Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ❓ Last week, Tomasz Tunguz (MD at Redpoint Ventures) asked a question many are wondering, “how low will SaaS valuations go”? After all, public software multiples are now officially lower than what we saw in 2016, with the median percentile trading at 4.9x (vs. 5.6x in 2016). Tunguz points out that the 10-year bond’s rates correlate with SaaS multiples at -0.49 R^2, inferring that increasing rates address roughly half of SaaS valuations ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ? Just last week, Adobe shocked the software world by announcing their plan to acquire competitor Figma for a whopping $20b, representing a 50x ARR valuation. And if you read the fine print, it was likely north of 50x given the report states 400m is where Figma plans to end 2022. So how can the Adobe finance team justify paying WAY above market value and making CEO Dylan Field a 30 year old billionaire? Well, as Hunter Walk points out ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ? Private Equity is smitten with B2B enterprise software, and there are plenty of reasons why. These tools are often mission critical with high switching costs (and in turn, great retention profiles), large ARPUs, and strong upsell potential. So why isn’t every SMB or Mid-Market founder dropping their project to work on something serving the enterprise? Well, as Axuall CEO Charlie Lougheed explains in this piece, it’s an uphill battle t ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ? Most operators consider content strategy to be a marketing activity, not a sales one, but Nutshell CRM is here to change your mind. It’s their view that salespeople can create great content because their message should naturally showcase the features and benefits of your product, how it helps buyers, and ultimately, entice more sales. They break down six types of sales enablement content for your team to add to their arsenal. The easies ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ? Early stage B2B SaaS VC, Senovo, released a three part, monster of a B2B sales model review geared towards companies scaling from PMF (Product Market Fit) to the growth stage. It does a great job of outlining all of the KPIs you should be monitoring (as well as their benchmarks), how these KPIs inform each other, and even provides a base model for you to plug your data into. This level of detail will help you answer essential questions ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ☁️ 68% of the Cloud 100 (with public pricing) offer prepay annual plans, discounting plans by 20-30% on average in exchange for cash upfront. While this might seem like a great way to improve retention rates and CAC payback, that’s not always the case. According to OpenView’s 2021 Finance and Operating Benchmarks Report, monthly/quarterly contracts win on long-term retention – companies with 100% of their revenue on monthly and quarterly ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ? The current state of the market is impacting almost everyone within software, but you could argue there is no one getting hit harder than the marketer. Reduced budgets (both their own and their customers’) means they have to work smarter and be more resourceful to land deals, which is easier said than done. Olivine Marketing had a good piece on how to revamp your marketing strategy during these tough times, outlining strong ROI activiti ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ? It’s hard to say exactly how much public softwares’ cratering valuations are affecting the private market because we have limited info on private companies. But there are certainly signs indicating a decrease in private valuations as well – Forge Global (a secondary market for private company shares) told the Financial Times that “the prices of companies on it’s platform had fallen 19.9% in February and March compared with the fou ..read more

Before diving into this week’s playbook, I want to introduce Scaleworks (who pays the Playbook’s bills) to some of our newer readers. We’re a group that acquires and invests in B2B software usually doing somewhere between $3m–$10m in ARR. When people hear the word acquire they often think of classic Private Equity, a.k.a. loads of debt, optimization for cashflow, and as a result, low growth. That’s not really our model. We have a growth first mindset – but within reason – and like to scale in a capital efficient way that doesn’t have the repercussions of VC “all or nothing” growth targets. Fo ..read more

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe now ⚰️ It’s still early in the year, but the majority of software has taken a beating thus far as rates rise and geopolitical tensions increase. But Orlando Bravo (Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo) and his portfolio are doing just fine, as he’s always championed fundamentals and profitability over high cash burn for a shot at hyper-growth. In a recent sit down with Delivering Alpha, Bravo goes in on the “growth at all costs” strategy, why you ..read more