Sat.Nov 09, 2019 - Fri.Nov 15, 2019

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How to Calculate Your Renewal and Upsell Rate

The SaaS CFO

In the SaaS space, we talk a lot about the health of our recurring revenue. This comes in the form of churn and retention. And it makes sense, right? Macro level valuations of your SaaS business are based on a multiple of recurring revenue. But as an operator of your business or an investor in […]. The post How to Calculate Your Renewal and Upsell Rate appeared first on The SaaS CFO.

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The Red Badge of Courage: Helping Overachievers to Manage and Process Failure

Kellblog

When I lived in France for five years I was often asked to compare it to Silicon Valley in an attempt to explain why — in the land of Descartes, Fourier, and Laplace, in a country where the nation’s top university (École Polytechnique) is a military engineering school that wraps together MIT and West Point, in a place that naturally reveres engineers and scientists, why was there not a stronger tech startup ecosystem?

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How Yelp drove down churn by building up customer success

Intercom, Inc.

As a brand new company, you might engage in plenty of initiatives that are inherently un-scalable – because there’s no better way to nurture customer love than through a personal relationship. But what happens when you hit hockey-stick growth, and you’re no longer able to connect with individuals on a one-to-one basis? It’s time to start thinking about retention at scale and bring onboard a customer success team.

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5+4 SaaS Marketing Tactics At First Hand That Have Worked Like A Charm

Incredo

Marketing is approached differently in each industry. The audience and the platforms keep changing with the industry and the product. Particularly in the SaaS industry, it can be daunting for new business owners and marketers. You know you’ve built an awesome product, but sometimes your marketing efforts don’t pay off all the time. With so many metrics and variables to chase in each campaign, it gets increasingly difficult to market the product effectively.

Marketing 125
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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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The Most Frequent Mishire in Startups

Tom Tunguz

The most frequent mishire in startups is the first head of marketing. Many different disciplines fall under marketing’s purview. The question facing founders recruiting marketers is: which is the most important to prioritize? Marketing expertise falls into three segments: product marketing, demand generation, and brand marketing. Each of these kinds of marketers have critical skills for a startup.

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Here's How To Make Your SaaS Marketing Strategy Generate Revenue

Entrepreneur - SaaS

Optimizing for conversions is just the tip of the iceberg.

Revenue 93
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The SaaS Financial Model You’ll Actually Update (Updated 2019)

Baremetrics

Since the original version of this post from early 2017, we’ve worked with many more SaaS companies and a common theme has been moving companies from a starter template to a more robust financial model. So I’m providing an updated model for SaaS CEOs and founders looking to improve their financial model from a number-crunching exercise to an operational tool.

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The Power of Simmering: Airtable’s Design Principles for a PLG Company

OpenView Labs

When people think about software companies, they usually think about technology first. They think about innovation and sophisticated new features, functionality and use cases. But a great deal of what makes any software company successful has little to do with technology and everything to do with understanding and investing in the connection between technology and humanity.

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The 14 best SaaS tools: analytics, accounting, pricing, and retention

ProfitWell

Your subscription company should run like a well-oiled machine. Taking advantage of SaaS tools will help you accomplish this. If you aren’t using SaaS tools yet, by the end of this article you’ll understand why you should. There are a wide number of reasons why SaaS tools are taking over. SaaS eliminates the need to do things manually, which is often time consuming and leaves too much room for error.

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Monetizing Analytics Features

Think your customers will pay more for data visualizations in your application? Five years ago, they may have. But today, dashboards and visualizations have become table stakes. Turning analytics into a source of revenue means integrating advanced features in unique, hard-to-steal ways. Download this white paper to discover which features will differentiate your application and maximize the ROI of your analytics.

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How a chatbot sped up our tech support resolution time by 50%

Intercom, Inc.

If your support team is routinely asking the same set of questions at the start of every chat conversation, it’s time to ask if you’re using the right tools to triage support issues. Recently our internal tech support team found themselves in this situation while providing support to our 650-person team spread across five offices and timezones.

