Blue Horizon’s reading list is a curated collection of articles for SaaS founders and management teams. We are entrepreneurs and operators who have lived through the process of founding and scaling software companies. Here are the articles and resources we found useful this week.
Why Attitude Is More Important Than Intelligence
Travis Bradberry, Entrepreneur.com (courtesy of Rachel Totten on LinkedIn)
Dweck found that people’s core attitudes fall into one of two categories: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. With a fixed mindset, you believe you are who you are and you cannot change. This creates problems when you’re challenged because anything that appears to be more than you can handle is bound to make you feel hopeless and overwhelmed. People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve with effort. They outperform those with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ, because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new.
4 Habits That Describe What Great Communication Looks Like
Marcel Schwantes, inc.com
1. Share information
2. Embrace conflict
3. Communicate to each other’s style
4. Communicate with your ears
The Top 10 Questions to Ask a VP of Marketing in an Interview
Jason Lemkin, saastr.com
What are the top 3 things you think we should upgrade in marketing?
What “commit” did you hold in your last roles?
How have you worked with the sales team in the past?
What should our marketing budget be?
How big a team do we need?
What have you done to increase win rates?
What should we do to market to each of our top 3 segments?
What agencies would you bring in to help us?
What sort of customer marketing should we do?
Changing Your Sales Strategies As You Grow Into PLG
SaaSx.com
The most important part of transitioning to PLG or the Product-Led Funnel is generating product-ready buyers, which means abandoning your traditional sales qualification process and letting customers buy the way they want to buy. At the beginning of your organization’s transition, the role of sales may not change very much but should leave wiggle-room for new buyers and processes. As you create product-ready buyers in your funnel, you’ll find prospects know more about your product, and are ready to move forward with their purchase decision more quickly.
10 Ways to Build a Moat in SaaS
Jason Lemkin, saastr.com
Brand can be a big moat in SaaS. Most customers just want to pick the app they’ve used and heard of. We all underestimated this in the earlier days of SaaS. There may be 100+ CRMs today, but most of us just want to pick the one we know.
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