The Angel VC
MARCH 31, 2015
Following his well-received guest post about cohort analysis , here comes another guest post from my colleague Nicolas. Enjoy! Status Quo From an investor’s perspective, SaaS companies have a lot to love: High gross margins, predictable (recurring) revenues and capital efficient operations. On the flip side, most of them follow a common thread when it comes to growth.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 2, 2015
A few weeks ago, I joined Mike Volpe, CMO of Hubspot, on the Growth Show where we had a great time talking about a few SaaS topics. A few listeners to the podcast picked a line from that podcast that I think is a really important point for content marketing. I said, “Content is one of the few forms of marketing that has a compounding return.” Like a bank account that starts out small and earns incremental gains, but over time becomes quite large, content marketing efforts require con
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MARCH 7, 2015
It wasn’t that long ago that just describing your application as a "software-as-a-service (SaaS)," or saying that it ran “in the cloud” was enough to get attention. Companies like salesforce.com and a few other pioneers could differentiate themselves largely by saying they weren’t traditional on-premises software. 'Why buy applications built on old technology when you can buy solutions built on new technology?
ReSci
MARCH 31, 2015
Whether or not you're a fan of sugary pop princess Taylor Swift's music, one thing can't be denied: the woman is a pro at retaining her customers. Did I say customers? I meant fans. Or Swifties, as they prefer to be called. Swift has always been canny about building her brand, and…. The post Retention Marketing Tips from Taylor Swift appeared first on ReSci.
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CloseSaaS
MARCH 25, 2015
“Brilliant!” That’s what I thought when I heard Kevin sell this deal. He was giving a product demo to a prospect, but in a way I’ve never heard of before, and it ultimately helped to make the sale. If you're looking for ways to demo your product more effectively, keep reading.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 17, 2015
Leads are the lifeblood of every SaaS company. As a SaaS startup grows, the limiting factor of the business quickly becomes demand generation. Can the marketing team generate enough leads for the inside sales team to attain their monthly quota? The Marketing team’s mandate is to generate these leads in a cost-effective way and develop a portfolio of lead-generation mechanisms.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 25, 2015
Whether implicitly or explicitly, it’s critical for a startup to map out accounts to understand the purchasing dynamics of a buyer. When sales teams start selling, their goal should be to create the sales playbook. The playbook all begins with understanding the key dynamics among the five players in the sales process. These are the five people: The Proponent of the Sale champions the sales.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 4, 2015
After writing about the Seed Market in 2015 , I wondered whether I could find some data to support Sam Altman’s observation that acquihires have fallen in frequency over the past year by 66-75%. The chart above shows an estimate of the acquihires in US technology companies over the past four years. There is no perfect data set on acquihires because many of these transactions are never announced.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 9, 2015
There’s a magical property to the classic sales funnel SaaS startups use to evaluate the effectiveness of their go-to-market organizations: an increase in effectiveness at any stage of a sales funnel cascades through to the end funnel. But improvements to the early parts of the funnel are more important than those later in the funnel, because they meaningfully improve key SaaS metrics like cost-of-customer acquisition and pay-back period.
Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 31, 2015
Every morning, it seems like a startup raises a massive growth round. In fact, the data proves the point. In 2014, there were 251 working days and 211 $40M+ growth rounds - just about one per day. In contrast to the frenetic private market, there were 15 US IT venture-backed IPOs with offerings greater than $40M last year, slightly more one IPO per month in 2014.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 29, 2015
Like most things in a startup, a sales commission plan should evolve as the company scales. For example, as Mark Roberge, CRO of Hubspot, wrote in The Sales Acceleration Formula , Hubspot adopted three different sales compensation plans throughout its early evolution which embody the three key ingredients of a sales compensation plan. Hubspot’s first sales plan paid $2 of commission for every $1 of MRR an account executive booked.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 21, 2015
In 2.5 years, Adobe has transformed its business from a software license business into a SaaS business. It’s been a remarkable transition, and one not talked about very much in the SaaS world. Transitions from licensed software to SaaS are rare. The travel and expense management behemoth, Concur, recently acquired by SAP for $8.3B , is another great example that made the transition first from CD-ROM packaged software, then to enterprise license software and then to SaaS.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 17, 2015
Over the last 15 months, the typical high growth public SaaS company’s multiple has halved. The chart above plots the average enterprise value to forward revenue multiple for established SaaS companies and high growth SaaS companies. High growth companies peaked in February last year at about 22x forward revenues and have fallen to 11x on March 1, 2015.
