Three Things I Learned In SaaS, Sports, Tech & Live Events 10.6.23
The curve has dropped for successful businesses, how changing a job title 10x'd applicants (and why that's not a good thing), and the truth about LinkedIn connections and followers
The curve has dropped. A Lot.
We're a middle-market enterprise SaaS. We have healthy growth every year and we have suitors calling us often to try and invest in or acquire our company. A normal occurrence for a business doing well.
We've been in business awhile now. The first acquisition calls started in 2012. These days, there are a few every week. Occasionally I'll take one to get a feel for the market.
It's hard to get real data, but talk to enough people and we can conclude what market is. The curve has dropped significantly. What was once a B- is now an A.
All the SMB "high growth" businesses that weren't making any profit are dying fast. They're all for sale. They all call us, all the time, trying to sell off their customers, but they can't. All the contracts are short-term, they all have cancel for convenience in them, and none of them scale. I've personally seen dozens of them just this month. They can't get money and the way they built their business is likely never coming back.
We've always been able to get money, but now it's easier than ever.
Funny how, in the end, discipline always pays off. What was once a growth rate nobody would touch is now in-demand. And what was "good" is now exceptional.
An acquaintance just sold a company at $20m ARR growing at ~20% YoY. They were asking for a 5.5x multiple. They got 24 offers. Two years ago they wouldn't have gotten anything.
Titles only matter to people who don't- but my goodness are there are more than we thought.
Business is going great for us and we are hiring.
A role we have been staffing up for is our "Customer Success Associate." It's a great job working with our customers in a support role for the customer, the sales lead, the implementation team and the Customer Success team.
This past week, we changed the title of the job to "Account Manager" for a number of relatively benign reasons (Mostly so people aren't confused by CSA, CSR, CSM which are three of our abbreviations.)
We changed the title on the job posting, which is the same job posting which has been up for two years.
We got 10x the applicants.
Some people would say that's a good thing. More to choose from!
I don’t agree.
What it signals to me is we're getting a bunch of applicants who never bothered to click on the CSA posting to see what the job was. Had they, they would have applied, like they did for Account Manager. What's more likely is a spray-and-pray approach to any semi-decent Account Manager posting there is (sort by title). I'm confident in that assumption for another reason: the gig very clearly says it is in the office five days per week - no exceptions - and more than half the applicants share they're only open to remote work.
Tell me you didn't read the job req without telling me you didn't read the job req.
Dad he has more followers than you
Out of curiosity, I logged how many LinkedIn connection requests came in the last two weeks and how many of them were just sales people and recruiters looking to sales bomb me.
186 connection requests.
21 accepted
7 dropped within a day after a sales bomb
1 out of every 13 people actually want to connect/follow.
Extrapolate that out over an entire year, that's 4,576 junk requests per year to the CEO of a not-very-well-known small business with ~150 employees.
Two learnings and one question:
a. Number of LinkedIn followers is meaningless (I already knew that as many are purchased but even organically it's meaningless)
b. If we believe someone is ignoring our connection request, they may be, but we also may be lost in an inbox of thousands
c. How do people in glamorous jobs even use LinkedIn? I assume they get 100x this traffic!