SaaSletter - Mark Roberge at SaaStr Annual 2021

My notes and highlights from Mark Roberge's wildly popular session at SaaStr Annual 2021

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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:

Higher comp on expansion sales = key part of Roberge playbook at Hubspot

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:

An R-squared of 0.54 is impressive - by comparison, the revenue growth vs valuation R-squared sits at 0.21 today (via Meritech)

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:

"Science of Scaling" on 1 slide....but seriously, go watch the whole presentation

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