Mon.Mar 18, 2019

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Why Your Cost of Sales Generally Doubles As You Scale

SaaStr

One of the biggest things first-time founders intuit wrong is how much sales efficiency plummets … just as it is getting good. Usually, most SaaS start-ups follow a pattern where the CEO starts off doing founder-led sales. Then, after she hires a few sales reps, and makes a few mistakes. At first, those reps struggle to even close anything. But then, by trial-and-error, learning, and better training … eventually, the CEO gets the company to two trained, scaled sales reps that are pre

Scale 212
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Benchmarking PagerDuty's S-1:How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up

Tom Tunguz

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by 3 former Amazon engineers who were often on-call. To engineers, being on call means carrying a pager to respond to crises when software breaks or services go down. In the 10 years since that day, PagerDuty has built an exceptional business. Their product has evolved from on-call management, which includes routing calls, triaging alerts, and creating workflows to handle crises in real time; to an incident management platform that manages the standard operating pro

Metrics 192
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SaaStr Podcast #217: Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson on The Trapdoor Decisions to Avoid When Scaling

SaaStr

Formerly a senior leader at Google, Claire Hughes Johnson is now Chief Operating Officer at Stripe, where she’s helped guide the online payments firm through rapid growth. Stripe today has more than 1,400 employees and processes billions of dollars for millions of users worldwide. Scaling the company’s employee base, sales teams, marketing, and operations—all while preserving its culture—has required a laser focus on first principles, smart processes, and effective hiring.

Scale 121
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3 Sure Signs that becoming a Payment Facilitator IS NOT for Your SaaS App

Agile Payments

Payment facilitation or payment aggregation allows one entity, the master merchant, to process or facilitate payments for a base of sub-merchants. For SaaS providers these are typically application end users or customers.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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What are some techniques SaaS companies use to combat trial abuse / people trialling multiple times?

SaaStr

Let it go. A lot of things will drive you a bit nuts when you are small: Folks that do repeat free trials. Folks that share accounts. Early customers that got “too good of a deal”. Customers that use a cheaper edition they aren’t entitled to. Etc. etc. When you are fighting literally for every dollar, this will irk you. But as you scale past a few million in ARR, you’ll learn: Most folks follow the rules.

SaaS 118

More Trending

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17 Experts Share Their Best SaaS Pricing Strategies

Cobloom

Small improvements to your SaaS pricing strategy can have a huge impact, on customer signups, MRR, and the overall growth of your business. Trouble is, working out how to improve your pricing strategy can feel seriously complicated: you need to factor in your competitors' pricing, the perceived value of your solution, the price sensitivity of your customers. and somehow come up with a perfectly optimised price.

Pricing 73
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7 Must-Haves in a Payment Facilitation Partner

Agile Payments

As the idea of Payment Facilitation gains traction, more and more SaaS companies are exploring becoming a PayFac. Conceptually, it is an attractive feature to introduce: fast, easy, onboarding and new means of revenue generation. In fact, independent software vendors and SaaS companies are poised to generate $4.4 billion in revenue from payment processing alone by 2021.

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Managing the EOQ Scramble (And Minimizing Deal Slippage)

Sales Hacker

Sales cycles are getting longer and more complex. Buyers are more informed (and demanding) than in the past, and reps are busier than ever – in fact, on average, only 34% of a rep’s time is being spent on selling each week. What steps can you take to more effectively manage the EOQ scramble? How can you minimize the risk of slipped deals? And how can you do this without overwhelming your reps?

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Is Frictionless Onboarding Worth the Risk?

Agile Payments

If you’ve considered becoming a Payment Facilitator (PayFac) for your SaaS customer base, you’re familiar with the term “KYC,” or Know Your Customer. As the payment processing industry continues its trend of explosive growth, however, KYC might be more accurately termed “CYA.”.

