Entrepreneur Meetup: September Startup Forum
To kick off the Fall season and close out Q3, Atlanta Ventures hosted the third Simply SaaS Forum. 70% of Forum attendees this September were Founders who gave up half their day to hear rapid fire learning sessions on four topics — People, Product/Engineering, Sales and Marketing. These events were created to help SaaS Professionals connect, learn, and be inspired.
In addition to speaker sessions from four industry leaders, Josh Pigford, Founder and CEO of Baremetrics, joined for a Q&A with David Cummings.
Brad McGinity — Sales
Brad McGinity leads the Revenue Organization at 15Five, including sales, customer success and customer support. He previously co-founded Windsor Circle and was the top performing Sales Exec at Bronto Software before its acquisition by Netsuite.
Brad presented on opportunity stages and MEDDPICC — a strategy to help increase win rates covering Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Process, Decision Criteria, Paperwork, Identified Pain, Champion, and Competition.
Quantify the payoff your solution brings to your customer.
Jeff Perkins — Marketing
Jeff Perkins is Chief Marketing Officer of Parkmobile. He took us through 6 ways to make a big impact with a small budget: 1) Focus, 2) Know your buyer, 3) Get your name out there, 4) Think big, 5) Be the brand, and 6) Create raving fans.
“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”
Jonathan Manuzak — Product/Engineering
Jonathan is the CTO of CodeGuard (recently acquired by Comodo CA). He taught the foundations for a high performance engineering team — well-defined project management, choosing the right metric, thoughtful operations, and customer support.
“Find the best communicator you can afford.”
Christine Kaszubski — People
Christine Kaszubski is the Chief People Officer at SalesLoft. She presented on why hiring good people is so hard — it’s all about fit and making sure skill sets and core values meet the company’s.
“Someone here today is going to positively change a person’s life forever because you knew they were a fit for the organization, and to me, there is no greater level of success than that.”
Josh Pigford — Q&A
Josh Pigford is the Founder & CEO of Baremetrics. One big takeaway from Josh and David’s Q&A: Early on in SaaS, don’t pay attention to the metrics. Just go with your gut. The only number you should increase and focus on is revenue.
“We celebrate raising money, but a lot of times it makes things worse.”
“Your idea isn’t really worth anything. You’ll have lots of ideas. The ability to prove an idea faster than how long it takes someone else to build it is extremely valuable long term.”
Photos by Futography