SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2022

So we’re in the 5th or so “SaaS crash” since I’ve been doing SaaS. This one is the worst, not because SaaS companies aren’t’ doing well. No, they are doing better than ever. Not because valuations are terrible. No, they are still decent, in absolute terms. No, this SaaS Crash is so tough on VCs and public market investors because the market was just so, so high for Cloud stocks from mid-2020 to late 2021: You can see above in the BVP Nasdaq Cloud Index that while these are still Great Times

Venture Capital 364

Venture Capital Cloud Startup SaaS 364

The Daily Egg

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

Making money online takes more than a store. Customers want flexible payment options, or you’ll be another domain with a catchy name, The post Best Payment Methods for Ecommerce appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Payment Methods 325

Payment Methods 325

Predictable Revenue

MARCH 3, 2022

Shawn Rhodes joins the Predictable Revenue podcast to discuss how systematizing the outbound sales process can help improve your conversion rates. The post Removing Hope From Outbound Sales To Increase Conversion appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Sales 264

Sales Revenue Strategy Marketing 264

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs) are one of the most vibrant areas of crypto. DAOs are groups of people with the right to vote to change how a crypto company operates. DAOs pop up for many different reasons: to form a social club that requires a token to join, to buy a copy of the Constitution , to manage open source software. Almost any group of people can organize a DAO to pursue a shared purpose.

Construction 328

Construction Government Scaling Data 328

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Underinvesting in software testing costs more than you think, and now you can prove it. This guide helps you quantify hidden costs like developer time, support overhead, tech debt, and lost revenue. Use the companion calculator to model your own data, and present your findings with a ready-to-edit presentation template. Whether you're making the case to leadership or validating outsourcing, this toolkit gives you the numbers and tools you need.

Outsourced Development

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2022

Q: What type of CEO is the most difficult for the Board to work with? In rough order: The “surprise springer”. Big surprises that could have been disclosed long ago, in a lower-drama format, pop up at a board meeting. Often repeatedly. This instantly undermines confidence and buys the CEO no advantage at all in the end. The “third check-er”. The CEO who struggles to raise money and asks his investors to write a third check into the company without a new, outside lead.

Sales 306

Sales Marketing 306

Predictable Revenue

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

Learn the five key steps of outbound sales call mapping so you can put together an effective plan to help you and your outbound sales team close more deals. The post Step by Step Guide to Outbound Sales Call Mapping appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Outbound Sales Team 317

Outbound Sales Team Sales Revenue Strategy 317

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 2, 2022

The Future of Money provides a sweeping landscape of how money is changing. Paper money is an 800 year-old institution implemented by Kublai Khan grandson of Ghengis Khan, and founder of the Yuan Dynasty. After nearly a millennium, bills and coins' time may be ebbing. Sweden projects the end of paper money, amongst its citizens by 2030. Today, 87% of Swedes never use cash for transactions.

Banking 243

Banking Government Innovation Development 243

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: As You Scale, About Half Your Team Will Be in Sales and Marketing. Why There Is a 50/50 Chance You’ll Tilt Upmarket in SaaS. Dear SaaStr: I Think My Boss is Going to Hire a VP Above Me.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring SMB Sales Enablement 293

The Daily Egg

MARCH 1, 2022

Are you a small business owner who is looking for ways to accept credit card payments? If so, you’re in the right. The post How to Accept Credit Card Payments appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Accept Credit Card Payments 195

Accept Credit Card Payments Payment Services Business 195

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.

Data

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 3, 2022

Despite how crucial user onboarding is to increasing customer conversion and retention , it’s still somewhat overlooked or brushed off in many organizations that see it as an item to cross off the checklist as soon as the user becomes a paying customer. And that’s exactly why today’s guest, Ramli John , jokingly calls it “the ugly duckling of growth.” Ramli is a Growth Coach at ProductLed, a community for product-led growth enthusiasts such as himself, and the author of Product-Led O

Growth Marketing 156

Growth Marketing Onboarding Marketing Consulting 156

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 2, 2022

The artificial intelligence field has evolved dramatically since the deep learning revolution kicked off in 2012, and Richard Socher has been around for all of it. He earned his PhD from Stanford working on NLP (natural language processing) before co-founding an AI startup called MetaMind in 2013. He then spent several years leading the AI. Read More.

Artificial Intelligence 145

Artificial Intelligence AI Startup 145

SaaStr

MARCH 3, 2022

Dear SaaStr: What’s the Relationship Between OTE and Quota for a SaaS Salesperson? In most SaaS companies, a sales rep’s quota is in the end 3x-5x their OTE (i.e., salary + target bonus). Generally low with smaller deal sizes and SMBs, and generally approaching 5x in the enterprise and with bigger deals. Here’s why: A rep working on $3k-$10k deals often can close about $400k-$450k a year.

Scale 286

Scale SMB SaaS Onboarding 286

The Daily Egg

MARCH 2, 2022

Planning for retirement can be scary. There’s so much information out there that it’s tough to know exactly what the best plan. The post Best Employee Retirement Plans appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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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.

AI

Sparktoro

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

Cold outreach is typically seen as a numbers game: hit as many inboxes as you can, assuming 5% or fewer will convert. But I’ve never agreed with that approach because I believe my reputation is on the line when I message a stranger.