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 15, 2015
Every SaaS company should be focused on mitigating churn because greater retention enables a business to grow far more rapidly , to reduce the cost of customer acquisition , and to slash the amount of capital required for the business to grow. But there’s one additional reason to focus on churn: predictability. The more dollar churn a business creates, the less predictable its performance - and vice versa.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 12, 2015
In a recent survey, 40% of VCs pointed to SaaS as the startup sector most likely to be impacted by a market correction. There’s no question that the early stage SaaS founders are benefiting from substantial multiple expansion and pre-money valuation increases. But I was curious about how widespread aggressive investments are in software companies.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 10, 2015
When you walk into Looker’s offices , the first thing you’ll see are the surfboards standing in a corner, still sandy from a morning’s outing. Looking around, you’ll notice the sunny outdoor patio where a chef once made enough paella in one enormous paellera for Looker’s 100 employees, and you might sit at the long tables where they shared the feast.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 5, 2015
Over the past four years, the amount of seed investment has increased by more than 200%. And the typical seed investment size has risen by 25% in just the last 12 months. In 2014, for the first time in four years, median Series A round size have increased. When we analyzed the data last year, this wasn’t the case. But in 2014, the median Series A hit $6.8M, increasing 14% over the trailing three year average.
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 1, 2015
The seed stage investment market feels like it’s changing quickly. Last year and the year before, the institutional seed investor came to the fore. These firms raised between $5 and $75M to invest in seed stage companies. In addition, VCs have been participating in the seed stage market as well, making 2013 a banner year for seed investment. Startups raised 132% more in seed rounds than in 2012.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 24, 2015
This is a guest post by Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures. Check out his great blog on SaaS marketing, customer acquisition & churn reduction. When it comes to sales hustle, Steli is the man. He’s taught us about thepower of the follow-upandturning failed demos into sales.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 23, 2015
Self-service. Oh, show me a SaaS founder who doesn’t love self-service customers. They find your product through word of mouth, inbound marketing or partnerships. They eagerly sign up for your trial. Automatically convert into paying customers.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 17, 2015
Here's a guest post from Patrick McKenzie [[link] He published this epic piece on how to move upmarket from a low-touch sales SaaS into a more rigorous sales process back in December to his subscribers.
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CloseSaaS
MARCH 12, 2015
One of the most useful frameworks for assessing a potential sales hire is something I learned a long time ago from reading a book by Jack Welch, former CEO and chairman of GE.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 9, 2015
Hiring people for your startup is hard. There’s no way around that. Whether you’re a little unknown startup nobody ever heard of, or a hotshot rocketship making headlines in the techpress, figuring out which candidates to hire is really difficult.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 7, 2015
Steli’s recent post about determining the ROI of your marketing efforts struck a chord with me. I got the same advice from Noah Kagan when he spoke to the companies going through Techstars Austin last summer.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 13, 2015
If you run an early-stage startup, your first sales hires—and how you train and introduce them to your company—will set the tone for the next stage of your startup’s growth.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 20, 2015
Our very own ace of sales, Kevin, recently did a webinar for early-stage startup founders. If you want to know how to get your first customer, then this is for you.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 6, 2015
One of our main email drip campaigns is our free Startup Sales Success Course. It's an educational email course for anyone who sells a startup or SaaS product.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 30, 2015
Everybody who wants to be great at sales needs to master one skill: the art of listening.The better you become at listening, the more you sell.
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