Tom Tunguz
JUNE 6, 2018
You’ve just raised a round of financing. Your next step is to build your management team. There are several criteria for finding the right executive. Competency in the field, cultural fit, communication skills, management experience. All of those should be obvious. There is one that is often overlooked. Network. Recruiting is one of the most important responsibilities for a head of a department.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 22, 2018
It’s easy to believe that machine learning is hard. An arcane craft known only to a select few academics. After all, you’re teaching machines that work in ones and zeros to reach their own conclusions about the world. You’re teaching them how to think! Indeed, the majority of literature on machine learning is riddled with complex notation, formulae and superfluous language.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 1, 2018
If you’ve ever sat through a marketing agency’s pitch or seen an episode of Mad Men, you’d think that marketing is all about talking – pushing out clever messages so that people will buy whatever it is that you’re selling. Not exactly. You’re right that there’s plenty of delivering messages through email, blog posts, paid adwords, Twitter, TV, radio, or print ads or whatever media reaches the buyer.
FastSpring
JUNE 26, 2018
There’s no denying the power of ecommerce—it has radically changed the way people buy and consumer forever. With over five billion people around the world expected to be online by 2020, it is time for businesses to take their ecommerce global.
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When test coverage falls behind release velocity, quality suffers, and your team feels the consequences. This guide outlines when it makes sense to outsource quality assurance (QA), the risks to watch for, and how to scale testing without increasing headcount or slowing down engineering. You will learn how leading teams are leveraging external QA partners to expand coverage, enhance defect detection, and remain aligned with CI/CD timelines.
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
JUNE 26, 2018
Today, everyone working in and around sales and marketing knows that bots are hot, in vogue and quite simply, of the moment. That’s no secret. After years of dreaming about what might just be possible, over the past 12-18 months numerous software as a service (SaaS) companies from around the globe have taken their respective bot offerings to market.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 9, 2018
Last week, Microsoft acquired Github for $7.5B. It’s a massive acquisition at a massive price relative to other software acquisitions. Why is Microsoft willing to pay so much? Developer identity. Identity has been critical to Microsoft success. Active Directory (AD) forms nexus of the Microsoft enterprise ecosystem. AD contains all the users, their roles, and their rights.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 15, 2018
There are few issues more important than customer retention when running software-as-a-service businesses. It’s no good acquiring customers for $10, if they only stick around for a month or two. Retention can be measured qualitatively by talking and checking in with your customers regularly so you’ll know what their main questions and issues are, and when they occur.
Sales Hacker
JUNE 20, 2018
Why have a career in sales ? Tune in to episode 12 of the Sales Hacker podcast with Jaimie Buss , VP of Sales, North America for Zendesk as she talks about startups careers and transitions! What You’ll Learn. Building your career in startups and managing different career transitions. Working at Andreessen Horowitz and how large VCs support their portfolios.
Totango
JUNE 28, 2018
Totango’s mission is to enable organizations to proactively and intelligently operate around their customers. With industry-leading enterprises confidently running on Totango’s Customer Success Platform, we are dedicated to innovating and bringing to market products that deliver Customer Success results. Extending Product and Engineering Teams. We are constantly hiring the best and brightest Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, and Data Scientists who are passionate about our Enterprise-2-Cus
Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate
Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.
The SaaS CFO
JUNE 14, 2018
How to Correctly Calculate your SaaS Gross Margin There are a couple financial metrics that I calculate and review each month and this includes my SaaS gross margin. Of course, it’s not just your overall gross margin, but it’s also your recurring revenue margin and services margin. You may also have hardware margins, but that’s […]. The post How to Correctly Calculate your SaaS Gross Margin appeared first on The SaaS CFO.
A Smart Bear
JUNE 5, 2018
Pricing is often more about positioning and perceived value than it is about cost-analysis and unconvincing ROI calculators. As a result, repositioning can allow you to charge many times more than you think. Here’s how. You’ve created a marketing tool called DoubleDown that doubles the cost-efficiency of AdWords campaigns. You heard that right folks — as a marketer, you can generate the same impact, the same number of conversions, the same quality of sales leads, but with half
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 17, 2018
Imagine you come across three builders working on the same project. You ask each the same question: what are you working on? The first says, “I lay one brick after the other.” The second says, “I’m building a wall.” The third, “I’m erecting a cathedral.” What is the moral of this aphorism? I see two. The first is to keep the greater vision of our work in mind.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 18, 2018
A few years ago, we had a seemingly simple problem to solve: our customers needed an easy way to set realistic expectations around their response times to conversations in our Messenger. Did this prove that we should have trusted our intuition all along? When we first considered the problem that businesses were facing, we instantly thought of implementing something like an “office hours” setting, so businesses could easily alert people to when they were likely to respond.
Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage
There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.
Sales Hacker
JUNE 28, 2018
Part 4 of this sales coaching series focuses on the right coaching goals for sales reps. Article overview: 1) Sales coaching is not a beat-down. 2) Sales Coaching: What salespeople say versus managers/leaders. 3) Don’t mistake a conversation for sales coaching commitment. 4) How to make your 1:1s count. 5) Stay in the inspiration business: Read the full coaching series.
FastSpring
JUNE 21, 2018
The ecommerce industry is about to experience a major shift in the way they do business in the United States.
Chargebee
JUNE 7, 2018
Lessons from Michelin, Google, and certain other SaaS companies that got their pricing right.
Chart Mogul
JUNE 8, 2018
Our own Nick Franklin spoke to Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital at the fourth edition of our inaugural event series, held in Berlin at Point Nine's headquarters. Berlin was our biggest Mogul I/O event so far — thanks to everyone who came out to hear the talks, enjoy the discussion and see an excellent fireside chat between Nick Franklin and Christoph Janz.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 23, 2018
In the last six years, the median time between seed and Series A has more than tripled from about 200 days to about 750 days. Why? The seed market is in the midst of some secular changes. Seed rounds have declined 63% from their peak. Total dollars invested have fallen by 37%. But the median round size is up 3x in the same time period. In other words, investors are concentrating capital in fewer startups.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 4, 2018
The promise of live chat for sales teams is being able to connect faster with high-quality leads. But for someone in Sales Operations, the first thing we think is: how well does live chat convert? As Intercom’s VP of Sales Operations, my job is to obsess over how we can optimize our supply chain to deliver against our pipeline and revenue targets; in other words, figuring out how to make our sales organization run better and faster.
Sales Hacker
JUNE 5, 2018
Customers want to be recognized as people, not account numbers or dollar signs. If you want to create sales emails that get responses, it’s this one fact that you need to focus on. No matter your industry, niche, product, or service, the ideal is to communicate with prospects and customers as individuals. How do you do that? With personalization. They want it, need it, and expect it.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 20, 2018
If you’re not restricting your potential employee pool to one location, you’re able to hire the best of the best no matter where they live.
Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments
Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.
Chargebee
JUNE 14, 2018
User onboarding is crafting the first mile of a user’s journey with your product. Can you apply everything that works within it to your nth?
Chart Mogul
JUNE 29, 2018
In SaaS, everyone wants to rule over a kingdom. But instead of fighting to topple category leaders, startups today prefer to build their own kingdom from scratch. Let's look at how and why that's happening. It’s a ruler-takes-all game. In the world of SaaS, there’s a never-ending game of thrones. Ruling over an entire category is the ultimate goal, but getting there is a grueling journey that requires killing your competitors and uncompromising focus.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 2, 2018
There are five forces driving the startup ecosystem today. They are working together to reinforce a high valuation environment. These forces are: An infusion of capital into Startupland. There are many reasons for this. The money supply in the US has doubled in the last 10 years. A low interest rate environment means a low cost of capital, which means yield is hard to find for cash.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 29, 2018
When faced with a problem or new process at work, most people usually don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, they look for patterns and frameworks that are widespread and valuable. A common challenge for many teams is how to run retrospectives. There are plenty of solutions, and one of them is Start, Stop, Continue – a framework to structure a retrospective for a team, career or project.
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For SaaS businesses, improving retention is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive revenue and profits. With a clear link between failed payments and customer churn, having a robust failed payment recovery solution isn’t optional—it’s essential. Achieving your retention goals starts with the right solution.
Sales Hacker
JUNE 13, 2018
It might be scary to think that closing calls are out of your control, but it is and we have the data to prove it. Below are our top phone sales closing tips from 1M sales calls. . “Always be closing.” The phrase is so popular in sales that it’s practically the industry’s unofficial motto. But what if everything you know about closing is all wrong? What if by the time your deal is “late stage,” its fate has already been sealed?
ITPro
JUNE 5, 2018
Tutorials. Learn why cloud-managed networking is growing in popularity with businesses.
Sixteen Ventures
JUNE 20, 2018
Let’s talk about Customer Engagement, specifically one part of the Communication Model, which is my BEAST Message Framework for creating messages that actually engage customers. It’s really interesting that we communicate all day long – with our friends, with our peers, with our customers – but when was the last time you actually thought about what goes into communication?
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