Strategy 145

Strategy Marketing Advertising 145

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Answer: 35% (with 45% and 15% as the top and bottom quartiles). Charts like this, from OpenView’s 2021 Financial & Operating Benchmarks survey , help us answer questions like that all the time. Good SaaS executives keep these metrics in mind, regardless of whether they get them from KeyBanc , RevOps Squared , OpenView , Opex Engine , or any other quality source.

Sales Hiring 144

Sales Hiring Marketing Sales Benchmarks 144

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2022

Q: Dear SaaStr: Can We Add Termination Charges for SaaS services? Some older companies do this. In fact, we were recently handed a bill like this for a 20+ year old SaaS product bought out by a PE firm. And really, an “auto-renew for another year without notice” clause can basically do the same thing. Threatening a customer that forgets about an auto-renew and has already stopped using you is sort of the same thing.

SaaS 286

SaaS Churn Revenue Pricing 286

Unbounce

MARCH 1, 2022

Unless you’re looking over your customer’s shoulder, you’re never going to be able to see exactly how they navigate your page. (OK, that’s a bit extreme, but you get the idea.) That’s why your best friend is going to be a little code called click tracking. Click tracking shows where visitors click and how much time they spend looking at each element.

Social Media 140

Social Media User Experience Engagement Metrics 140

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.

AI

Andreessen Horowitz

MARCH 1, 2022

There are people in the industry who seem to be everywhere you look. Zane Lackey has always been one of those people. He’s perhaps most well known as the cofounder and CSO of Signal Sciences, which was acquired by Fastly … The post Zane Lackey appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

Enterprise 136

Enterprise SaaS 136

CloudGeometry

MARCH 3, 2022

When developing a SaaS product plan, it’s important to recognize two foundational principles. First, SaaS is a business strategy, not a technology strategy. Second, there is no one-size-fits-all SaaS architecture (the second principle is a corollary of the first). The challenge is to build common ground between business and architecture so as to translate business assumptions into critical technical solution inputs.

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) SaaS Cloud 130

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

Now that we’re in the New Normal, what will the office really be like — now that we are all pretty good at running distributed teams? I wanted data, so I brought the CEO and the new VP of New York for Raise.Work together for a deep-dive on where it’s all going. Raise.Work is a leader in planning, leasing and sourcing tech real estate spaces.

Startup 286

Startup Software Strategy Data 286

Unbounce

MARCH 3, 2022

Today’s landing pages have a whole laundry list of tasks for you to tackle. They need to teach visitors about your brand, collect info from your customers, and—most importantly—bring in those sweet conversions. How can you help a single landing page handle so much at once? Let a form do the heavy lifting. This nifty tool improves your visitors’ experience to boost your landing page’s results.

Payment Methods 139

Payment Methods Scale Payment Solutions Payment Services 139

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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.

Scale

Sixteen Ventures

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

Having worked with hundreds of companies of different sizes, funding stages, and Customer Success maturity, around the world, I’ve boiled down what I believe are the five “secrets” of World-class CSMs. This is specifically about CSMs that are thriving, even if their environment is less-than-perfect. . It’s always best to have strong Customer Success leadership, buy-in from Executives, great processes, purpose-built CSM software, etc.

Customer Success 127

Customer Success Management Churn Retention 127

Totango

MARCH 1, 2022

Did you know that while women make up more than 50 percent of the U.S. workforce, less than one in five employees in the tech industry are women? Like in most male-dominated industries, there are many reasons for the lack of women in tech, including work culture and gender discrimination issues, a significant gender pay gap, and a lack of female representation in the workplace.

Technical Review 108

Technical Review Leadership Technology Education 108

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

Q: Where do you draw the line when companies ask for customization for a SaaS product? I feel this is perhaps the point founders get the worst advice of all. Especially from VCs, B2C folks, and folks that have never sold bigger deals and into the enterprise. One-off customization per se is bad. This is SaaS, not a services business. But. Being paid a lot to build something important already on your roadmap can be magical.

B2C 278

B2C SMB Enterprise Startup 278

Baremetrics

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

If you’re running a micro-SaaS business by yourself, chances are you haven’t had much time or budget to spend on marketing. In fact, most founders focus resources almost exclusively on product development, and delay thinking about sales strategies until they desperately need their first customers. Of course, that’s already far too late to start running an effective ad campaign.

Scale 105

Scale SaaS Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 105

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.

Payments

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2022

In this episode of the Sales Hacker Podcast, we have Russell Benaroya , Co-Founder and Partner at Stride and author of One Life to Lead , a book he wrote to help others with life design after he transformed his own. Join us for a candid conversation about taking charge of your life and becoming your best self. powered by Sounder. If you missed episode #196, check it out here : How to Fix the Pain Points Around Demoing with Jonathan Friedman.

Acquisition 104

Acquisition Sales 104

Groove HQ

MARCH 3, 2022

We've pulled together a list of high quality customer support templates to help you level up your support game! The post 25 Customer Service Email Templates to Save the Day appeared first on Groove Blog.

Customer Support 103

Customer Support 103

SaaStr

MARCH 4, 2022

At the 2022 SaaStr Miami Super Meet-up the other day, Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter pointed out an interesting statistic from the recent Vista SaaS CEO conference: Public SaaS companies that are hyper sales efficient haven’t been hit nearly as hard, if at all, compared to those that are less efficient. Take a look at ZoomInfo, Bill.com and Atlassian for example.

Scale 272

Scale Sales Acquisition SaaS 272