Top Predictions For 2022 From OpenView Leaders

January 20, 2022

What does the future hold for 2022? At our final BUILDing Together event of 2021, OpenView’s Expansion & Investment Team leaders shared their top predictions for talent, go-to-market, investing and more. 

Drumroll please…here are the trends we expect to see in 2022. And don’t worry, we’ll be continuing BUILDing Together in February. Stay tuned! 

Hiring the best talent will continue to be extremely competitive and require creative tactics

“The talent market is extremely hot right now and searches are taking longer. If you start a search today, 75% of the candidates you might want are taken.” — Steve Melia, Partner  

“I’ve always said build in house because you will have a closer connection between teams, but a lot of employees want to be contractors right now. Companies need to start looking at those options which can be flexible and get you great talent and can be a great way to plug a gap when looking for that full time role. —Kyle Poyar, Partner

“Hiring someone who is about to do it instead of someone who has done it before can be powerful for that person’s motivation and creativity. Software is moving so quickly and changing so quickly but it might not be the person who has done it three times before that will be successful on the fourth try. It might be better to have the person with the fresh pair of eyes” — Margaret Kelsey, VP Marketing  

Pricing: how you grow revenue streams in a software business  

“The question of how you price and package is going to become more strategic at a board level. Executives are going to be hired to solve this problem.” — Kyle Poyar, Partner

“We’re starting to see more technology that is helping companies adopt usage-based pricing. As folks get more comfortable with the upside for their business, we’re going to see companies diving in head first into usage-based pricing.” — Kyle Poyar, Partner

You can’t measure it all: back to the golden days of brands to build your revenue engine   

“Marketing will pivot back from the idea of ‘what gets measured gets managed’, which is an over reliance on data and measurement and we will finally remember the magic of building the long game of a brand. We have enough data points as marketers and need to remember the reason we got into Marketing rather than following the numbers blindly.” — Margaret Kelsey, VP Marketing

“The classic demand gen digitally measured parts of the marketing funnel is saturated, which makes it so folks need to be creative to stand out.” — Kyle Poyar, Partner

“There has been a bifurcation of ‘haves’ and ‘haves nots’. The haves are creating immense customer value so expanding their value propositions and really delighting their customers faster than they are capturing that value back is revenue. We’ll continue to see those companies have outsized success in the form of valuation.”  — Sean Fanning, VP Investment

Internal team alignment will be more important than ever to keep pace

“PLG is a GTM motion, but the secret sauce is the fact that all teams are aligned in making the product the most valuable thing for the organization and the vehicle for growth.” — Margaret Kelsey, VP Marketing

“Marketing is going to have to take learnings from building relationships with sales and apply those to building hyper-close relationships with product, CS, growth and use their superpower of marketing to these different audiences to create a full flywheel internally.” — Margaret Kelsey, VP Marketing

>> Miss the final BUILDing Together event of 2021? Rewatch our Expansion & Investment Team leaders before our next event in February!

Partner at OpenView

Casey leads the end-to-end strategy & programming for OpenView’s network of industry experts, advisors & corporate partners. Her role is focused on creating connections between founders & their teams and the partners, advisors, board members & events they need to reach their goals. Additionally, she manages the OpenView portfolio peer networks and hosts the #WeeklyWalk series.