October, 2018

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SaaStock Dublin 2018: Get inside your Buyer’s Head – Improve Conversion Rates

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

At this year’s SaaStock, I presented on one of my favorite topics: how to improve your marketing and sales funnel conversion rates using a deep understanding of what is going on in your buyer’s mind as the navigate through their purchasing process, and experience your marketing and selling.

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Customer retention: 5 best practices & 6 strategies for low churn

Intercom, Inc.

Customer retention is the silent killer of SaaS businesses today. People get curious, kick the tires, shrug their shoulders and leave without saying goodbye. Even if you are acquiring customers for $10, if they only stick around for a month or two, you won’t build a lasting business. What is customer retention? Customer retention is the rate at which your business can keep its paying customers over a given period of time.

Churn 199
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Red Hat's Acquisition - A Triumph of Open Source

Tom Tunguz

Over the weekend, IBM announced the largest software acquisition of Red Hat, an open-source software company, for $35B. It is the largest software acquisition in history, and the third largest technology acquisition (Dell/EMC at $67B and JDS/SDL for $41B were both larger hardware mergers). IBM will spend 31% of their current market cap for Red Hat and pay a 70% premium to Red Hat’s closing price on Friday.

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SaaS Marketing for Start-ups: Don’t just start doing stuff!

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

I get it. You’ve finally built a working product and now you’re ready to get it out into the market. You want to crank out a press release, put up a website, offer a free trial, execute an email campaign, buy adwords, or do whatever else you can think of or afford. Don’t do it. Or at least don’t do it yet. If you rush headlong into programs and deliverables, you’ll end up spending a lot of time and maybe a lot of money… but not necessarily winning a lot of paying customers.

Marketing 133
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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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Five Key Skills for Sales Ops Career Success

InsightSquared

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a lawyer, the path is pretty clear: Get a Bachelor’s degree. Take the LSAT. Earn your JD. Pass the bar. The process may not be easy, but at least it’s laid out. You know exactly what steps to take, including recommended classes and exam prep courses, in order to put yourself on a path to success. When I think about sales operations, there is no defined route to take.

Sales 110

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Get inside your Buyer’s Head – Improve Conversion Rates

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

At this year’s SaaStock, I presented on one of my favorite topics: how to improve your marketing and sales funnel conversion rates using a deep understanding of what is going on in your buyer’s mind as the navigate through their … The post Get inside your Buyer’s Head – Improve Conversion Rates appeared first on For Entrepreneurs.

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How to retain more users with value-based onboarding

Intercom, Inc.

Brand new users aren’t committed to your product when they first sign up. They’re just trying it out. A great first use experience has to prove to these new and uncertain customers that your product will actually make their lives better. It’s not surprising that onboarding flows focused on demonstrating all the features of a product become leaky buckets as new customers quickly lose interest.

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What Does AirBnB's 'Shares for Hosts' Idea Imply for Blockchain?

Tom Tunguz

Last week, AirBnB proposed granting their most valuable hosts shares in the company , much like employees. This requires a change in securities law. It’s a novel idea that has a history, promise and some risks. In 1998, an online travel agency, TravelZoo, tried this. They granted free shares to 700,000 people who signed up to use the service. Administration of these shares proved a headache for the company.

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6 Examples of the Best B2B Landing Pages (and the Secrets to Steal From Them)

Unbounce

B2B products and services can be difficult to fully capture on a landing page—we know from experience. Whether it’s defining your conversion goal, ordering your page sections, or writing copy that resonates, it’s not always a walk in the park. Not to mention B2B can involve so many more decision makers you may need to appeal to. Showcasing the value of something like software at scale can be trickier than explaining how your cutting-edge hoverboard might benefit just one person.

B2B 108
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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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Guest post: How to Use Intercom to Increase Engagement

Upscope

This is a guest post by UpLead who use Intercom extensively. UpLead is a B2B contact database for gathering sales leads. If you don’t engage your users, they won’t stay Imagine you're out with friends and you stop by a hip new restaurant. You step inside and immediately notice the artwork, decorations and colourful furniture. There’s nothing not to like about this place, but it’s silent.

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How Smart Is Your Sales Playbook?

Sales Hacker

I read a quote the other day that immediately resonated with me: “Memorizing a playbook is like memorizing a script. When they change the script at the last minute, it’s like changing a play in the game.”. Never has this been more true than in the art of selling. No two deals are the same, though they likely share common DNA. In fact, with so many variables involved in a deal—from unique buyer objectives, to your timing in a deal relative to your competitors— building playbooks for your sales te

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Zero to 100 – Photos from the SFO Sept 2018 event

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

Thanks to all of you who helped make the Zero to 100 event in San Francisco such a great success. Please find below a selection of photos from the event:… The post Zero to 100 – Photos from the SFO Sept 2018 event appeared first on For Entrepreneurs.

Startup 130
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Key strategies to successfully scale your customer support

Intercom, Inc.

How do you scale a support organization without breaking the budget or killing the quality of the customer experience? It’s an age old question for anyone leading a customer support organization, the sort of challenge that requires continuous innovation as a company and its customer base expands. With more than 30,000 customers and 100 people on the Customer Support team, we’ve come a long way from the team of just nine when we first shared a blog post on using Intercom to support our customers.

