The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 18, 2017

Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend a lot of time with so far. I usually just “OK” them, since the founders we are working with are all super reasonable people who carefully weigh how much they need against the interests of the company – their company. But sometimes founders ask me for a suggestion or some guidance because they are uncertain as to what is fair, and so I thought it might be useful to create a simple model.

Technical Review 279

Technical Review Compensation Company Culture Benchmarks 279

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Disagree and commit. I first read about this idea in the 2016 Amazon Shareholders letter. But the idea can be traced back to Andy Grove at Intel. Grove wrote about this topic in High Output Management. Disagree and commit is a management technique for handling conflict. There are two parts to it. First, expecting and demanding teammates to voice their disgreement.

Management 218

Management Leadership Engineering Startup 218

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

I gave a talk this year at the 2017 SaaS North conference in Ottawa, where I discuss the fundamentals of building a repeatable, scalable, & profitable growth process for a startup. Building a Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth Process [View on Slideshare].

Startup 189

Startup SaaS Business Model Business 189

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

NOVEMBER 4, 2017

No matter how long the list of amazing features you offer, if you’re marketing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, that’s not all you’ve got to sell. You should be talking about the “non-feature” pieces as well. If not, you’re underselling your solution. That’s because prospects are usually thinking about more than just features when they’re evaluating a solution.

SaaS 133

SaaS Finance Data Marketing 133

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

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

How do you keep customers happy? Long-term customer satisfaction and retention begins with knowing your customer. You should understand their wants and needs. You may not know the specific motivations for each customer, but there are some traits that nearly all customers have in common. Here's a tip to help you keep customers happy and coming back for more.

Retention 120

Retention Marketing 120

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 30, 2017

While doing some research for another post I just stumbled on this excellent overview from Pacific Crest on the churn rates of publicly listed SaaS companies. I’ve seen posts with churn benchmarks of public SaaS companies before, but this one is by far the most comprehensive collection I’ve seen and I think it’s very useful. What’s maybe even more interesting than taking a look at the numbers themselves is to see how different companies define churn (or the inverse, retention).

Churn 226

Churn SaaS Retention Metrics 226

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 4, 2017

Initial Coin Offerings, a fundraising mechanism for companies using cryptocurrencies as a mechanism to buy their service, seem to be upending the world of venture capital. Filecoin raised $250M through an ICO. Tezos raised $232M. Bancor raised $153M. These are massive amounts of money. Recently, I’ve been wondering how prevalent ICOs are and whether they could potentially be a substitute for venture capital.

Venture Capital 188

Venture Capital Startup Trends Development 188

Think Strategies

NOVEMBER 11, 2017

Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they are going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage going forward. Yet, many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. These executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting the new generation of cloud-based applications and services that make the digital enterprise possible.

Development 100

Development Cloud Enterprise Sales 100

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

Free trials are a great marketing tactic. Everyone loves free. Signing up for one is easy. A first name here, an email address there, and you have access. But as a business owner, there’s a massive gap between getting names and getting dollars. How many free trial users end up as paying customers? Depends on your conversion model: A Totango study in 2012 found an average of 50% when a credit card was required for the free trial, but only 15% when a credit card wasn’t necessary.

Churn 103

Churn Engagement Pricing Marketing 103

Advertisement

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

InsightSquared

NOVEMBER 15, 2017

Guest blog by Zahra Bukhari, sales operations manager at Localytics. An effective sales methodology is arguably the backbone of a successful sales team. In today’s sellers’ environment, there are many standard sales methodologies your team can use: The Challenger Sale, MEDDIC , BANT , Solution Selling, Value Selling — the list could go on.

Sales 88

Sales Forecasting Data Leadership 88

Totango

NOVEMBER 22, 2017

Get ready for two days of great content, speakers, networking and fun! So much is happening in the world of Customer Success. We’re going to bring the best and the brightest from the field to share latest trends in strategy and innovation so you and your organization can make the BIGGEST IMPACT possible in customer adoption, retention and overall customer engagement.

Customer Success 84

Customer Success Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AI 84

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

After a Clio Board Meeting last week I received the following email from Jack Newton, the company's amazing co-founder & CEO. Hi everyone, I'd like to experiment with requesting some 1:1 feedback on our board meetings. Please take 5 minutes and provide feedback through this Typeform: [link] Cheers, Jack I thought this was a really great idea and worth sharing here.

Investment 132

Investment 132

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 29, 2017

“Evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups.” That’s a shocking statement. Adrian Furnham, a professor of organizational and applied psychology at University College London, said it. It turns out it’s completely true. Participants in interactive brainstorming groups rated their performance quite favorably…[and] felt that interactive group brainstorming was more productive than individual brainstorming…Howev

Management 184

Management Data Business 184

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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

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

The model for early-stage success in SaaS is shifting. Let's take a look at the shift happening in fundraising, and some of the businesses succeeding from bootstrapped-origins, as well as some different strategies up to and beyond that critical first $1M ARR. What’s enabling bootstrapped SaaS? The concept of bootstrapping a business is nothing new. The term originates from the concept of “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps”.