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How to Prepare Yourself to Be a Great CEO

SaaStr

Being a founder is easy. You just start something. Grab a smart friend, hop on over to WeWork, hit 99 Designs for the logo, and you’re off to the races. Being a CEO is tough. You have to convince people to join you. To drag the troops up the hill. To invest in you when there’s no logical reason to. To do the impossible. You probably haven’t done it before.

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5 Last Minute Conversion Tips Before the Holiday Season

The Daily Egg

How to Quickly Boost Conversion Rates for Your Online Store If you’re an ecommerce owner, you’re probably looking forward to the upcoming holiday season. You’re planning your marketing campaigns carefully, maybe hiring new people to help, and waiting for more traffic to come. But you may also think it’s too late to do anything with […]. The post 5 Last Minute Conversion Tips Before the Holiday Season appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Marketing 277
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Are you setting your SDRs up for failure?

Predictable Revenue

Starting out in sales as an SDR can be extremely exciting and rewarding, but also soul crushing when things don’t click. After chatting with hundreds of CEOs and sales leaders over the last couple years, I know they too feel the pressure when things aren’t working because, ultimately, the buck stops with them. But unlike those in leadership positions, a junior SDR tends to be pointed in a specific direction by a superior and will, by default, trust they’re being pointed in the right direction.

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People, Passion & Perfection: The Key Ingredients for an Awesome Product

Need help launching innovative software quickly? Dive into "People, Passion, and Perfection" and unlock the secrets to building excellent products in the digital age. Fast-track your journey with Tech Accelerator: Agile and Cloud-Native for flexibility & scalability AI-powered innovation for faster results Quality at every step for a flawless user experience See real impact across industries: Healthcare: Empower patients and medical professionals with intuitive solutions Education: Transform cla

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Bernard J. Tyson

Andreessen Horowitz

“Sometimes I’m right and I can be wrong. My own beliefs are in my song. The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then. Makes no difference what group I’m in. I am everyday people”. —Sly and the Family Stone, “ … The post Bernard J. Tyson appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Are there any examples of a unicorn startup that was bootstrapped?

SaaStr

Q: Are there any examples of a unicorn startup that was bootstrapped? From the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100, here are the SaaS/Cloud “start-ups” that are bootstrapped, i.e. $0 in disclosed capital raised: Mailchimp. Closing in on $1,000,000,000 in ARR and 1,000+ employees with no outside capital raised. That’s impressively efficient. Yardi. A software oldie in property management.

Startup 207
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Sequencing Business Models: Can That SAAS Business Turn Into a Marketplace?

Casey Accidental

As someone who has spent a lot of time building marketplaces in my career, a curious thing has happened over the last couple years. Founders have started reaching out asking for help converting their SAAS or SAAS-like business into a marketplace. The approach sounds a bit like this: I’ve amassed a large group of X type of professionals. I’ve helped their business, but they’re asking for help driving more customers.

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How Predictable Revenue built its innovative Outbound Validation program with CPO Kenny MacKenzie

Predictable Revenue

A few years back,Kenny MacKenzie, Predictable Revenue’s Chief Product Officer had bootstrapped his company, Vandrico, to six figure revenue and a team of 13 people. But they failed on the sales and marketing side – they developed a really cool, cutting edge piece of software that wasn’t aligned with what the market needed. And that’s the story of entrepreneurship. even the best ideas can fail for a host of different reasons.

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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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16 Steps to Securing Your Data (and Life)

Andreessen Horowitz

Attackers look for the path of least resistance. Recently, that path has shifted from enterprise networks to you and your devices for two reasons. First, as we have built more secure software and systems, it has made it harder to … The post 16 Steps to Securing Your Data (and Life) appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

Data 102
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After $2m-$3m in ARR, Your Leads Should Always Grow. Here’s Why.

SaaStr

Progress in SaaS is never as linear as it looks years down the road. Everyone has rough quarters (often at least 1 in 5). And we almost had a full Year of Hell, often during a tough transition. I certainly did (twice). More on that here: The SaaS Year of Hell. And Then – Reignition. But there’s one thing it is important to be honest about, to do a root cause analysis when times are tough: After about $2m-$3m in ARR, your organic leads should always be growing, You may have troub

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A Day In the Life of a Lead Development Manager in IT

Sales Hacker

Have you ever wondered what other salespeople’s days are like? Or wished you could see what makes them tick? We probably all have. Lucky for you this series goes behind the scenes with top salespeople to get the inside scoop. (You’re welcome!). Today, we’re looking under the hood of a Lead Development Manager at an IT consulting company, and for that, we talked to Joe Latchaw.

