeed under the leadership of professional CEO John Morgridge. “I like opportunities that are addressing markets so big that even the management team can’t get in its way,” Valentine said. People can be hard. Benefitting from a rapidly growing market can be easier. In a remarkable talk (below) with the Stanford Graduate School of Business (unsubtlety titled “Target Big Markets”), Valentine explains how Sequoia Capital is most often interested in markets already populated by a few products. “We were not interested in creating markets. It’s too expensive. We were interested in exploiting markets early.” Team Marc Andreessen is acutely aware of the inherent absurdity in startup investing, where having 15 of 30 investments succeed —a batting average that would sicken hedge fund managers—can make for a dynamite portfolio. No matter what’s prioritized: market, product or team, Andreessen is under no illusion that growing a company is easy. “The default setting of every startup is dying in obscurity.” But if someone is going to solve big problems, Andreessen wants invest in the person doing it. On a recent podcast, Andreessen explains that team is makes the most sense of the three to back: “We struggle from a distance to evaluate market, he said. “And we also actually struggle to evaluate product. But if you can get yourself in business with really good people, I think number one: if it works it’s great, because those are really good people to be in business with and they, with you, can build something great. But even if it doesn’t work—if it’s the wrong market or the wrong product—you’ll still learn so much working with the right people and you’ll build such a valuable network for what you do next.” It’s wise to do reconnaissance on the investors you’re going to pitch to find out which matters most to them. The answer may not jive with what makes your company is great, but even in the worst of circumstances, you’ll understand why you’re getting told “no.”

Drip Campaigns for Investor Relations One of the most difficult parts of fundraising is getting your foot in the door with an investor. Grasping their attention is key and receiving an invite for a meeting has an extremely low success rate. Anyone who has ever raised capital knows that it is not something you complete as a weekly sprint, and that it can take months from start, to term sheet, to finally spending that money on some well deserved office beers. At Visible, our initial success has been with stakeholder and investor reporting; all the details and data after you received funding. As we continued to grow and build new features and tools, we built Visible to be used throughout the entire process of investor backed companies; from sending out initial pitches, full on pitch decks, and investor reporting after investment. I want to share a few things that we have learned, both from Visible, founders, and investors about pitch decks and fundraising. We put this into an eBook so that you can always keep it with you and easily share with others. Here are a couple excerpts… Pitch Decks Are Resumes: Make Yours Targeted If your metrics are akin to a resume then what is your cover letter? How are you and your company effectively telling your story in a succinct way that matters? Drip Your Way to Success Every conversation you have with a stakeholder is your chance to plot a dot in time. Have enough dots, create a trend. Have a trend (ideally a good one) and your fundraising process will be tight, clean and efficient. Interested in checking out the entire eBook? Click below to get your own copy of how to easily and effectively start your next fundraise. Get access to your copy of Visible’s Solution to Pitch Decks here (no email required)! Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days.

