November, 2018

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2018 SAAS Private Survey Results- Part 1

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

For the seventh year in a row, we’re proud to work with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) to share results from a survey of ~385 private SaaS companies. Thank you to the readers of forEntrepreneurs who participated in taking the survey! Thank you also to David Spitz (@dspitz) and the team at KBCM Technology Group for their.

SaaS 271
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Live chat for business: everything you wanted to know about live chat but were afraid to ask

Intercom, Inc.

A great customer experience today is about meeting people where they already are. And today, there’s one channel where more potential customers are than any place else: messaging and live chat. Think about the way that you talk to people every day. If you’re anything like me, you use iMessage to talk to your family, WhatsApp for your close friends, and you probably spend your entire day on Slack talking to your teammates at work.

Scale 239
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Do You Lose Sales Opportunities Because of Sales Execution or Product Insufficiency?

Tom Tunguz

You have a good pipeline of prospective customers. You pitch them but things aren’t working out. You can see it in your low close rates. They are below 15-20% conversion from sales accepted lead to closed customer. You need to answer an important question: are you losing these opportunities because of sales execution or product insufficiency? Those are the two possibilities.

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7 Of The Most Common Mistakes Made Building Your First Sales Team

SaaStr

Building your first sales team will be an endless series of mistakes. It’s OK. Plan for me. But there are a few avoidable , key mistakes I see start-ups making > 50% of the time. Just make a few less of these mistakes, and you’ll scale faster, and just as importantly, with less turnover and more stress: Hiring Early Reps (#1 – #3) That You Personally Wouldn’t Buy From.

Scale 160
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Beyond the Basics of A/B Tests: Highly Innovative Experimentation Tactics You Need to Know

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.

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Are your partnerships useless?

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

Partnerships can be a good thing for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. They can deliver more value to customers, without requiring lots more work from your internal development team. For marketers, a partner could provide credibility, broaden exposure, find leads, and even win deals. That’s if they’re done well. Too often though, partnerships don’t deliver as promised.

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2018 Private SAAS Company Survey- Part 2

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

We recently released Part 1 results of our private SaaS company survey in partnership with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities). This is the sixth annual survey we’ve produced together, which provides data to help SaaS companies benchmark their performance against their competition. In Part 1, we covered growth rates, go-to-market trends, and CAC Rations and CAC Payback.

SaaS 240
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Data-driven sales: 18 sales KPIs and metrics to grow your revenue faster

Intercom, Inc.

There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization – the right people, processes and strategy, to start. But today, the underlying backbone of all of it is the right data. That’s not to say there’s no art to practicing sales. Much of what defines our most outstanding sales reps is their ability to deeply understand our prospects’ and customers’ business needs and speak directly to them.

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The Four Stages of Sales Compensation Structures in Early Stage Startups

Tom Tunguz

Your startup is just getting off the ground. You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do you know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? I’ve seen four stages in early stage software companies.

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How to Close More Revenue Today — With The Leads You Already Have. Use The “3 L’s”.

SaaStr

If you’re past $4m-$5m or so in revenue, this post isn’t for you. You’ll have figured this out, at least mostly. But if you are on either side of $1m in ARR, there are 3 things you can almost always do from a pure process standpoint to squeeze materially more revenue out per lead. Do ’em now! ??. First, implement Lead Scoring.

Scale 143
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How Investors & Strategic Buyers Evaluate Integrated Payment Strategies

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.

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Converting with Extra Copy: 5 Long-Form Landing Page Examples

Unbounce

We all know how effective a short, concise landing page can be. It’s quick to read and, depending on the offer up for grabs, can convince visitors to purchase or opt-in fast. But there are benefits to building long-form pages too. For starters, longer pages can provide in-depth info visitors need to make informed decisions, helping you attract more qualified leads from the start.

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How to Build a 100-Day Plan to Grow Revenue

InsightSquared

We recommend that every quarter you pick one thing to improve about your sales process. If you improve the conversion rate during each key moment in your sales process by just a small percentage, you can end up doubling your revenue or more. But how do you know what key moments or metrics to focus on? In the past, we’ve discussed three key measurements: Volume based metrics (the change in amount at any given stage i.e. # of leads).

Revenue 94
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WebSummit Presentations

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

I presented on two topics at WebSummit 2018 in Lisbon on November 6th. The slides and videos of those two presentations can be found below. The videos are provided courtesy of WebSummit: 9 Secrets for Startup Success, A roadmap for B2B Founders Lean Startup taught the world how to find product/market fit, but in the.

Startup 225
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Tips for creating a great support experience during the holidays

Intercom, Inc.

The holidays are quickly approaching, and for ecommerce businesses, that often results in significantly higher support volume for your team. . To help you stay on top of your support this season – without increasing overhead – we’ve curated a few tips for automating your support load. These tips apply broadly to many different automation products, but if you’re an Intercom customer, they’re actionable today and require no engineering work.

B2C 183
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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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SAP Buys Qualtrics; 2018 Catapulted to $65B in $1B+ M&A Volume

Tom Tunguz

Another week, another blockbuster software acquisition! This time SAP has agreed to purchase Qualtrics for $8B. Qualtrics is a Utah based provider of experience management software. Qualtrics writes and sells software to ask questions of employees and customers to help businesses improve customer experience, employee satisfaction products, and brand.