Scale 178
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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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Normalization of Valuations in the Public and Private Software Markets

Tom Tunguz

I’ve written quite a bit about the public market software multiples. They’ve increased to near historic levels with forward revenue multiples approaching 9x. As the public markets have appreciated, something has happened that I didn’t expect. Some public companies are now fetching the mulitples of the most attractive private companies.

Software 120
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Why Excel is a Startup’s Worst Enemy

CloudKettle

This blog post was born out of an off-hand tweet written by our President and Founder. The post Why Excel is a Startup’s Worst Enemy appeared first on CloudKettle.

B2B 92
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Simple Sales Efficiency Metrics for SaaS Leaders

The SaaS CFO

I have spent years forecasting software and SaaS company financials. One area of the P&L that receives extra scrutiny from leadership and investors is the sales and marketing area. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of SaaS metrics, but in this post, I’ll focus on a couple easy and popular (meaning important) SaaS […]. The post Simple Sales Efficiency Metrics for SaaS Leaders appeared first on The SaaS CFO.

Metrics 79
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How to Use Netflix Secrets to Create Binge-worthy Effective Sales Pitches

Sales Hacker

They say the average human attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s. Yet, a new study just came out saying that the average person watches 18 days worth of Netflix a year. The math doesn’t exactly add up. But what’s the difference? How do you get your viewers to figuratively “hit full screen” and give you their complete attention, instead of Amazon Prime shopping in the background?

Sales 86
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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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Zero to 100 – Photos from the SFO Sept 2018 event

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

Thanks to all of you who helped make the Zero to 100 event in San Francisco such a great success.

Startup 175
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We killed the blog. We hope you like it.

Intercom, Inc.

You might have noticed Inside Intercom is looking a little different today. What you’re experiencing is the result of almost a year’s work, designed not just to showcase the breadth of content we publish, but to make it easy for you to discover and consume it. Over the past few years Intercom’s customer base has grown considerably beyond the startup and product-focused readership we initially focused on with Inside Intercom.

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SaaS Freemium/Free Trial Survey is Here

Tom Tunguz

Earlier this year, I wrote about MadKudu’s analysis of free trials and asked if readers were interested in another benchmarking survey on the topic, and the response was overwhelming. Over the last few weeks, my colleague Patrick Chase , and I (along with help from many people in the community) have been busy putting the survey together. I’d like to thank Ryan Janssen for lending a hand.

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The Ultimate Guide to Building a Customer Success Team

CustomerSuccessBox

Every SaaS company knows how important Customer Success is and what results it can bring if implemented properly. However, since it is a comparatively new field, there are many different ideas, thoughts on how one should be building a customer success team so that it can have a big impact on the bottom-line. This makes it imperative to take the guidance from experts who have years and years of experience in the field.

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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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The Must-Have Ecommerce Checklist for the Holidays

FastSpring

Getting your digital business ready for the holidays is a lot like getting you and your home ready for the holidays. Think about it; you probably started thinking about holiday shopping lists and cards back in September or October, and you’ll start putting up decorations at the end of November and into December. That lines up nicely with when you need to start planning, prepping, and executing your holiday campaigns.

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5 Signs Your Star Salesperson Will Make a Terrible Sales Manager

Sales Hacker

The Cautionary Tale of James and Kim. The call came in. It was like so many calls I had received before. Kim* was fed up because James,* the star salesperson her organization promoted, wasn’t making it as a sales manager. James had been killing it at sales. It was clear he knew the industry and how to convert leads into sales. When James’ supervisor left he made it clear he wanted to move up in the organization and Kim and the other members of management thought it was clearly the right thing to

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What are some of the challenges marketing automation providers like HubSpot and InfusionSoft face?

Net-Results

Having operated as a consultant in the B2B marketing automation space and having worked behind the scenes at a major marketing automation vendor, I can perhaps shed some light on this topic. Adoption One of the biggest problems I kept running into as a consultant was adoption. And that simply means that customers actually use the product on a […].

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Embracing the deadline: How engineers benefit from delivery dates

Intercom, Inc.

People sometimes shudder at the thought of working to a deadline. They can be seen as stressful, constraining and often arbitrary. It can feel like delivery dates are chosen on a whim and imposed randomly. When working to a deadline, however, you should never feel that the number of hours worked between now and then is all you can vary to effect the outcome.

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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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Sales CRM and the Fear of Change

Teamgate

Whether you’re graduating from staples to paper clips, double espressos to decaf, or sales spreadsheets to CRM software, the mere act of changing can be more disruptive to your personal wellbeing than those around you will ever realize. Some people don’t just dislike change, they absolutely fear change. Fear as an emotion is not abnormal, and it’s most certainly not a sign of weakness.

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InsightSquared Welcomes FunnelWise Customers to the Family

InsightSquared

FunnelWise, a company that aimed to provide better analytics and visibility into sales and marketing funnel performance, is shutting down their operations in a few months. To ensure continued success and access to insights for their clients, we are excited to announce that FunnelWise chose InsightSquared as the solution for their largest clients. Welcome to the InsightSquared family, FunnelWise customers!

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Employee Spotlight: Sian Wang, CFO and Financial Trailblazer

FastSpring

FastSpring’s Employee Spotlight is a Q&A series that features the hardworking, intelligent, and fun people that make FastSpring great. Get to know the fantastic team behind the ecommerce platform. Q: What is your role at FastSpring? A: I serve as the Chief Financial Officer where I’m responsible for budgeting, forecasting, and strategic planning.