Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? This is a very nuanced question, but benchmarks do provide some guidance for what is reasonable. Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity.

Investment 274

Investment Startup Marketing SaaS 274

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

Over the past 12 months I’ve invested considerable time thinking about, experimenting with and optimising my daily routine. I relish figuring out new ways to become more efficient and better at my work. There’s a limited number of hours in the working week, so the challenge is to use our time so that we not only produce our best work, but also clearly understand what’s going to have the biggest impact.

Underperforming Technical Team 138

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Communication Advertising 138

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

SEPTEMBER 9, 2017

If you’re a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution provider, you’ve got something that your customers want… but you may not even know it. Data. Namely, data that you can see because you’re hosting an application for lots of users. In aggregate, this information can be very useful. For example, if you host an HR solution, you could see the average number of vacation days used by employees, or the average number of candidates reviewed for each open position.

Data 100

Data SaaS Software Review Benchmarks 100

Totango

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

Today’s customer success executives are being challenged to use unprecedented amounts of customer data to build more predictable revenue outcomes and run more efficient operations. That’s on top of their existing efforts to manage an entire customer base. If you are a VP of Customer Success, it is time to go beyond defining strategy and start ensuring the execution of your strategy across the organization.

Customer Success 82

Customer Success Technical Review Onboarding Metrics 82

Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science

Are you ready to move beyond the basics and take a deep dive into the cutting-edge techniques that are reshaping the landscape of experimentation? 🌐 From Sequential Testing to Multi-Armed Bandits, Switchback Experiments to Stratified Sampling, Timothy Chan, Data Science Lead, is here to unravel the mysteries of these powerful methodologies that are revolutionizing how we approach testing.

Innovation

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

Modifications to your website shouldn't be made on a whim. Instead, it's important that you conduct extensive A/B testing to determine whether the changes you want to make are going to make a positive impact on your bottom line. This is especially crucial for your shopping cart functionality.

Marketing 75

Marketing 75

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 30, 2017

Shopify is an exceptional business. There are not many software companies who can nearly quadruple their enterprise value in two years. But Shopify has grown from $2.7B in enterprise value to more than $10B. What are the metrics behind this behemoth? First, let’s describe the company a bit. Shopify provides e-commerce infrastructure to merchants.

Merchant Services 155

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions 155

Rakam

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

If your job title resembles anything like Data Analyst, VP Analytics, Head of Analytics, etc, you know how critical your role is in the company. You resume work on a typical weekday and are already faced with countless reports to churn out. The Management meeting is breathing down your neck. A client whose data is managed by your organization has called in.

Data 69

Data Cloud Churn Management 69

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

Documentation, more often than not, is an afterthought for many SaaS businesses. But when given focus it deserves, it can be a highly-scalable customer success machine capable of stopping churn in its tracks. Sweating the details on your product’s visual design. Tackling complex technical challenges at scale. Building a world-class sales team.

Underperforming Technical Team 68

Underperforming Technical Team Scale SaaS Technical Review 68

Totango

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

Zendesk is a family of products that helps companies manage the entire customer lifecycle in different ways. They are on a scale that is uncommon for B2B companies, with a $350M run rate, 90K paying customers, and an additional 50-100K free or trial customers at any given time. At Customer Success Summit 2017 , Sam Boonin, VP of Product Strategy at Zendesk, gave a keynote address where he pointed out that “relationships between businesses and consumers are complicated,” because what they want is

Customer Success 82

Customer Success Investment Scale Underperforming Technical Team 82

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Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.

Payments

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

Inbound marketing, PPC (Pay-Per-Click), and natural SEO are all great ways to market your SaaS or digital product. Each method is based online, and they're relatively inexpensive, which makes them a good fit for startup companies. You've probably heard the terminology tossed around in marketing circles, but what are the key elements of each of these methods?

Marketing 61

Marketing Startup SaaS 61

Brian Balfour

SEPTEMBER 26, 2017

Get the customizable Growth Interview Prep Worksheet that accompanies the post here. You walk into your growth interview after hours of preparation. You’ve perfected your 2 minute pitch, polished your work stories, and maybe even done some case prep. You’re ready to showcase your achievements and you have an answer ready for any question they throw at you.

Interviewing 65

Interviewing Retention Metrics Social Media 65

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

One of the most difficult go-to-market strategies for startups is platform. Platform go to markets mean selling software that can do many things, depending on the customer need. Selling a platform is challenging for five reasons. First, most customers buy software to solve a particular and immediate problem. When pitching a platform, the potential buyer has to imagine what the platform can do for them.

Marketing 153

Marketing Engineering Startup Software 153

Joel Caparella

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

Introducing the first episode of Leading Matters FRAMED. I think you will find the premise both interesting and engaging; take the most recent full interview episode of Leading Matters and pull out one specific powerful topic to pay attention to. Today we frame up episode 62 which was my interview with Craig Ballantyne, and you are going to absolutely love this closer look at how Craig communicated during our conversation.

Interviewing 62

Interviewing Communication Engagement 62

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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.

Revenue

Entrepreneur - SaaS

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

People are often averse to change, but businesses can't afford to be if they want to remain competitive.

Business 80

Business SaaS 80

Totango

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

Today we hosted a webinar on Customer Health with our customer, iPerceptions. There has been a TON of interest in this topic which is why we’re calling it Part 1 of our Customer Health series. For those of you who couldn’t attend today’s webinar but have an interest, catch the highlights below the link to the recording! What is a Customer Health Model?