Yes, bad blood between a startup CEO and one of the company’s financiers may be a plague on both houses, but the responsibility largely falls on the founder to prevent the affliction. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones. Maybe you have managed to preserve the sacred union between founder and investor. Good. But your work is not complete! Like all relationships it’s bound to fall apart without strong trust and communication. It’s not good enough to simply declare an open door policy for emails, calls or visits. Set a schedule and stick to it. Provide regular updates that outline vital metrics and allot time for investors to have the opportunity to ask you anything. The cycle of updates and willingness to be transparent mitigates one-off asks and actually helps you stay focused on the most important aspects of the business. Follow These 5 Steps to Improve Investor Relations Go one-on-one—Set up individual investor calls. Allowing time for long-form discussions, brainstorming, individual inquiries and just shooting the breeze or sweet talking to help make every investor feel important. This is essential for those unable to attend in-person meetings. Do your best to schedule interactions outside of the office, too. If you and your investors are able to make time for lunch or drinks, you can better understand your investors on a social level as well. Regular conference calls— Follow up on written reports by setting up a call to field questions or any other particulars that pique an investor’s interest. Share a conversation and you and your investors will remember why you fell for each other in the first place. Write monthly reports: Keep it simple. Investors want updates in five key areas: how much cash is in the bank, how many months until $0, how the team is functioning, how are the KPIs and how they can help you. Having a hard copy provides your investors with a reference sheet when they need quick answers about your company. In-person meetings— Get everyone in a room and let investors pepper you with questions like you’re facing a firing squad. The physical meeting simply can’t be replaced, even if out-of-town investors can’t make it. Investors will appreciate the chance to meet face-to-face. Ask what you’re doing wrong –Vulnerability is a great thing if it strengthens relationships. Open yourself up to criticism from your investors. Let them take you to task, you’ll be better off for it. And to improve your communication strategy, ask each investor what else you could do to keep them properly up-to-date on the company’s health. Investor communication is no less important than communication with your employees. Everyone involved in the business needs to stay on top of what’s going on. And investors will have a much tougher time staying in the loop while managing a portfolio of other companies and spending most days not interacting with your business at all. So don’t let communication gaps form and relationships fizzle. Keep the feedback loop going and let harmony reign. Now say it together: ‘til liquidation do we part. Related Resource: Liquidation Preference: Types of Liquidation Events & How it Works Search through thousands of VCs with Visible Connect:

We always strive to reduce the friction for letting companies tell the right story to the right stakeholder at the right time. Recurring Updates is our latest step in that direction. Recurring Updates simply let you choose a time period on which you would like your Updates to be prompted to send (think of them as recurring calendar invites but for your data and reports). You can have your investor updates recur every month, team updates every week and board reports every quarter. We’ll automatically grab your new data for the respective period and all you have to do is provide the context. Create a Cadence Utilizing Recurring Updates will get you into a cadence and form a great behavior over time. Your stakeholders will know that they will hear from you in a timely, professional and visual way. You’ll be able to leverage your stakeholders and spend valuable time diving into major issues in your business by saving time on your stakeholder updates. Build a Rapport Your stakeholders will be more engaged in the business than ever. The secret to all great relationships is communication. Your stakeholder relationships are no different. Recurring Updates make it easy to invest in your stakeholder relationships without having to invest too much of your time. Utilize our Contact Lists functionality to segment various groups of stakeholders and use them in your various Recurring Updates. Business Intelligence for your Stakeholders With any Update sent on Visible we close the loop providing the sender with detailed analytics of who is engaging with the content you’ve crafted. Quickly understanding who is engaged and disengaged. You’ll know exactly where to start a conversation with any stakeholder. FAQs Q: How do I create a Recurring Update? A: Easy. When you are sending an Update we’ll ask you if you would like to make it recurring. You can also create one from the templates section in your Visible account. Find step by step instructions in our knowledge base. Q: Do Recurring Updates automatically send? A: No. They are put in a draft in your Visible account. Only those with edit access to Updates can see the drafts. You still have to hit send and are able to make any changes (or delete it completely). Someday we may let you automatically publish Updates but that would be an explicit action and setting. Q: Is there a limit to how many Recurring Updates I can have? A: No! You can have as many Recurring Updates as you like! Q: Why should I be using Recurring Updates? A: They’ll save hours of time but more importantly they will help you create a great behavior that will let you attract more talent and more investment dollars. Q: Am I reminded when I have a Recurring Update? A: Yes! We’ll send you an email reminding you that the Update is in draft and link directly to it so you can make any changes and send! We hope you enjoy. As always, let us know if you have any questions or feedback. You can directly schedule a quick 15 minute consultation by clicking this link. Up & To the Right! -The Visible Team