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6 Reasons Why Your Integrated Payments Strategy Could Fail

If you're in the software industry grappling with integrating payments into your business model, understanding where others have stumbled can be a game-changer for your revenue goals. Discover 6 key reasons behind the struggles many face. The challenge goes beyond the technicalities of integrating a payment system; it delves into the strategic oversight of revenue shares, negotiations with payment providers, and the full exploitation of potential revenue streams.

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Unify Your Company’s Contacts into a Team Relationship Manager with Nimble

Nimble - Sales

In today’s collaborative modern workplace, many companies still find themselves operating in walled-off silos between sales, marketing, customer service, and accounting departments. These teams are unable to communicate effectively about the shared company business contacts amongst themselves, allowing for missed opportunities and dropped balls. In today’s update, Nimble has embedded the ability to synchronize over […].

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Payfac Companies

Agile Payments

Payment Facilitator Companies. A Payment Facilitator takes on the role of the Master Merchant. The primary benefit to becoming a Payment Facilitator is that you can quickly and easily enroll your app users and enable processing of credit, debit card and in some case ACH transactions. As an example: A SaaS offers an invoicing solution eg QBooks. Businesses that want to leverage their invoicing solution complete a simple application and 15 minutes or so later they are approved and set up to accept

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PODCAST 49: KPIs to build World-class Customer SuccessOrganisation w/ Roger Scott

Sales Hacker

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Roger Scott , Chief Customer Officer at New Relic. Roger is a world class technology executive who has spent the last 25 years in customer facing roles, first at Oracle and now at New Relic. Roger discusses the key philosophies driving effective customer engagement and how to build a global organization while preserving culture and alignment. .

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5 Things You Must Have To Become A Payment Facilitator

Agile Payments

Payment facilitation is the process by which one entity, a master merchant, processes or facilitates payments on behalf of a base of sub merchants.

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How To Package & Price Embedded Analytics

Just by embedding analytics, app owners can charge 24% more for their product. How much value could you add? This framework from Software Pricing Partners explains how application enhancements can extend your product offerings. You’ll learn: How to take a disciplined approach to pricing The three elements of the Packaging Decision Framework Ways to structure your new embedded analytics offering Download the White Paper to learn about How To Package & Price Embedded Analytics.

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The Top 5 Things Unleash Taught Me About the State of Sales Tech in 2019

Sales Hacker

I still have not recovered my voice from last week’s Unleash Conference put on by Outreach. The gorgeous venue – an amazing resort in San Diego – was second only to the caliber of attendees and conversations that I was able to have. 1200 people, 50 speakers, 3 days, ~500 different engaging discussions… So was it worth sounding like Gollum for four days after?

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Looking to become a Payment Facilitator as an SaaS application?

Agile Payments

Steps to becoming a Payment Facilitator are outlined below.

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How to develop a winning sales mindset: Critical self talk vs pep talk

CloseSaaS

We’ve all been there: you’re in the middle of a sales call, and you start rambling. You only realize it after you’ve been going on for a few minutes. You kick yourself, try to focus on the topic at hand, and wonder why you always have trouble sticking to the topic.

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Come for the Network, Stay for the Tool

Point Nine Land

A couple of years ago, Chris Dixon, Partner at a16z, coined the saying ‘ come for the tool, stay for the network.’ This came to define a new go-to-market strategy for many marketplaces or, as they came to be known, SaaS-enabled marketplaces. The idea was to acquire one side of the marketplace by offering them a SaaS tool and, once significant scale had been achieved, attracting the other side by building out a marketplace (solving the infamous chicken and egg problem).

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People, Passion & Perfection: The Key Ingredients for an Awesome Product

Need help launching innovative software quickly? Dive into "People, Passion, and Perfection" and unlock the secrets to building excellent products in the digital age. Fast-track your journey with Tech Accelerator: Agile and Cloud-Native for flexibility & scalability AI-powered innovation for faster results Quality at every step for a flawless user experience See real impact across industries: Healthcare: Empower patients and medical professionals with intuitive solutions Education: Transform cla

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Subscription60: Monday, March 18th

ProfitWell

Welcome, good people. It’s Monday, March 18th, National Sloppy Joe Day. But since I’m rocking a crispy white shirt, I’m saving the ground beef for later. Abby here, with your Monday subscription news and the recurring revenue resources we dug up for you to commence the week right. The Rundown. Art of the Customer We’re big Leela Srinivasan fans and on the Inside Intercom podcast, the SurveyMonkey marketing mogul drops the knowledge on the art of being truly customer-centric.