Scale 114
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The FastSpring Team Meets Up for 2nd Annual Fall Summit

FastSpring

At FastSpring, we take our company mission, vision, and values seriously. They are a big part of what makes FastSpring the leading all-in-one ecommerce platform for digital businesses around the world, and a great place to work. One of the ways we showcase our mission, vision, and values is our annual Fall Summit event. Employees from all over—Nebraska, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, and Amsterdam—came together at the Santa Barbara headquarters this month for three days of learning,

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Getting Software as a Service (SaaS) Accounting and Financial Operations Right from the Start

SaaSOptics

By 2020, more than 80 percent of software providers will change their business models from “traditional” perpetual license and maintenance to subscription-based models. A perpetual model requires customers to pay a fee upfront to purchase a license for the system or application, whereas a SaaS model requires a monthly subscription fee. While some providers, such as Dropbox, were created “as a service,” thousands of other software vendors that started out with traditional licensing models are rea

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Your Sales Year is Coming to an End. Are you ready?

InsightSquared

It’s two weeks until December. Holiday music is already playing in every store you set foot into, your weekends are starting to fill with egg-nog and apple pie induced festivities and every morning you find yourself layering up with an extra hat or scarf before you step outside. Tis’ the season! December around the corner also means your sales year is coming to an end.

Sales 78
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Driving Growth, Customer Satisfaction, and Retention through Usage-Based Pricing

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

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2018 Private SAAS Company Survey- Part 2

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

We recently released Part 1 results of our private SaaS company survey in partnership with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities). This is the sixth annual survey we’ve produced together, which provides data to help SaaS companies benchmark their … The post 2018 Private SAAS Company Survey- Part 2 appeared first on For Entrepreneurs.

SaaS 130
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Tune up your SaaS sales pitch with a focus on clarity

Intercom, Inc.

For salespeople, your sales pitch is crucial – above all else, it must be crystal clear what you’re trying to sell and what the value is to your prospective customer. This clarity from the start is critical, because that early impression shapes everything that follows – according to Forrester , the first viable vendor to reach a decision maker and set the buying vision has a 74% average close ratio.

Sales 180
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How to Use the Right Sales Data to Shorten Your Selling Cycle

Sales Hacker

Like a long and arduous hike that seems to go on and on, a prolonged sales cycle can leave your team feeling drained, exhausted, wondering if they’ll ever reach the summit … and if they do, whether they’ll have the energy to climb the next mountain! We’ve all had at least one instance where we’ve felt overstressed, overworked, and under quota due to a long, drawn-out sales cycle.

Data 81
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FastSpring Visits Innovative Cleantech Incubator

FastSpring

FastSpring finds inspiration in a cutting-edge incubator for cleantech startups — also known as the LACI. One of the things that truly sets FastSpring apart as a business is our values. We are constantly pursuing new ideas that not only help businesses selling software, SaaS, or digital goods but also shape the evolving tech landscape at large. Our exploration of innovative tech often pushes us beyond the beautiful coastline of Santa Barbara.

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Addressing Top Enterprise Challenges in Generative AI with DataRobot

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.

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19 Killer Tips for Great Sales Lead Generation

Teamgate

Having problems with lead generation tactics? “ Wow! I love your new website. Really slick. What kind of visitor numbers are you attracting? ”. “ That’s the strange thing, we’re not getting as many hits as we’d hoped for. Everyone keeps telling us how cool the site is, but that’s about it. Our CRM software is telling us that we’re not generating the numbers of leads to match our sales forecasts ”.

Sales 77
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The Best Analytics Tool for SaaS Content Marketing? I finally found it.

Upscope

Google analytics is free but it's not giving me the answers I want quickly and cleanly. By chance, I came across Oribi. They got it right guys. THEY GOT IT RIGHT. Each day, I need to know what blog posts are working well, what specific part of the post is working well, what brings in real leads. Oribi tells me this because they finally figured out the whole 'events' thing.

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2018 SAAS Private Survey Results- Part 1

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

For the seventh year in a row, we’re proud to work with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) to share results from a survey of ~385 private SaaS companies. Thank you to the readers of forEntrepreneurs who participated in taking the … The post 2018 SAAS Private Survey Results- Part 1 appeared first on For Entrepreneurs.

SaaS 130
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9 essential sales steps you need to grow your SaaS startup

Intercom, Inc.

In the early stages of most SaaS startups’ lives, the CEO or founder often acts as the initial head of sales. This makes sense given the likely resource constraints and the value to be gained from getting in front of customers from day one. As Jason Lemkin puts it , “The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers.

Startup 178
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From Whims to Wins: How a Customer-Centric Portfolio Transforms Product Strategy

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.

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6 Reasons to Walk Away from a Deal

Sales Hacker

Why successful sales people walk away. When you’re young and new to sales, there’s a strong compulsion to chase after every opportunity that comes your way. It’s not surprising, just getting prospects to engage at all has become so hard! So, when you get someone to actually talk and you spot a possible opportunity, you’re onto it all guns blazing! There’s a sort of die hard, “I’m a sales guy/gal, I’m relentless, I never give up” type mentality that sets in.

Banking 76
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Partners in Growth: Danfoss & FastSpring

FastSpring

Cisco Systems estimated that IoT was “born” between 2008 and 2009, but it’s just in the last couple years we’ve seen an explosion of IoT solutions for both commercial and domestic use. The Internet of Things is a network of interconnected physical devices that collect and share data with each other. You’re probably already familiar with IoT associated features like automatic climate control for Smart Homes or the daily holistic health reports generated by aggregating data from your w

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When Black Friday Comes

Teamgate

The one good thing about Cyber Monday is that you don’t have to bash people square in the face to get what you want; or what you think you want. That, unfortunately, is sometimes untrue of its bigger, meaner, older brother, Black Friday. But firstly, what is Black Friday, and what is Cyber Monday; where did they begin, how did they evolve, and how did they come to be what they are today?