Chapter 1 Subscription Economics: How Recurring Revenue Changes Everything The next part of our journey moves into the execution phase of sales and marketing. Elay Cohen gives us a great summary of the core elements needed to empower your sales team to be aligned on messaging and supported with well-designed playbooks that will help them win. He also touches upon the importance of defining an onboarding methodology and program to support the growth that comes with your sales success. Mike Wolff, currently SVP of SMB sales at Salesforce, has developed a unique formula for building a sales team that makes sense in today’s business software landscape. He shares his current approach on building and managing a sales team with us, based on a “hub distribution model” and specific strategies on how to segment your market for growth. In the final part of this section, we get to hear from Melinda Gonzalez, one of Salesforce’s original customer success managers. Melinda enumerates a three-point plan that will help to guide you in the development of your own customer success strategy. The last three chapters of the book are devoted to the practical needs of the earlier-stage startup. We hear from two colleagues who have worked together at both Radian6 and then at Salesforce. Greg Poirier helps us understand the need and use for CRM as a key driver for early-stage startup success and growth. He introduces the topic of content marketing as a critical tool for lead generation and sales, and later follows this up with key plays that can be implemented in your CRM solution. Amanda Nelson gives us a play -by-play tactical guide to content marketing, with the focus being on “filling the funnel” with quality leads. I hope that you will enjoy hearing from these recognized experts in SaaS and take away key learnings that you can apply to your business today. So turn the page, and let the journey begin!