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FlashTags: A Simple Hack For Conveying Context Without Confusion

OnStartups

The following was originally written as a post on the internal HubSpot wiki a couple of years ago. At the request of several fellow entrepreneurs (hi, Wade from Zapier!) I've mentioned this to, I'm sharing it publicly for the first time. Hope you find it useful. -Dharmesh. For easy reference, you can access this page using FlashTags.org (it redirects here).

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What Is Customer Acquisition Cost ?

Rakam

The purpose of every marketer is to help their company to achieve growth. Best marketers don’t just focus on growth are they focus on sustainable growth in the long term. Most of the times marketing professionals forget about the long term part of the growth and just focus on making business decisions to acquire new customers without thinking about the costs.

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Director of Revenue: A Real Story of Revenue Automation

Zuora

Revenue Directors across companies and across industries are struggling with the complexity of revenue recognition. Here we tell the story […]. The post Director of Revenue: A Real Story of Revenue Automation appeared first on Zuora.

Revenue 40
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Embedded Analytics: A Force Multiplier for Business

The possibilities for embedded analytics to drive real value for businesses, end users, and society are as fascinating as they are limitless. No matter the industry, brand after brand is finding that analytics can be the solution to a multitude of business challenges. Go deep with five insightsoftware customers as they share the details of their analytics journeys and discuss the transformative power of data.

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Free Trial or Freemium? Going From 0 to 100,000 Users In Six Months With Wes Bush

Outseta

Wes Bush is a SaaS marketer who has quickly developed a reputation as “the free trial vs. freemium guy.” He helps SaaS leaders launch and optimize free trial and freemium models via his consultancy, Traffic is Currency , and is also the founder of the Product-Led Summit. I caught up with Wes to talk about his free trial vs. freemium framework, our own customer acquisition process, and the start-up scene in Waterloo, Canada.

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FlashTags: A Simple Hack For Conveying Context Without Confusion

OnStartups

The following was originally written as a post on the internal HubSpot wiki a couple of years ago. At the request of several fellow entrepreneurs (hi, Wade from Zapier!) I've mentioned this to, I'm sharing it publicly for the first time. Hope you find it useful. -Dharmesh. For easy reference, you can access this page using FlashTags.org (it redirects here).

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IBM launches global blockchain-based payments network

IT World

IBM today unveiled Blockchain World Wire , a real-time global payments network based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) for regulated financial firms. The blockchain-based network will offer a new way for near real-time cross-border payment exchange and international settlement. (The settlements can be done in five to 10 seconds.) The network is currently able to transfer funds to more than 50 countries using 47 digital coins backed by fiat currencies. [ Further reading: What is FinTech (a

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5 Awesome Instagram Story Tools To Create Stories Like A Pro

The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication

Also like to note there are affiliate links in this post When Instagram Stories came on the scene, the noise regarding this feature was “They’ve copied Snapchat, like come on, man, that’s neither here nor there.” Innovations and copying go hand in hand within this competitive tech landscape. [link] But what we can take away from Instagram is that IG Stories is epic.

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Crafting Tomorrow: A to Z of Delighting Customers with Your Product

Ready to build game-changing software fast? Trigent's eBook, "Crafting Tomorrow," unlocks the secrets. Entrepreneurs, product managers, and developers: it's time to bring your vision to life. Tech Accelerator: An on-demand ninja team ready to ideate, validate, iterate, and propel your product at every stage. Master the Product Life Cycle: Identify problems, build solutions, launch, scale, and optimize with confidence.