Reading List: Distributing Your Product

From the Visible Foreword:

• The Big Whale and the Long Tail - Patrick O'Neill of Intercom offers an inside look at their own sales process and shares why they close small deals fast and first.

• A Low Win Rate is Just a Huge Opportunity-in-the-Making - Jason Lemkin of SaaStr makes the case why a low sales win rate can be a big opportunity and lays out a series of questions to improve your win rate in 2018.

• Intercom on Marketing – the marketing book for startups - The team at Intercom offers an in-depth look at what they've learned by scaling their marketing team from 1 to 40+.

• How to Get More Out of Your Existing Customers - Haresh Gangwani, CEO of Bolstra, makes the case for investing in customer success by sharing an infographic breaking down the impact of "loyal customers".

• Reorganizing Your SaaS Startup's Organizational Structure to Optimize the Customer Lifecycle - Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures explains why the customer journey is no longer linear and makes the case why teams should embrace cross functional objectives.

• Make Sales & Product Meetings a Win-Win - Bardia Shahali of Intercom breaks down the system they have found best when collaborating between sales and product teams.

• The Importance of Time Value of Money for Startups - Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures shares the importance of the time value of money for startups and what it means when raising and allocating capital.

The Archives:

Growth & Marketing

• Andy Johns has led growth at companies like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, & Wealthfront. Here is how to build a growth machine from scratch like he does.

• Hubspot is one of the most successful SaaS companies in recent memory and this is an inside look at how they grew one of their newest products, Sidekick.

• Tom Tunguz on the 5 marketing channels of successful SaaS companies.

• The team at a16z provides founders with Go-To-Market processes, templates, and best practices.

• The Lazy SaaS Marketing Stack, from the team at CB Insights.

• Tom Tunguz on using customer segmentation and personas to determine who your SaaS company should pursue and who to ignore.

• Another from Tom Tunguz on the 9 marketing disciplines of great SaaS companies.

• Andrew Chen, now on the growth team at Uber, lays out a list of the few ways (and there are only a few) to scale user growth.

Sales & Business Development

• Upfront's Mark Suster on why most startups should be deer hunters and shouldn't waste time with elephants or rabbits.

• What are channel partners and how can startups leverage them to grow rapidly?

• SaaStr's Jason Lemkin looks at how companies can sell into the SMB market and still grow a huge business.

• Wiley Cerelli, Venture Partner at First Round Capital, shares 39 actionable pieces of sales advice he gathered from leading startup sales teams.

• The a16z team on why even great SaaS products still need to have a sales force to support them.

• The Close.io team breaks down how to balance vision and reality as a sales person they also have a great, free email sales course that you can sign up for here.

• If you can get to 10 unaffiliated customers when selling a SaaS product, you're onto something, according to Jason Lemkin.

• A conversation between Aaron Ross, author of Predictable Revenue, and David Skok of Matrix Partners on building specialized SaaS sales teams.

• SaaStr's Jason Lemkin says that your #1 sales rep should be driving an M6 convertible by month 12.