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5 Ways to Leverage Your CRM When Planning an Event

Nimble - Sales

When planning an event for your organization or business, it’s important to understand the audience and attendees you’re targeting. The best way to do this is by using a customer relationship manager (CRM). What is a CRM? A CRM manages all of your relationships with customers and prospective customers. It tracks communications, interactions, and past […].

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6 Reasons Why Your Integrated Payments Strategy Could Fail

If you're in the software industry grappling with integrating payments into your business model, understanding where others have stumbled can be a game-changer for your revenue goals. Discover 6 key reasons behind the struggles many face. The challenge goes beyond the technicalities of integrating a payment system; it delves into the strategic oversight of revenue shares, negotiations with payment providers, and the full exploitation of potential revenue streams.

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Why We’re Investing in Virtual Kitchen Co

Andreessen Horowitz

We all have our favorite places to dine out where we live — for me, that could be anything from enjoying a hot pot meal with friends in the Richmond district of San Francisco, grabbing a quick burrito off a … The post Why We’re Investing in Virtual Kitchen Co appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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How do venture capital general partners resolve investment choice disagreements? If a number of partners think a certain startup is a good portfolio candidate and others don’t agree, what happens?

SaaStr

It varies. Generally: The most senior partners can get any deal done they want. Period. They make seek consensus, and may defer when they don’t get it. But in the end, they can do what they want. And the more junior ones need more buy-in from the rest. The more junior the partner, or investing professional, the more she/he needs others to buy-in. You’ll often be called back to multiple meetings at the office with different partners before you present to the main partnership in this case.

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Late Payments Acceptance via IVR

Agile Payments

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has been around for quite a while now, and it's use for payments acceptance has grown significantly in recent years. With recent advents in IVR systems along with increased cell phone adoption, businesses and organizations now have more tools to bill their customers and collect and accept late payments by phone.

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How to Talk to Customers like They’re Your Friends

Nimble - Sales

Ever had that moment when you only remembered someone because you needed something from them? Or ever felt like someone just reached out to you out of the blue, only to find out that they remembered you because there’s something they have to ask from you? That’s how your clients feel whenever you suddenly reach […]. The post How to Talk to Customers like They’re Your Friends appeared first on Nimble Blog.

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Embedded Analytics: A Force Multiplier for Business

The possibilities for embedded analytics to drive real value for businesses, end users, and society are as fascinating as they are limitless. No matter the industry, brand after brand is finding that analytics can be the solution to a multitude of business challenges. Go deep with five insightsoftware customers as they share the details of their analytics journeys and discuss the transformative power of data.

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The End of Centralization (and the Future of Trust)

Andreessen Horowitz

Editor’s note: It’s Summit Week at a16z, so each day we’re re-sharing some of our favorite talks from the last few years. a16z Summit is an annual, invite-only event bringing together thinkers, builders, and innovators to explore and examine the … The post The End of Centralization (and the Future of Trust) appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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How do venture capital firms determine when and how to help stalled or stuck portfolio companies?

SaaStr

Q: How do venture capital firms determine when and how to help stalled or stuck portfolio companies? It is a super interesting topic more should be written about. Most VC firms do plan for some tough times. They expect a rough quarter every 4–5 or so. And then generally reserve some extra cash if you are doing OK but not great, often another 25% more than the initial investment for a bridge or small second check if that gets you over the help.

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The top 6 subscription KPIs to measure for growth

ProfitWell

The health of your SaaS business is entirely in the data, and a lot of SaaS professionals tend to think that the more data they’re actively tracking, the better. But you can get a more representative picture of your progress by reducing the number of metrics you observe. The trick is identifying a smaller set of metrics that really tell the story of your business and making them your key performance indicators, or KPIs.