For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
JANUARY 3, 2018
In working with a number of SaaS portfolio companies, I have found that there are two causes of churn that occur more frequently than any others. They are: Failure to successfully onboard the customer Loss of the champion who drove the purchase Looking at these in order: Failure to successfully onboard It’s easy to understand.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 16, 2018
Last week, I shared a presentation with an executive team at a large public SaaS company on everything I’ve learned about pricing. Here’s a summary of the frameworks and theory that I’ve aggregated over a decade of investing in startups. Why do we set prices? Setting aside the important reasons of generating revenue and maintaining solvency for a business, there are many other reasons to set price.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JANUARY 6, 2018
For lots of us software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketers, the first thing we want to do with a new prospect is show them a demo. They visit our website: invite them to a demo They walk into our trade show booth: show them a demo They download a white paper, open an email, attend a webinar, whatever: schedule a demo. My advice: Stop doing that. If we rush into a demo before the prospective customer is ready for one, a few bad things may happen: We miss an opportunity to learn more about the prospect
Intercom, Inc.
JANUARY 30, 2018
In customer engagement, the right context for a message matters just as much as the right time and recipient. Given that content is in itself a tool for engagement, the same principle is in play. Today, we released our second installment in our audiobook series, Intercom on Customer Engagement. Divided into 8 shorter chapters, this compilation is our guide to crafting actionable messaging strategies that will help you grow your business.
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.
Think Strategies
JANUARY 17, 2018
Now that moving to the Cloud has become mainstream, it’s time for organizations to confront their biggest enterprise application challenge in the era of digital disruption – revamping their enterprise resource management (ERP) systems to keep up with the times. A clear indication of the shifting tides in the ERP market is the growing number of organizations that are replacing their installed systems with a new Cloud-based solution.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
InsightSquared
JANUARY 29, 2018
During a recent analysis of the available “operations” jobs on LinkedIn, we discovered a significant number of “revenue operations” jobs — 59,110 to be exact. It sparked the question, “Is revenue operations just another word for sales operations, or are the roles fundamentally different?”. We spoke to several operations professionals to help us better define revenue ops, and understand how the role fits into an organization relative to sales ops.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 3, 2018
Below are 7 predictions about the startup software ecosystem. How many of them do you agree with? The tax holiday for repatriation creates one of the most active M&A environments of the past ten years. The repatriation holiday is part of the new tax plan. It permit companies to bring US dollars held abroad (from software sales in other countries) back to the US at a lower tax rate than before.
Casey Accidental
JANUARY 2, 2018
This blog post was adapted from a presentation I did recently. Hence, slides. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I receive a lot of questions about growth teams. Naturally, there is a lot of confusion. Is this marketing being re-branded? Who does this team report to? What is the goal of it? What do they actually work on? When do I start a growth team for my business?
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 23, 2018
Mistakes during your sales conversations cost you deals. Buyers have dozens of options and more power than ever before. That means you can’t afford to slip up during sales conversations. Your buyers won’t have it. They’ll move to another vendor faster than you can blink, leaving your pockets empty. Knowing the most common mistakes will help you avoid them.
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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.
Think Strategies
JANUARY 12, 2018
One of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes trying to move to the cloud is finding and retaining the skilled workers necessary to implement today’s rapidly expanding assortment of on-demand services. This skills gap cost companies more than $250 million in lost business opportunities in just one year, according to a recent survey conducted by the London School of Economics and sponsored by Rackspace.
FastSpring
JANUARY 31, 2018
There are two things most businesses can never get enough of: time and money. You’re constantly racing against the clock to get your product off the ground and generating revenues. One of the best ways to reduce costs and decrease time-to-market is to use a SaaS-friendly billing system. SaaS-friendly billing systems are designed specifically for companies who sell online services under a subscription model.
Totango
JANUARY 22, 2018
Customer Success Summit brings together the best and brightest minds in Customer Success. Our world-class speaker lineup for 2018 Customer Success Summit will share the impressive business results that customer success best practices should deliver. The first wave of speakers has been announced and the experience and CS knowledge they bring to #CSSummit18 is priceless.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 25, 2018
In SaaS, machine learning has become an essential component to many different products. Whether it’s automating responses to inbound sales queries, identifying expense reports for audit, or surfacing anomalies in data, machine learning improves workflow software. To date, most software imbued with machine learning reduces costs rather than increase revenues.
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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.
InsightSquared
JANUARY 12, 2018
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. As a strategic member of the sales team, ops plays a critical role in owning the sales tech stack. While sales leadership may sign on the dotted line for new vendor contracts, the responsibility of onboarding, implementation and training falls on the sales ops team. It’s important to be involved in every step of the process so you can effectively manage your organization’s sales technology.
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 11, 2018
At first glance, project managers and sales professionals don’t seem to have much in common. They inhabit different worlds and generally aim for different goals. Budget-conscious, time-crazed and snoopier-than-normal, the stereotypical project manager seems, at most, a very distant cousin of the freewheeling, outgoing and glib sales practitioner.
