By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC By now it is a well-known fact that successful platform businesses enjoy faster growth and (much) greater valuations than more conventional product companies. The most successful players today – Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Tesla (“AMAAT” for short) – have recently become trillion-dollar businesses. Two more recent players that arose from the ashes of the global financial crisis, AirBnB and Uber, are well on their way to similar status, with market caps at around the $100bn mark. An increasing number of B2B startups and scale-ups are aiming to emulate this success in different industry sectors including finance, energy, transportation and logistics, grocery retail, healthcare, agribusiness, and other sectors where they have identified inefficiencies that a digital platform could eliminate, alongside opportunities to create new value. Among other factors, successful platform business models leverage several key technologies of the past two decades: the internet, smartphone, GPS mapping and navigation, cloud computing, social networking (for identity verification), mobile payment systems, recommendation engines (for reviews and ratings), and big data algorithms to facilitate instant matchmaking of buyers and sellers. But building a successful platform business model requires much more than “just” leveraging modern digital technologies. It’s taken the

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Synopsis: Why are churn rates in B2B SaaS companies so high, and why is expansion in major accounts so haphazard? For whatever reason, management teams wildly over-invest in their Land strategies while dramatically under-investing in their Expand opportunities, as well as in the support and education efforts required to ensure that customers Renew. Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of suitable models and best practices for managing each of the three corresponding sales motions. I hope this article provides some pointers to help teams redress this chronic imbalance. I chose the image for this article, highlighting the different dynamics surrounding customer acquisition vs. customer expansion, because it points to a persistent, chronic misalignment in the vast majority of B2B tech companies today between management rhetoric and action. As I’ll demonstrate, renewal is another area where resources are mis-aligned and a different approach is required. CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CCOs may talk a good game about investing in “customer success” but what their actions actually tell us is that they prioritize only what they believe to serve their own success in racking up new logos and new ARR. The provocation in the “not equal”

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Every day since late last year the media has reported on Covid vaccine rollouts to a global audience anxious to gain protection against Covid-19. The early running indicated that the Oxford-Astra Zeneca alliance, would grab the lead, with the pure-play MRNA companies, Biontech (backed by Pfizer) and Moderna following close behind. Then there’s J&J, which employs a similar technology to that of Oxford-AZ. Which vaccine technology and which company stand to win out in the end? I know where I’m putting my money… For the past year the world has waited anxiously for confirmation that newly developed Covid vaccines will help restore some level of normalcy to our daily lives. Clearly there’s nothing like a major existential threat to concentrate the minds of scientists, microbiologists, chemists, pharmaceutical companies, execs, healthcare systems, and governments – let alone each one of us citizens – to find a solution to a global pandemic that to date has infected 125m people and killed almost 3m. In the past six months or so we’ve seen astounding progress in vaccine launches and initial vaccination programs in certain countries, particularly in Israel, the UAE, the UK and the U.S. Every day brings

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.” – Albert Einstein “The problem is not the problem, the problem is the way we see the problem.” – Saji Ijiyemi, Don’t Die Sitting In my work with CEOs and their teams in B2B SaaS scaleups as well as mid-sized and larger companies I am constantly surprised by how many of their sales teams are closing small deals of $50k or so in ARR with enterprise-level organizations instead of developing much larger opportunities. One consequence of this apparent lack of ambition is a much slower growth rate for the company, and another is that it can take twice as long to build a profitable revenue engine. In fact, I believe this is partly why B2B SaaS companies tend to take a decade or more to build a profitable revenue stream. In some cases, this problem occurs because AEs are spending much of their time selling to middle management or even lower — whether in IT, line functions, or procurement — to address tactical problems or respond to RFPs. In other cases, it