My notes and highlights from Mark Roberge's wildly popular session at SaaStr Annual 2021
My Notes on Mark Roberge at SaaStr Annual
My brief excerpts + notes here will not do full justice to the talk (starts here on YouTube) or the slides (here - email required to download). I encourage you to watch and read each.
He started with a great tactic of offering higher compensation on expansion sales than upfront sales:
The talk (again watch here) also gets deeper into how this comp plan is REALLY well aligned with true customer success and a 1st rate onboarding.
In an environment where NRR is very predictive of your valuation (see BVP / Gainsight correlation analysis below), finding specific tactics like Mark's to drive NRR metrics are very powerful:
Absolutely love this question to test your moat:
I am biased though - I asked a similar question in my talk at the 2019 APPEALIE SaaS Conference:
Since 5 rockstar engineers getting backed by Sequoia is far more likely than a Lemkin x Kalanick partnership, go with Mark Roberge's framing.
The presentation's section on the "science of scaling" is excellent.
I find this Roberge framework to be a powerful advancement in terms of defining product-market-fit beyond the Sean Ellis framework of "you have PMF if 40% of your customers surveyed would be 'very disappointed' if your business disappeared."
Why?
More case-specific + customizable
Better accounts for the reality of many competing SaaS alternatives available today - the Ellis "disappearing" framework made more sense in the early 2010s and less so in a world where every G2 category has 20+ players.
To be honest, a question about a business disappearing strikes me as odd. I can quickly get + answer your AskNicely-type NPS satisfaction questions when I am in your app...but I might skip answering about you disappearing (especially if I were a "regular" customer, not a SaaStr attendee type).
Again, go watch the talk + download the slides - it was one of the most popular sessions of SaaStr 2021 for a reason:
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