The Periodic Table is a summary sheet based on data collected from The Bridge Group, Inc.’s Inside Sales and Lead Gen Metrics & Compensation reports. The reports are the result of surveys with 125 technology companies in North America.

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A free guide to leveraging Inside Sales as an engine for growth.

In today’s challenging market, you’ve already cut budgets and headcount to the bone. This ebook shares key factors in building highly effective Inside Sales teams, including:

• Which Model is Right for Me?
• Who Should Run the Group?
• Best Practice Interviewing Techniques
• Technology & Tools to Maximize Success

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This SaaS Metrics blog post looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down layer by layer to expose the key metrics that will help drive success. The post provides a considerable amount of detailed information that should be of great assistance to anyone running, or looking start, a SaaS business.

Metrics for metric’s sake are not very useful, so the goal of the post is to provide a detailed look at what management must focus on to drive a successful SaaS business. For each metric, the post also looks at what is actionable.

The post starts by looking at the high level goals of a SaaS business: Profitability, Cash, Growth and Market Share, and drills down into the component parts that drive each of these. Key metrics that are covered include cost of customer acquisition (CAC), lifetime value of the customer (LTV), months to recover CAC, Churn, sales funnel metrics, etc.

The coverage of what metrics are needed is comprehensive and detailed.

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Success. Success. Failure. Success. Failure.

That’s it, that’s my story. It’s been my heartbeat. I’m a Serial Entrepreneur with a 60% track record, which is comforting, except that I’m coming off my latest failure at Helpstream. 60% is way in excess of what most any VC ever gets….

I am fond of saying you learn a lot more from failure than success. Call it a consolation prize, but I do learn a lot from the failures, though I also learn from the successes. Since I am just off a Failure, clearly I have not yet amassed enough learnings to have a perfect picture of how to navigate the treacherous waters a startup sails on to success. Hence there are new learnings to be discussed. The Helpstream Learnings Series

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After being an entrepreneur for most of my adult life, I’ve now been a part-time angel investor for 5 years and a full-time venture capitalist for the past 9 months. During that time, I’ve come to appreciate the real value that great venture capitalists provide: amazing informational awareness, comprehensive business networks, providing brand cover for companies so that they can recruit and raise more money effectively, and more.

Still, some VCs do things that I really don’t like. This post is for them.

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Why do angel investors exist?

Before answering these questions, it’s useful to ask and answer a related question: why are there angels and why have they become more prominent in the last 10 years? After all, doesn’t the definition of venture capital include all of the activities that angels perform?

The answer lies in the history of technology companies and the differences between how they were built 30 years ago and how they are built now.

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Looking to build a business plan for your SaaS company, but don’t know how to create the right financial model?

Get best practices and insider tips first-hand from SaaS finance experts and actual investors on what financial metrics matter and how they affect your business plan, ability to raise capital, and long-term profitability.

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This post comes from reading some blog entries like the post our friend Abe Sultan of Apprenda wrote for Datamation – How to Fail Miserably as a SaaS Company and my own conversations with software company executives. Before anybody says it – it is not every way there is to fail at SaaS. And like any limited list covering a big subject – the items are over broad and not necessarily indicative of the most common ways to fail.

But that said, these are the things that really irritate me and I’m sure irritate those who have lived these errors – as happens in the life of an entrepreneur. So, if you are or are considering offering a product with the SaaS business and delivery model, you might want to consider about the common trip points mentioned in this article…

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Steve Blank is a respected voice in Silicon Valley for good reason. He writes and speaks from a deep well of experience and insight. I’ve never found anyone who could put the current trend towards the “consumerization” of online software into an actionable context better.

What I’ve linked to for this “classic blog post” is actually not one post but instead a whole category of Steve’s posts that highlight an approach to product development that is strongly user-driven and fits particularly well for the Internet delivery model of SaaS products. It is a key part of the whole “Lean Start Up” philosophy that is gaining a lot of attention because it answers the questions around what is a viable roadmap for a SaaS product.

If you’re developing or considering a SaaS product, I strongly suggest sampling the posts in this series – there is a lot of good information here.

[Recommended by By Michael Dunham at http://blog.sciodev.com ]

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