A Smart Bear
JANUARY 4, 2018
People said there’s no money in hosting. WordPress is just a toy. After the success of Smart Bear, I should be setting my sights on something big, not this. I’m sure people said similar things to Heather when she joined as our CEO. The Silicon Valley-oriented technology press outlets don’t cover us because we’re not in San Francisco, even though we’re more successful than most of the startups they cover.
FastSpring
JANUARY 24, 2018
Facebook recently announced a plan to test a shopping feed within its app that is designed to help users discover new products and buy them seamlessly. Welcome to the brave new world of social commerce.
As companies strive to boost revenue, deliver customer value, and stay competitive, they are increasingly embracing the potential of usage-based pricing.
Chart Mogul
JANUARY 2, 2018
There are many ways to get customers to stick around, but they're not all equal. Let's take a look at the fine balance between holding users captive and making them want to stay. Stickiness is a term usually used with a positive sentiment in the tech industry — everyone wants a sticky product. However, the term lock-in is normally used negatively, describing products making it difficult for users to leave — even if they want to.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 10, 2018
In December 2017, the amount raised in ICOs nearly equaled the amount raised by Series A investments globally. The technology innovation catalyzed by Bitcoin and Blockchain is creating many multibillion dollar economies quickly. The ICO market today bears many similarities to the dotcom era. Startups can raise hundreds of millions of dollars on an idea.
InsightSquared
JANUARY 22, 2018
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. In previous posts , I’ve discussed how to evaluate the costs of a new sales tool, and offered some general best practices for managing your tech stack. To help you roll out the new technology your sales leadership just purchased, I’ve outlined some general guidelines you can follow to help the organization onboard a vendor successfully. .
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 30, 2018
In this article, you’ll learn how to write a sales proposal, along with a pre-meeting checklist to follow in order to maximize your chances of closing the deal. Simple Sales Proposal Evaluation Checklist. Is it organized? Is it readable? Does it address the prospect’s pain? Does it address pricing and timeline? Is it organized? Often, when we spend weeks working on a proposal, we know our way around the document just as well as our own home.
Speaker: Dan Olsen - Product Management Trainer and Consultant, Author, and Speaker
Everyone working on a product is trying to achieve the same goal: product-market fit. But most products fail to do so. In this webinar, product management expert Dan Olsen will share his simple but effective framework for achieving product-market fit from his book The Lean Product Playbook. He will explain his Product-Market Fit Pyramid and The Lean Product Process, a 6-step methodology that guides you through how to: Determine your target customer Identify underserved customer needs Define your
The SaaS CFO
JANUARY 26, 2018
Management Presentations in M&A Due Diligence The banker said to block my calendar for management presentations. Excuse me, what are management presentations? And for two weeks? Yes, and this is only the halfway point. The real “fun” in due diligence comes after the management presentations. However, before we get too far, let’s break down what […].
FastSpring
JANUARY 16, 2018
If you're considering creating an OEM bundle (or budles), but you're not sure how to fairly price it, you're not alone. It's a tough needle to thread, and you don't want to cheat your customers— or your business.
Chart Mogul
JANUARY 4, 2018
As any SaaS business grows, customer churn has the potential to turn from a minor issue to an all-out growth killer. Calculating your growth ceiling can be a useful tool to illustrate the limits of your growth, highlighting the profound effect of churn. What is the SaaS growth ceiling? Many SaaS businesses overlook the multiplicative effect that churn can have on their business, especially if new customer acquisition grows linearly.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 18, 2018
“My goal is to make you love rowing.” That’s how my first rowing started. I had never picked up an oar or stepped into a racing shell before. With 100 other freshman men, I had assembled at the boathouse along the maple and conifer lined Connecticut River. I’ll never forget those words. I had played many sports before. In every other case, the focus, the mission, the motivation had always been to win.
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.
InsightSquared
JANUARY 12, 2018
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. As a strategic member of the sales team, ops plays a critical role in owning the sales tech stack. While sales leadership may sign on the dotted line for new vendor contracts, the responsibility of onboarding, implementation and training falls on the sales ops team. It’s important to be involved in every step of the process so you can effectively manage your organization’s sales technology.
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 17, 2018
In this guide, I will teach you the fundamentals of Lead Qualification for inbound and outbound sales development, and give you actionable steps you can take to maximize your Revenue per Lead. What Is Lead Qualification? Lead qualification is the process of using metrics, scoring, and other criteria to ascertain whether or not a given sales prospect fits your ideal customer profile (ICP), and has strong mathematical probability of becoming a long term customer.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 18, 2018
Leaders like to communicate strength. In good times and bad, they project confidence almost by default. Whether they’re founders, CEOs, or sales managers, they operate as if they’re powered by unending supplies of courage.
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