Customer Lifetime Value 60

Customer Lifetime Value Customer Success Metrics Communication 60

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

Subscription billing is increasingly becoming the norm, for SaaS companies as well as companies that offer tangible assets. The "Subscription Economy" is taking hold, displacing the more traditional model of doing business. More businesses are making subscription or recurring billing available, including your own. That said, are you maximizing your company's subscription billing potential to its fullest?

Payment Features 60

Payment Features Subscription SaaS Business 60

CloseSaaS

SEPTEMBER 20, 2017

When you think about traditional sales, you might picture a bunch of people wearing ties in a scene from Boiler Room or two guys in country club getup shaking hands on a golf course.

Sales 52

Sales 52

As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.

Pricing

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 12, 2017

One of the hardest things for me is to admit is when I’m wrong. It’s hard first to admit it to myself. But harder yet is to admit the error to others. It could be my wife or my colleagues. Most challenging of all is owning the error in a public forum. But admitting mistakes is a key defining attribute of a leader. Owning the mistake accomplishes one critical thing.

Leadership 149

Leadership 149

Chargify

SEPTEMBER 13, 2017

The post SaaS Leaders Share Their Advice On Moving Upmarket To Win Enterprise Customers appeared first on Chargify Blog.

Enterprise 70

Enterprise SaaS 70

Pierre Lechelle

SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

As some of you may know, the largest european SaaS conference happened in Dublin on the week of the 18th of September. If you don’t know about SaaStock, you should definitely check it out. This edition gathered 1 500 people from all over the world. Great content and awesome people! I get the most out […]. Cet article 7 Awesome Entrepreneurs shared their secrets at SaaStock 2017 est apparu en premier sur Pierre Lechelle.

SaaS 55

SaaS Entrepreneurship 55

Joel Caparella

SEPTEMBER 13, 2017

Every single thing that Gary Vaynerchuk does and says you should be putting into practice. That should be the full extent of this post; listen to Gary Vaynerchuk and do what he says to do. What motivates this seemingly thousandth iteration of telling you to listen to GaryVee? I tuned in to this half hour conversation between Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan and Gary Vaynerchuk as part of Hubspot’s Four Days of Facebook promotion.

Social Media 52

Social Media Acquisition Branding Investment 52

Advertiser: Data Robot

The buzz around generative AI shows no sign of abating in the foreseeable future. Enterprise interest in the technology is high, and the market is expected to gain momentum as organizations move from prototypes to actual project deployments. Ultimately, the market will demand an extensive ecosystem, and tools will need to streamline data and model utilization and management across multiple environments.

Generative AI

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

Are you ready to launch your SaaS service, sell your app or distribute your digital download? In another post , we outlined six questions you should ask your e-commerce merchant solution provider. But for such an important decision, there are a number of factors to consider. Here are five more questions to ask before you sign on the merchant account dotted line.

Merchant Services 60

Merchant Services SaaS 60

CloseSaaS

SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

There’s a reason why we've created so much content over the last four years, and it’s not just because we like hearing ourselves talk.

Content Marketing 59

Content Marketing Marketing 59

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

How do you help someone when that person knows substantially more about the question than you do? This is one of the most fundamental and frequent questions in management. I came across it first as a product manager. Then as a manager of teams. And last as a board member. In each of these situations, have interacted with people who knew substantially more about their area of expertise.

Engineering 144

Engineering Strategy Management Data 144

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

Today we’re excited to announce ChartMogul Revenue Recognition! Now finance teams can save countless hours preparing income statements and get a real-time view of GAAP revenues. To date ChartMogul has primarily been about metrics; MRR, Churn rate, etc. these are things that teams might use to track their progress or inform decision making. We also added cash flow charts back in 2015, but these only show how much money has been received from customers in any given period.

Payments 49

Payments Revenue Payment Services Payment Features 49

Speaker: John Mansour - President, Product Management University

You know that sinking feeling. You’ve come up with a winning product strategy, everyone’s on board and energized, and you’re halfway down the path to execution only to have it submarined by something someone convinced your leadership was more strategic! It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar, and it exemplifies one of the biggest struggles with individual product strategies.

Strategy

Rakam

SEPTEMBER 30, 2017

Imagine you resume work and realize that your data has just been compromised. Months and years of data all maliciously tampered with and there’s no idea where it all went wrong. Take John… John manages data at a company called ABC Technology. One morning, he’s asked to look for a better query engine that can manage the company’s gigabytes and petabytes of data.

Data 40

Data Engineering Technology Management 40

ReSci

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

Facebook had been successfully running its ad platform for several years before launching Lookalike Audiences in 2013 to enhance its ad targeting. Since then, Facebook has grown their quarterly revenue from ads from $1.5B in the first half of 2013, to $9B+ in Q2 of 2017. Amazingly, the. The post A Guide to Ad Targeting with Artificial Intelligence appeared first on ReSci.

Artificial Intelligence 40

Artificial Intelligence Revenue 40

FastSpring

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

Struggling to keep up with digital taxes in the global marketplace? You’re not alone. In the U.S., states were initially slow to adapt to digital download taxation, then suddenly enacted a wave of new rules. European Union countries apply varying amounts of Value Added Tax (VAT) on imported digital services, in the name of fairness to EU sellers.

Marketplace as a Service 60

Marketplace as a Service 60