Are you tracking revenue per lead? Sales can fix a lot of problems. As company growing pains continue as a business scales, it’s easier to focus on marketing initiatives or nip product bugs in the bud if your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) regularly surpasses its goal. Drilling down to the core metrics that drive sales performance is one of the best ways to expose how well a startup scales after reaching initial traction. As we’ve discussed before, Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) is the favorite metric many VCs want to see to evaluate a company’s sales. Jason Lemkin unabashedly loves LVR, calling it the #1 metric to determine the trajectory of SaaS company’s sales. But Lemkin is also an advocate of measuring Revenue Per Lead (RPL), noting it as the second crucial sales stat to track. How do you measure RPL? The equation is simple division: Revenue Generated/Number of Leads = RPL On the other hand, the benefits of RPL can be widespread for your sales force. Take individual sales rep performance. Once you’ve established your company’s current RPL and track its growth, you’ve created an evolving benchmark that can help measure the effectiveness of everyone on the team. RPL will showcase which reps are able to convert leads into customers at the highest rate. It can also determine how many leads one rep can handle before the workload becomes counterproductive and RPL starts to slump. More than Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), RPL can reveal whether or not your funnel is actually filled with Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL). It will also outline how well your team is converting SQLs and able to achieve additional revenue on each sale as the business scales. As Lemkin told InsightSquared: “Leads are precious for a long time in startups, and if you can get 20 percent more out of each lead, that’s magic. But if you don’t measure it down to the individual rep level and you just look at MRR, you’re missing an opportunity to improve things.” So for founders and investors, noting RPL in regular updates provides an easy top-line metric to communicate a startup’s health. It also a powerful indicator within a company of whether or not the business is steady as it scales. Related resource: Lead Velocity Rate: A Key Metric in the Startup Landscape

What is Market Share? One of the first steps to building a business is understanding the market and understanding the viability of a successful business. Regardless if the goal is to be a multi-billion dollar company or a local joint that can sustain a few employees — understanding the market, and your share of the market is vital. As Investopedia puts it, “Market share is the percent of total sales in an industry generated by a particular company. Market share is calculated by taking the company’s sales over the period and dividing it by the total sales of the industry over the same period. This metric is used to give a general idea of the size of a company in relation to its market and its competitors. The market leader in an industry is the company with the largest market share.” Why is Market Share Important to Understand? Understanding the market share is vital to determining the viability, and success of a company. In the earliest days, market share will help understand if a business is worth pursuing. Later in a business’s life, it can help stakeholders understand how they are performing compared to their competitors and can help shape roadmaps for future markets and products. When building out financial models and projections, market share can certainly play a role. Market share has the opportunity to help shape and impact your future go-to-market strategy and product development. \ On the flip side, understanding your market share can oftentimes help shape your financing options. Your ability to capture a % of a market, large or small, will help funders and lenders understand the likelihood of receiving a return at a later date. For example, if you’re pursuing venture capital you need to demonstrate you can build a large business that will generate returns for them. How to Calculate Market Share Revenue vs. Units/Customer Count Market share can be broken down a few different ways. Generally, the 2 most common ways to break down market share is by revenue or by # of units/customer count. Calculating either follows the same general steps as below (but you will sub out units for revenue and vice versa). 1. Determine what you’re calculating Like any startup metric, you have to first determine how and why you are calculating something. A couple of questions to ask yourself when calculating market share: What period of time am I analyzing? What specific market am I evaluating? Am I calculating our share of revenue or units/customers? For example, let’s say we have a store, Visible Bread Co, and sell artisan bread in Chicago. We want to calculate our % of the artisan bread market sales over the last year in Chicago. 