SaaS Roundup #136

Hi folks, welcome back to SaaS Roundup.

I'm putting this week's email together having just arrived home from another excellent SaaStock conference in Dublin. Props to the whole SaaStock team for putting together a superb experience, and to everyone who stopped by the ChartMogul booth for a chat!

I recorded two one-off episodes of our SaaS Open Mic podcast at the event that'll be published in the next week or two. Two awesome conversations with SaaS industry icons! Can't wait to share them.

⚡️ Micro updates
The value of the subscription box industry increased from $57m to $2.6B in just 5 years(!)
Tomasz Tunguz launched a survey on freemium & the free trial model
David Skok published his excellent SaaStock 2018 keynote, "Get Inside Your Buyer's Head — Improve Conversion Rates"

🎙 Podcast of the week
How Typeform Leveraged Customer Success to Scale to Over 3M Users — OpenView

Have a good one,
Ed @ ChartMogul

From the archives

Our top 3 reads

Anatomy of a Price Increase: A Nutshell Oral History

Ben Goldstein, Nutshell

This post is a great way to see behind the curtain and get a feel for all of the thinking (and people) involved in a major price change at a SaaS company. (hint: it's a huge operation).
 

"Increasing revenue is always trickier, but there was one thing that we could control, which is the price that we charge customers. As we looked at our customer segments across the board, it was clear that our Classic customers had benefited from a great deal of increased value in the product over time, without any price increase. Some of them were paying five bucks a seat, which is pretty crazy."

How we reduced sales ramp time by 40%

Bryan Naas on OpenView Labs

Sales ramp time is a key indicator of success in any sales organization, and requires deliberate, focused work to improve. Bryan shows us exactly how his team achieved such an outstanding improvement.
 

"The time it takes from bringing in a new rep to the stage when they’re able to hit their quotas is a key measure of success. In our experience, a robust process coupled with a high-quality onboarding and sales enablement curriculum has been key. In fact, we’ve found it so beneficial that we’ve decreased our ramp time by more than 40% to positively impact productivity and better performance overall."

What You Need to Sell SaaS to the Enterprise

Anna Talerico, Beacon9

I recently spoke to Hannah Chaplin of Receptive.io on the SaaS Open Mic podcast, and one of the topics we covered was targeting enterprise businesses from an early stage. Think of this post as a continuation of that theme — Anna has some excellent advice here!
 

"Whether you love it or hate it, resent it or embrace it, or just outright ignore it: Enterprise customers have bigger needs and bigger expectations than SMB. That’s a fact, but it doesn’t mean you have to forget about your needs in the process of meeting theirs. If you want to sell to large customers, you need to find the balance between meeting enterprise requirements and not getting your entire company off course to do so."