Venture Capital 77

Venture Capital Startup SaaS Travel 77

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

If you want to learn how to manage a sales team, you’ve come to the right place. You’re about to get actionable insights from top experts who have all been there (and done it) before. Managing a sales team is definitely a challenge, but until you have managed or been on a sales team building revenues at +20% MoM AT SCALE, you may be in for a swift and rude awakening.

Scale 90

Scale Sales Hiring Management Sales 90

InsightSquared

NOVEMBER 30, 2017

Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. In sales operations, we do a lot. Putting out reactive fires, supporting reps, managing territories, reporting, building new functionality and processes in the CRM, and much more. However, trouble may come in actually measuring our success in these things. A sales team typically has a quota so their success is easily measurable, but how do you measure your success?

Sales 79

Sales Systems Review Technical Review Software Review 79

Totango

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Customer Health continues to be a hot topic among Customer Success professionals for obvious reasons. Getting your customer health model right is critical to the foundation of a great customer success operation. In part 2 of our customer health webinar series, we tackled “How to Measure the Effectiveness of a Customer Health Model” and discussed a more advanced approach to customer health.

Churn 76

Churn Forecasting Customer Success Technology 76

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

Pricing

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 9, 2017

Image Source: Asia Times. A relative newcomer to the holiday scene, Singles' Day sales are rocketing. How does it compare to the surge of sales that retailers often see on Cyber Monday?

Sales 64

Sales Marketing 64

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 8, 2017

Founders often describe their unit economics in terms of their LTV/CAC ratio - the ratio of the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer to the Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC). The LTV/CAC metric can be a powerful metric to unpack the health of the go-to-market team of a company, as Netsuite has shown. But this figure is often meaningless for early stage startups.

Startup 174

Startup Forecasting Benchmarks Acquisition 174

CloseSaaS

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

Over the past two months, we've interviewed 50+ top sales leaders to get their best sales advice, tips, and strategies that have transformed the way we sell today.

Sales 64

Sales Interviewing Strategy 64

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 21, 2017

This is part of the Winning By Design Blueprint Series in which we analyze and provide practical advice for SaaS sales organizations. In this blueprint, we’ll breakdown how to structure your SaaS metrics, and measure the right data for your business. Many organizations are excited about the amount of data that is flowing into their platform. However, with the explosion of data, they soon are lost on how to interpret it.

Metrics 90

Metrics Underperforming Technical Team SaaS Education 90

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

InsightSquared

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Guest post by Adam Honig is the co-founder and CEO of Spiro Technologies. If you work in sales operations, it may seem like the sales reps at your company don’t always see the value you are adding to their daily lives. It sometimes feels like the only thing you have in common is both of your job titles beginning with the word “sales”. Instead of ignoring the divide, see it from the sales side and try to articulate, in their language, your value add.

Sales 78

Sales Compensation Technology Education 78

Totango

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Customer Health continues to be a hot topic among Customer Success professionals for obvious reasons. Getting your customer health model right is critical to the foundation of a great customer success operation. In part 2 of our customer health webinar series, we tackled “How to Measure the Effectiveness of a Customer Health Model” and discussed a more advanced approach to customer health.

Churn 72

Churn Forecasting Customer Success Technology 72

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

Does your SaaS platform set you up for success? Unfortunately, many platforms have flaws that limit the potential for maximum profitability. Let’s look at three critical capabilities your platform must have to support rapid growth that leads to long-term success.

SaaS 61

SaaS 61

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

How quickly do the fastest growing software companies build their teams? The answer is incredibly quickly. In fact, this data bolsters the notion that management team’s top priority is recruiting, especially after the business has reached product market fit and capitalized itself well. Above, I’ve charted the headcount growth rate for 10 of the fastest growing software companies in recent history.

Headcount 150

Headcount Scaling Software Business 150

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

Pierre Lechelle

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

Do you have a software business? The first thing that people see about you is your website. Are you investing enough resources on making sure they have the best possible experience? I’m guessing that more than 98% of people coming to your website leave without giving you their email address. You know why? It’s because […]. Cet article Are you ready to optimize your SaaS website for conversion and improve your CAC?

SaaS 65

SaaS Investment Software Growth Hacking 65

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 22, 2017

Winners make things happen. Losers make excuses. Regardless of the field, this time-tested principle consistently rings true. In sales, sellers who cite convoluted reasons to explain poor performance, rather than proactively doing something about it often remain — unsurprisingly — at the bottom of the success ladder. There certainly are a lot of things in sales that make life a tad more difficult.

Underperforming Technical Team 86

Underperforming Technical Team Sales CTO Coach New CTO 86

InsightSquared

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

Earlier this year we teamed up with LinkedIn to highlight the basic characteristics of professionals in three critical operations roles — sales, marketing and business operations. Unlike other specialized professions that require advanced degrees or technology certifications, there is no “typical” career requirements, or career path, in operations.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring Technical Review Sales Banking 59