2. Calculate company data First things first, you need to calculate your revenue (or units/customers) for the specified period of time. For companies that have multiple products that span different markets, make sure you are focused solely on the product and market you are evaluating. Continuing on our example, let’s say Visible Bread Co. did $100,000 in artisan bread sales over the last year. (Keep in mind, if we were calculating our share based on units that might translate to something like 30,000 units/loaves of bread) 3. Calculate market data Now that you understand your company’s performance in a specific market, you need to understand how the market is performing as a whole. Calculating the market data is a mix of art and science. Depending on the market, there may be publicly available reports and data you can leverage. On the flip side, if there is no publicly available data you may need to piece together your data and assumptions to estimate the market. To help, you can check out our total addressable market template here. For Visible Bread Co., we found sales from a local association that shows there has been $1,000,000 in total artisan bread sales in Chicago over the past year. 4. Calculate your market share Now that we have our data in place, it is time to do a simple calculation. Simply take your sales or units and divide it by the sales or units for the market as a whole. Times by 100 and that is your market share. For Visible Bread Co., that looks like this $100,000/$1,000,000 = .10 x 100 = 10% of Chicago artisan bread sales over the last year. 5 Things to Consider When Evaluating Market Share There are few better ways to measure your business against competitors than by calculating market share. Knowing how big your slice of the pie is helping keep founders and investors on the same page when it comes to tracking a product or services’ participation in the market. So how do you do it the right way? 1. Is now the right time for market share? Depending on company size, investors may disregard market share as a progress indicator. Especially in the early days, this metric doesn’t matter if your company doesn’t have already own a significant percentage to track. Sizing your company up against the market leaders may be a fruitless exercise if you’re still in the process of rolling out a product. For founders and investors talking about a startup in its first few rounds of financing, now is likely not the time to worry about your share of the market. 2. Understand your Total Addressable Market (TAM) You can’t measure your market share without first knowing the Total Addressable Market (TAM) you’re pursuing. It’s essential to conduct a thorough assessment of long and short-term market factors, as determining TAM can be a tricky exercise. But make the best estimate of the number of customers in your market, the different types of customers you’re targeting, how much they’ll pay, how you expect the market to grow, and project revenue for 100% market penetration. 3. Measure market penetration Now you’ve got a reasonable idea of how many total customers are there for the taking. How many are currently under contract? Treat the total number of customers like units and simply calculate your current client base percentage from the total number. For instance, if your SaaS company has an installed customer base of 200 in a TAM of 200,000, your market penetration is 1 percent. 4. Determine market share How much are customers actually paying under each contract? In your TAM exercise, you’ve assessed your client’s propensity to pay, now determine how well that’s translated into contract value. Again, it’s a simple equation: if you currently own $1,500,000 of a total sales volume of $150,000,000, 150,000/150,000,000 = 1 percent market share. Now, your market share and market percentages won’t align if your contract value underperforms or exceeds projections. However, both data points will help underscore your evolving market share and provide insight. 5. Track over time Growth or decline in market share or market penetration can be powerful communication tools for your business narrative. A sagging market share may expose a surge in competition, whether that’s revealed to be a battle over price or new challengers to the game. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with a founder that’s showing steady growth when it comes to the company’s fight for market dominance. Keeping market share in your regular investor communication will be greatly useful once you’ve determined that your company has reached a significant percentage threshold. How to Expand Market Share Most businesses are constantly looking to expand and grow (some are not, which is great too!) their share of the market. At the end of the day, this requires finding new customers and/or expanding your existing customer base. A few ways companies generally find success when looking to grow their customer base and capture more of a market: 1. Lower prices. Lower prices can be a quick way to convert more customers (be aware of underpricing your product or service!). Note, lower prices can have an impact on your overall revenue, especially for SaaS businesses. 2. Innovate new products and features. One way to grow your share of a market is by introducing new features and products. Using existing research and customer feedback, you can make an informed decision about the development of new products and features. 3. Appeal to new demographics. Going hand-in-hand with building new products and features, is finding a new demographic. You may dominate one small segment of an overall market but have the opportunity to pursue new personas. 4. Delight your customers. Word-of-mouth and happy customers can take your business to a new level. Having customers that are eager to spread the word about your business can be an incredible, and organic, way to grow your share of the market. Download our Template! In order to help calculate your market share and your potential to build a large business, it helps to calculate and understand the total addressable market and sensitivity analysis. Check out our free total addressable market template below: