Operations

If you are a CEO or other company leader, I have a challenge for you: spend the next 8 weeks writing Friday notes to your team. You don’t have to send them on Fridays, and they don’t actually have to be written—I’ve seen video updates work very well, too—but you do have to send one to all of your employees, every week, for the next 8 weeks. If you haven’t done this kind of thing before, I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the results. Ben Horowitz wrote that “perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.” Put another way, the CEO sets the tone for company communication. If you communicate intentionally, openly, and predictably, odds are the rest of your team will, too. What’s in a note? A Friday Note can be just that: a note. It doesn’t need to include a in-depth report on company progress or deep philosophical insight. In fact, I’d argue an approach like that could be counter-productive. Instead, share what’s at the top of your mind for the week and why, plus some words of encouragement or additional thoughts. What are you excited about? Where would you like to see improvement? What have you been reading lately? If you’re sending the note via email, keep it under a page. If it’s a video, two minutes or less. Your note should be easy to digest. If you have additional thoughts, save them for the following week. Most importantly, take a tone that is as personal as you’re comfortable with. Your team likely gets enough official communication from you and other org leaders, so something more conversational will be refreshing. What you’ll get in return It’s easy to forget that with the title of CEO comes a degree of unapproachability. The larger and older your company, the more this is true. A weekly note to the entire team, presented without much varnish, helps you connect with your employees on a more human level than they may be used to. In a previous role, I worked with the CEO to compose Friday notes for the team’s ~120 employees. He got responses every week. Some were straightforward, to the tune of “thanks for writing this!” but others offered more, like an employee’s thoughts on the subject at hand, or even questions or comments about unrelated matters. Either way, the note started a dialogue that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Finally, a weekly note gives you a chance to evangelize your vision. Your team may have heard it at an annual All-Hands or in a quarterly call, but supporting that vision with regular reminders is a great way to ensure that everyone keeps working toward it. If you need help getting started, we have a great weekly note template in our resources section. Otherwise, just give it a shot this week and see what happens. I promise it’ll be worth your time.

Much has been written about the benefits of organizational transparency, but some startup founders are still slow to adopt it in their businesses. It is awfully hard for an employee, investor, or advisor to add value to a business when they’re left in the dark. At the same time, however, it is vital to be thoughtful when deciding which information to share. Transparency can be a double-edged sword. Too much transparency can lead to confusion, whereas too little can lead to distrust and a failure to align your team and stakeholders. Outside of the value-add from your current stakeholders transparency can be a catalyst for building trust and attracting top capital, talent, and customers. Here are 3 things to keep in mind when embracing transparency at your company. Sharing without context is dangerous Data without context is dangerous. While it may be easy to say, “I shared a dashboard with every in the company, I’m being transparent!”, that can lead to confusion, questions, and more answers. Sharing a revenue dashboard without including your monthly burn or spending does not provide much context for anyone consuming the data. Des Traynor, the CEO and founder of Intercom, claims that mastering transparency has been one of the toughest lessons he has had to learn as a CEO. As Des puts it, “Transparency is some sort of spectrum. I think one thing that people over-engineer for is ‘let’s let everyone have access to absolutely everything and somehow magically assume that you’re going to understand it all on how we think about everything all the time.’ That’s just not how it works, unfortunately.” Keep it consistent One of the key benefits of being transparent is building trust. One of the easiest ways to destroy this benefit is by constantly changing up or hiding information. If you’ve been sharing certain financial metrics, then unexpectedly stop sharing the same data or change the context it is in, it will create questions and can sow distrust in your stakeholders.  Joel Gascoigne, the CEO of Buffer, has had to deal with the burdens of sharing the negatives throughout the process. Often regarded as one of the most transparent companies, Buffer went through a round of layoffs that were a surprise to most of the organization. As Joel puts it, “I don’t feel that we fully lived up to our value of transparency, specifically to share early in order to avoid a big revelation later.” The Range of Transparency Transparency is not a “one size fits all” approach. In the workplace, people will tell you transparency means different things to different companies. At the end of the day, transparency is about arming your stakeholders with the information they need to add the most value to your business. On one end of the spectrum, you have companies like Buffer who is often considered one of the first to embrace radical transparency. Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer, shares everything from a live feed of new MRR to salaries for their employees. Other companies, like Structural, share a weekly note from the CEO. The “Friday Note” is a quick way to keep everyone in the loop and rallied behind the same vision. It is a simple way to engage employees but avoid any of the confusion that may come with sharing granular financials and strategic decisions. No matter how transparency takes shape at your company, it is vital to arm your stakeholders with the information they need to add value to your business. Create a plan, stick to it, and give everyone the context they need to succeed. Interested in learning more? Check out our other resources for embracing a transparent culture at the Founders Forward Blog.

Raise capital, update investors and engage your team from a single platform. Try Visible free for 14 days. CEO Friday Note Successful companies come in different shapes and sizes yet they often share a few key traits. One of which being regular and open communication. Dig into any great leaders, past and present, and you’ll notice most (if not all) have created some type of management system that allows for open and regular communication. Whether it be Marc Benioff’s V2MOM, Scott Dorsey’s “Friday Note”, or Kyle Porter’s Weekend Update communication can also come in different shapes and sizes. As ExactTarget scaled from a small startup to hundreds and thousands of employees it was no longer feasible for Scott Dorsey to stay in touch with everyone. His answer? The Friday Note. In an interview with Chip House of Structural, Scott Dorsey had this to say: “I started officially sending out my ‘Friday Note’ in 2009 and never missed a weekly email for over five and a half years. It was a simple and very impactful way to highlight accomplishments for the week and keep the lines of communication open with our 2,000+ employees. It showcased the transparency in the company and helped us keep our unique ‘Orange’ culture as we scaled the company — one of the defining factors to our overall success at ExactTarget.” Weekly team Updates are a quick way to share your company vision, rally around goals, and stay aligned as the team continues to grow. On the flip side, weekly Updates tend to help CEOs and leaders stay on top of the business. As Kyle Porter puts it, “Personally, writing this email helps me better understand the state of the business. It also helps everyone else stay in the loop so they can help out where needed and not lose track of our direction.” We’ve pieced together an Update Template from different methods and styles used by leaders like Marc Benioff, Scott Dorsey, and Kyle Porter. Once you’ve dialed in your style and format you should be able to crank out a weekly Update to your team in 30 minutes or less!

Successful companies share a few key traits… so do unsuccessful ones. Investors, executives, team members, potential hires, etc. understand this. Regular management reports show the CEO/CFO/etc. are key in keeping business decisions agile while showing you value what your management team brings to the table. How Can You Get Started with Successful Management Reports? It’s a lot easier than you might think. Good management reports don’t have to be long and they don’t have to be time consuming. If you’ve already got metrics, KPIs, etc. in place with your teams it is a matter of extracting the key data and turning it into something easily replicable, actionable, and digestible. Sharing financials, metrics, and dashboards can certainly be useful to managers but suffocating at the same time. Bringing clarity and simplicity to management reporting is a strong start to avoid “the activity trap” and keep managers, teams, and individuals focused on their original purpose. It is easy for team members to get lost in their day to day and ultimately forget why they joined your company to grow the company and themselves. In working with countless CEOs, CFOs, and managers, we have a few things to keep in mind while building your management reporting and data distribution system: Replicable – Keep metrics and objectives comparable from report to report. Chances are you’ve got an objective in place so be sure to highlight that in every report to keep focus where it matters most. Actionable – Be sure that the report leaves room for questions, discussions, and a game plan until your next meeting, report, etc. Digestible – Make the report light and to the point. Be sure to include only the 2-6 most vital metrics as full dashboards and spreadsheets can become suffocating and distract from your manager’s main objectives. An Example Management Report You can check out an example of a Visible Management Report Here. As always, feel free to sign-up for a free trial here and email support@visible.vc if you’d like the template dropped into your account.

In the “world of startups” there is endless amounts of content being published every day. It can be a daunting task determining what sources can be trusted. While curating a list of of our favorite content on a weekly basis for our newsletter, we have come across tons of content and wanted to share 6 blogs we have found to be incredibly valuable and reliable. We hope our list can help cancel out the noise and surface resources to help you fundraise, scale, and hire for your startup. Related resource: 12 Online Startup Communities for Founders Point Nine Land Point Nine Capital is an early stage venture capital firm focused on SaaS and online marketplaces based in Berlin. Point Nine writers offer a unique perspective from the “VC” side of things and share many of their thought processes and benchmarks for evaluating investments. Our favorite posts from Point Nine Land: Deconstructing VC’s Decision Making Frameworks The Top 3 Things Investors are Looking for in SaaS Startups An Early Stage Founders Guide to Working with VCs — 5 Part Series SaaStr Led by Jason Lemkin, Co-founder & CEO of EchoSign, SaaStr features daily blog posts from Jason’s (and other SaaStr writers) journey scaling and selling EchoSign. Posts cover everything from leadership lessons to breaking down Customer Lifetime Value. Our favorite posts from SaaStr: How to Gracefully Miss a Quarter. And Take the Right Steps Afterwards. You Need to Know Where You Stand with Your Investors. Your Investor NPS. Why Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) is the Most Important Metric in SaaS High Alpha High Alpha is a Venture Studio based in Indianapolis. The team (and writers) at High Alpha is made up of experienced entrepreneurs, operators, and investors. The High Alpha blog is a great tool box for finding resources to scaling your enterprise software business from $10M to $100M and beyond. Our favorite posts from High Alpha: The Art of Storytelling What Every Startup Employee Should Know About Finance The (Second) Greatest Sales Deck and Pitch I’ve Ever Seen Tomasz Tunguz Tomasz Tunguz is a Partner at Redpoint Ventures. On his personal blog, Tomasz publishes a daily blog post. Often data-driven and more technical the posts are a great way to get the bottom of key questions most startups face on a daily basis. Our favorite posts from Tomasz Tunguz: Clarity of Purpose – The Competitive Advantage of Focus The 10 Most Important Metrics in a Startup’s Financial Statements Premoney vs. Postmoney – Which is a Better Technique for Negotiating? Feld Thoughts Brad Feld, Co-founder of Foundry Group, has been in entrepreneurship and venture capital for 30+ years. In his personal blog, Feld Thoughts, Brad writes a daily post with current happenings in venture capital and shares experiences from his time in the industry. Our favorite posts from Feld Thoughts: Hotshot Advice on Raising Venture Capital The Ideal Financial Reporting Tempo for a VC-Backed Company Founders – Use Your Down Round to Clean Up Your Cap Table Both Sides of the Table Both Sides of the Table is the personal blog of Upfront Venture’s, Mark Suster. The blog focuses on “both sides of the table” as Mark is a 2x founder and investor himself. Our favorite posts from Both Sides of the Table: 11 Quick Tips to Get More Value Out of Your Board Getting Your Head in the Game for Fundraising Why Raising Too Much Money Can Harm Your Startup

A psychology professor and director of Resilience Research at the Appalachian Center, Dr. Sherry Hamby says that sharing stories of personal struggles can make you more resilient and other people more empathetic. Business leaders have also learned that sharing company growth stories can build an emotional connection that helps attract and retain customers, talent, and investors. There is endless content for telling a compelling story to your customers and team. However, we’ve found investors are often left out of the storytelling framework. We set our sites on two business greats that have become synonymous with using investor letters as a powerful storytelling platform; Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. Stay Focused on Your North Star Apart from the desks made of doors, trendy sunglasses, and HQ2, Jeff Bezos has become identified with his original 1997 shareholder letter. To this day, Amazon still includes a copy of the 1997 shareholder letter with each annual letter. So what sets it apart and makes it arguably the most famous shareholder letter to date? According to Tomasz Tunguz, Amazon’s competitive advantage started the day their first shareholder letter was published. Jeff has since remained focused on their “North Star”; customer obsession. Bezos has been able to center every annual letter around their “customer obsession” and simply changes the narrative and storyline. In 1997, it started with e-commerce and saving customers time & money, “Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.” Almost 20 years later, when announcing Amazon Web Services had reached $10B in Revenue. Bezos found a way to align the differing brands and bring back to focus their customer obsession: “They (Amazon.com and AWS) share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles. I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence. Through that lens, AWS and Amazon retail are very similar indeed.” As Bezos has said himself, “You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn’t amazing, it won’t matter. Nobody will watch”. Whether sending investor Updates on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis find your “clarity of purpose” and use that to build a theme to your company’s story. Bring Out Humanity and Trust Not only is he one of the greatest business minds, the Oracle of Omaha is often regarded as one of the greatest storytellers in business. Just like Bezos, Warren Buffett has turned his annual shareholder letters into a platform for fueling investment and interest in their business. While Buffett most certainly covers all financial housekeeping he has turned Berkshire’s letters into a platform that builds trust and lets investors (and potential investors) into Berkshire’s decision making and culture. Often filled with everyday language, unique stories, and a sense of humor, Buffett has been able to humanize Berkshire and create a sense of trust with investors. The $87B man has even gone as far to call himself “dumb” in his letters, just as one of your friends or co-workers might. Sure, it might be easier to step outside the norm when your company is valued near $500B but it is never too early to start bringing out the “human side” and building a relationship of trust with potential investors. What’s Your Story? Engage prospects, customers, investors, employees, and other stakeholders with Visible. You just need a business email account to get started.

This post is Part II or II of our storytelling series. You can find our first post, “Connecting Dots to Tell Your Story” here. The same principles that Pixar uses to craft their hit movies like Finding Nemo and Ratatouille can be applied to your own investor updates and pitch. Awesome right? I recently attended SaaStr and had the chance to see Jason Katz the Chief Storyteller at Pixar and Peter Arai the CEO & founder of Prezi talk about the 3 Parts of Visual Storytelling. Part 1 – Takeaway Message What is the message you want to leave with your audience? For finding Nemo it is faith vs fear, but the same concept can be applied for business. At Visible we encourage you to lead with your true north KPI followed by a big ask. Afterall, Investor Updates are most valuable for the company. Leverage your stakeholders to help make introduce to ideal customers, provide guidance on your go-to-market strategy or source new candidates. With each update you have the chance to leave your stakeholders with a takeaway message, don’t squander it! Part 2 – Structure and Visuals How do you structure the visual elements to enhance your story? This could be through framing, data visualizations and more. In addition, your story should follow a structure of beginning, middle and end. Combing structure & visuals can have a profound impact on delivery your key takeaway. Bonus points if you use the same comparable metrics for each update. One of my favorite posts around data visualization is, “Remove the legend to become one”. This chart: Is actually the same chart as this one with the same underlying data. (Make sure to check out the post to see how to get here!) Proper visuals can make all of the difference right? Part 3 – Delivery The final part of visual storytelling comes down to delivery. With your stakeholder updates you want to get your message across as efficiently and effectively as possible. You shouldn’t create more work for your stakeholders to get your key takeaway message. This is why we make it so our customers can control the delivery of their updates through being rendered in email, to PDF, web and Slack. Great so now we know the 3 parts of visual storytelling but what value can that have on my business? Well it turns out…a pretty big one. I recently saw Stephen Day from Navidar present at an offsite around M&A, specifically around how to get the best price for you company. He broke it down into this brilliant and simple equation: Price = Value + (Compelling Story + Competitive Process)^Evoking Emotion To break this down. Value is the fundamental value of your business. This could be a discounted cash flow analysis to find your valuation. Related resource: Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Analysis: The Purpose, Formula, and How it Works However, you can clearly see how your story and ability to evoke emotion can generate a much higher price than your fundamental one. This doesn’t just apply to valuation. This can be the pricing of your own product or service as well. The best brands are the best storytellers and they typically elicit the highest price. Craft your own framework and tell your story. Sign up to Visible today to get started. Up & to the right, Mike & The Visible Team

Weekly All Hands Team Email Template There is no doubt that All-Hands Meetings can be a powerful tool to drive culture, share accomplishments, and break down company performance. However, as Ray Gillenwater, CEO of SpeakUp, put it: “Taking time to get the entire company into a live session is an expensive and risky proposition. It says quite a bit about leadership’s attitude. Namely, we value people in this organization enough to invest in: Keeping everyone informed of major company updates. Ensuring everyone is emotionally connected to the company’s goals. Listening to the team’s (preferably unfiltered) feedback and questions.” With that being said, it is vital to formalize your All-Hands process and make sure you are doing everything in your power to make sure you are properly utilizing the entire organization’s time. Below you will find an Update template intended to share before your next All-Hands in preparation for your meeting or share after to summarize the meeting. The template is largely based off of Square’s Town Hall meetings and is broken into 3 major categories — The Team, Mission & Goals, and Agenda & Questions.

In an ideal world every company would be able to host a “Quarterly Business Review” for every customer. In reality, QBRs are generally reserved for your “higher touch clients” (read: top tier), as they should be. With that being said, there are easy steps (outside of an in-person meeting) you can take to nurture your lower contract size customers to build a strong relationship and avoid churn. Who knows? They might even blossom into a “top tier” customer. We suggest checking out the articles below if you’d like to learn more about QBRs: The Essential Guide to Quarterly Business Reviews from Gainsight Eight Tips for Nailing Your Next Quarterly Business Review Presentation from Forbes Scaling QBRs Traditionally, QBRs are in-person and bring in the executives from both companies. This is great, and ideal, for large enterprise deals. But when you’re a high growth company sending executives across the country is most likely not feasible. With that being said, a quick quarterly Update on the past, present, and future of your business relationships can be a valuable tool. More than ever, consumers care about quality, transparency, customer support, convenience, cause and usability. The same is starting to become true in the business world. While it is nice to get buy-in from management, employees have more power and discretion when it comes to choosing their tech stack. By sending quick quarterly reports or Updates, Customer Success Managers and end users can build a strong personal relationship and strengthen ties throughout the organization. Our QBR Update Template Below you will find our Update Template to send to your clients on a quarterly basis. The template is broken into 5 separate sections; general health, 90 day highlights, benchmarking, usage, and the future. The template is intended to show your company’s value, start a conversation, and get in front of potential issues. Keep in mind, this template is not intended to be a “one size fits all”. QBRs are a great way to show the value that your product or offering is adding to their business and are a great chance to add “your own spin”. If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so.

A Weekly Email Template for Marketing Leaders Marketing is one of the most measurable aspects of a business. With vast data points, it is important to hone in on what truly matters and rally your team behind those key metrics. This week, we have put together an Update template intended for marketers to “report up”. Whether that be a marketing representative to manager or manager to executive, our Marketing template is intended to be standardized across the team to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Key Metrics Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs. Some of our favorite marketing metrics include Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Cost (check out this video to use formulas to create CAC in Visible), and these 5 metrics for “reporting up”. TL;DR A quick recap of any major milestones, concerns, and figures from the last period. Always a good idea to piggyback off of any product updates, metrics, projects, concerns discussed at previous meetings/updates. Now Content and Campaigns Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Funnel Review A funnel is a quick way for all parties to quickly digest your marketing conversions and inbound marketing efforts. The metrics used in a funnel can be customized to any business as well. Make note of any interesting leads or trends that have noticed over the previous period. Customer Stories Reflect on the past period and share any relevant quotes from customers; good and bad. What is going well? What is not working? Feedback to certain emails? etc.

“Most organizations still believe in the perfect sales and marketing delineation: This is where marketing generates leads for sales, sales development reps then qualify these leads, to create opportunities that salespeople hopefully turn into revenue… The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our CUSTOMERS.” – Jill Rowley – Founder, #SOCIALSELLING As the modern buyer continues to become more informed it is more important than ever that your sales and marketing teams are aligned. It is vital that companies share the right information, at the right time, to the right person. At the end of the day, the marketing teams role is to enable sales to close more deals. A good place to start? Consistent and clear communication between sales and marketing. This week, we put together an Update template for marketers to share with their team, managers, etc. and most importantly the sales team. The template is intended to be shared on a regular basis and lead to conversations to improve different aspects of your pipeline. If you’d like us to drop the template into your Visible account feel free to shoot us a message to support@visible.vc and we would be happy to do so. Key Metrics “Enablement means something different in every company,” Katie MacDonald, global sales onboarding and enablement manager at Optimizely, said. Find the metrics that are relevant to your team and continue to share and reiterate. Get your team behind the data and constantly communicate with the sales team to find areas for improvement. Keep in mind, our template has popular sales enablement metrics in place but can be changed to your organization needs. The team at Hubspot suggests using Lead-to-Customer as your North Star. Last Week’s Efforts Include a brief section of any campaigns, content, and emails published from the past week. The goal here is to keep everyone in the loop and ultimately lead to conversations and improvements. Is always useful to include any success stories from reps or potential customers from the past week to help make sure everyone is getting the most out of new content. This Week’s Efforts A quick breakdown of content and changes for the upcoming week. Briefly highlight the goal of the content and where/when it should be used. Most importantly – leave a place for the sales team to offer feedback and share the sentiment from the buyers they have been talking to.

Engage Your Team With This Weekly Sales Report At a high-growth startup, sales operations and processes can often take a back seat to closing deals and growing the business. Regardless of the resources you have available, it is vital to be able to “self-manage” and lay the groundwork for a strong sales process and culture. With that being said, we put together an Update Template that can be used by the first sales hire or by a team of 100 BDRs. Check Out the Template Here >>> Keep in mind the metrics in the template are suggestions and can be tailored to your organization’s needs (check out these 3 other metrics to track) . With that being said, there are a few things to keep in mind when putting together a reporting template for your sales team: Acknowledge the report, good or bad, to give your reps the motivation to send reports moving forward. Build a cadence with your individual reps and keep updates succinct as well as comparable (make sure to share the same metrics in every report). Just do it! Get feedback and iterate. Make sure to send over feedback to continue to tailor the format and content.

A couple weeks ago, I attended High Alpha’s marketing forum and was reminded by one of the speakers of the simple, yet remarkable function of all marketing efforts: enable sales to close more deals. That doesn’t mean marketing plays a subservient role when sitting at the table with sales executives, but it does serve a measurable purpose and it’s time marketing is held to a regular revenue commitment. So how do we help marketing help sales? Specific directives and clear goals. Here are some questions you need to ask your team to make sure they’re moving in the right direction. Is your content really king? Easily one of the greatest tools marketing can provide sales with is valuable, in-depth content that establishes the company as an authority and the product as a solution. eBooks, articles, emails and infographics can all play a vital role in properly educating the prospect and getting them comfortable with the buy. You must evaluate your current deliverables and decide if your sales team is being armed with the necessary ammo to hit their targets. Are you communicating clearly with prospects? Having the right content will keep the message clear and help your customers understand the product’s value while they’re not on the phone. But are they hearing the right message when it comes to demos and closing calls? That’s not only the responsibility of the sales team. Marketing reps should be sitting in on calls, stationed near the sales team and developing materials to improve communication in the sales process. Creatives should be helping with email communications and even provide some coaching with sales development reps (SDRs) and account executives (AEs) to help develop the right language that gets clients to commit. How do you measure if it’s working? Your marketing efforts should be every bit as accountable to quarterly goals as sales employees. Look at these data points—and more at Hubspot—to measure if they are making headway on their enablement efforts. Content production goals Quality content drives real results. But everyone has to hit numbers, right? Your marketing team should deliver quality at scale and hit regular production goals. Not only does it help predict traffic, boost SEO and create inbound leads, but it also helps the sales staff how many new assets they’ll have to dangle in front of potential clients. Sales team NPS Survey your sales team like you would any customer. Figure out if they are able to use marketing’s efforts to close deals easier. Is their feedback being considered? Does the content being created truly demonstrate value and explain the ways a customer’s pain points? If your sales team isn’t comfortable with the deliverables, your organization won’t maximize the value of your communications strategy and cause a riff that prevents true marketing-sales alignment. Other metrics to evaluate conversions Marketing is far from the only department that chips into sales enablement. The following metrics will help you measure marketing’s impact on sales enablement, but take into account that many other factors will move these metrics. Measure lead-to-customer conversion rate of marketing qualified leads Measuring lead-to-customer conversion rate help identify the success of a given channel. Marketing is no different. Evaluate the performance of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to check the effectiveness of your inbound efforts. Finding a drop in this number over time can signal a drop in the quality of content (and vice versa for improvement) or determine if a change in messaging has brought in a crew of unqualified prospects. Measure revenue per lead As we’ve mentioned before, revenue per lead is really important to track. Use the following formula to figure it out: Revenue Generated/Number of Leads = RPL RPL helps to determine if your funnel is healthy and your leads are quality. This is also a great way to check if leads are being converted well and if not, it might be time to refigure the enablement efforts. Earning more revenue on each lead can be one of the strongest indicators of a startup that’s growing right. Are you beating your competitors? One of the metrics that can truly determine if your startup is healthy and your sales team well-equipped is a good win/loss rate against your competition. You may feel your content delivers better quality and the messaging is clear, but if it isn’t providing the winning differentiator that edges out the competition, marketing efforts may be the problem. Tally these columns and share it with your team each month and tweak communications as necessary. Related Resource: What Should be in an Investor Data Room?

When your startup hits growth stage, scaling the number of sales from channel partners is a no-brainer. For one, the customer acquisition costs are lower. A 2014 survey showed that companies spent about $0.53 for every $1 it attracted in new annual contract value (ACV)—almost half of what is spent on field sales: $1.02. Sales from channel partners also allow you to secure deals without scaling staff. Furthermore, your partners are likely hitting different customer and geographies. As Tomasz Tunguz notes, new channels diversify acquisition efforts “insulating the bookings number from the episodic underperformance typical of a single channel go-to-market.” That produces more predictable revenue and a greater multiple when you’re ready to raise money or sell the company. At first look, growing partner sales seems like the closest thing to a magic bullet. But your channel partners will not simply provide passive income. In order to achieve efficient and effective growth, start by interrogating your reselling efforts with the following questions: Are you actually securing more deals each quarter? It’s a simple question but one that needs to be quantified and shown to investors each quarter. Your partners need to produce and make reselling an indispensable part of your growth strategy. But if you’re just starting to create your first partnerships, this won’t come easy. Channel sales for partnerships require a lot of work upfront to get going. Be clear with investors when you embark on a reselling program that you need time to train your new partners. Nevertheless, after a few quarters, it’ll be time to show the program is working. Jim Somers at Openview has a great list of metrics for judging your partners. Here are some numbers he recommends for founders to record: How many partner deals are currently registered? What is the deal registration value? How many deals have been accepted/denied? How many deals have been won and lost? What is the value of the deals won? What is the deal velocity? Are you training partners properly? You can’t ignore your partners and expect the deal cash to flow. Channel partners may have experience in your industry or even share a similar business model, but will still need as much training like any account executives. “Developing reseller channels do require building a dedicated internal team to cultivate relationships, educate resellers, align internal and external incentives, and ensure success,” Tomasz Tunguz wrote. David Skok recommends creating marketing materials and programs specifically for channel partners to use. Sometimes, your staff will even have to convince your partners to help out with webinars and events to share these marketing efforts. Two things Somers recommends keeping tracking of is the number of courses your partners have attended and the number of training courses your partners have actually completed. Are your partners improving? Your partners have different priorities and, if the company is at a later stage, a different pace of business. It’s your job to prove the value in their participation and create a reason for them to be a better partner. You also need to figure out how to hold them accountable. “Establish partner quotas,” Jim Somers writes. “Both the supplier and the partner to agree to revenue goals and the required investment each must bring forward to be successful.” Assess your sales and training partner metrics and determine how you can improve each partner. Are they attending enough training sessions? What’s there close rate? Could their attempts be improved with more customized marketing materials? Working closely with your partners that are slumping will require a time investment but can pay off huge dividends in the long run. Moving a second-rate partner to a first-rate reseller can be as easy as looking at what’s worked for your top performer and figuring out to replicate the process. If a couple strategies don’t pay off, it’s worth both your time to end the partnership and move on. Are you adding partners? Treat your referral channels are an extension of your product. With new partners you have to test, measure and determine which fail and which scale. Provide incentives for your internal team to research new partners and develop leads. Measure the amount of leads generated, meetings set and deals made just like you would for your field sales squad. Scaling your sales from new partners protects you against saturation from other partner’s markets or a lackluster few quarters from otherwise reliable resellers. By going through this exercise each quarter and answering these questions, you’ve provided a framework for growing your partner channel, improving results with consistent focus on training and measuring any potential weak points that can be fixed or abandoned. If reselling is one of the most efficient ways to scale, evaluating the results and adjusting for future performance is one of the best ways to spend your time.

Last year, we put together a list of 17 startup newsletters that people here on the Visible team read and love. In one way or another, each of those newsletters helps to inform our decision-making around strategy and product or features content that we find generally entertaining and insightful. Related Resources: Our 15 Favorite Newsletters for Startup Founders The 16 Best Startup Newsletters In the months since, we have come across a few more newsletters that have quickly become can’t miss material for us each week. Snippets from Social Capital As a firm, Social Capital focuses on backing companies solving big problems. Snippets, their weekly newsletter surfaces content to help readers learn more about those big areas – like healthcare, education, and technology’s impact on society. The Ringer While the newsletter from Bill Simmons’ new venture, The Ringer, doesn’t even remotely focus on product or business – like his old site, Grantland, it focuses on the intersection of sports and pop culture – it does allow the reader to follow along with how one of the media world’s more interesting thinkers is going about building something from the ground up (albeit with an existing audience of millions). UX Design Weekly Kenny Chen’s newsletter is pretty simple — which any good UX designer knows is important. The best UX focused content from around the web sent out weekly. The list includes articles, tools, resources, and even portfolios to help readers advance their understanding of how to build usable products. L2 News – The Daily & The Week, Winners & Losers If you follow our blog, you know we love the stuff produced by L2 Digital and include videos and images from their reports in a lot of our posts. The firm focuses on benchmarking the performance of firms in the digital space — for example, how effective are Nike’s Ecommerce efforts vs. competitors — and their newsletters deliver all of that great content right to your inbox. Farnam Street Brain Food The Farnam Street Blog is difficult to describe succinctly. Basically, founder Shane Parrish has tried to build a site that pulls together great resources to make readers smarter and better. Decision-making, mental models, leadership, innovation…these are all topics that the blog touches on. The newsletter distills the best stuff from the site each week. Paul Singh’s Weekly Newsletter Over the years, Singh has worked on both sides of the table – founding multiple companies and working as a partner at 500 Startups. Since selling his most recent company, Disruption Corp., to 1776, Singh has built a community around his newsletter, where he shares 10 or so links that he and his community loved in the last week. And since you made it all the way to the end…we’d love to have you check out our little newsletter, The Visible Foreword. We generally send stuff twice per week. On Wednesdays, we share a new investor letter and over the weekend we provide some commentary on what we launched, learned, wrote, and thought about during the week.