Sat.Oct 27, 2018 - Fri.Nov 02, 2018

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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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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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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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Sales Hacker’s 35 Most Influential Women in Sales

Sales Hacker

Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) but those that take it even a step further by being incredibly intentional about promoting the next generation of female salespeople and making their path a little easier.

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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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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.

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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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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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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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How marketers are using Custom Bots to drive more engagement

Intercom, Inc.

We believe that conversational bot technology will be transformative for the businesses that embrace it today. Bots have the power to improve the customer experience at every stage of the lifecycle, from acquisition right through to retention. Earlier this year, we announced the release of Custom Bots , allowing you to create completely customizable chatbots to automate all sorts of user journeys on your website in minutes.

Scale 128
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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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Persona-Based Email Marketing Is on the Rise: Here’s How to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Sales Hacker

Summary: You may have heard of persona-based emails , but are you using the technique for all it’s worth? Make sure you know your audience members and send them the type of content that will keep them coming back. At least 69 percent of businesses invest significant time and money into email marketing, according to a recent survey by business news website The Manifest.

Scale 69
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Are You Spooked by CRM Software?

Teamgate

In the chilling 1978 movie Halloween , Sheriff Leigh Brackett remarks to the teenage babysitter Laurie Strode, “It’s Halloween, everyone’s entitled to one good scare”. Cue the knife-wielding madman. Unlike that classic chiller, the one thing that shouldn’t send shivers up the spines of CEOs and Sales Directors – at Halloween, or any other time – is choosing the right sales CRM software in order to streamline and commercialize the sales process.

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5 Spooky Things That Can Haunt Your Online Store

FastSpring

When you think of the word “scary,” what usually comes to mind? Bats? Ghosts? Frankenstein’s monster? For many people, the first thought usually isn’t of their online store. But what you and many others may quickly realize is that setting up your digital business and accepting online payments is often a lot spookier than expected. From the jumble of technical jargon surrounding online payment processing to the complexities of navigating global taxes, selling digital products or software on

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The rise of stories and the explosion of mobile micro-formats

Intercom, Inc.

Mobile formats such as stories have exploded in popularity in recent years, but they raise some interesting design questions – how are they changing the mechanics of mobile interaction? Will they usurp or coexist with the traditional newsfeed? What role do ubiquitous cameras have in shaping how we communicate with these formats? Let’s tease out some of the design issues raised by this phenomenon. ???

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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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How To Set-up Effective Split Testing For Your SaaS Company

Incredo

SaaS 113
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The Very First Question a Customer Success Team Needs to Ask

TriTuns

If you are like many customer success managers, you are probably extremely focused on the question, “Will our customers be successful with OUR software”. You and your team probably ask yourselves what you, as a customer success professional, need to do to ensure the customer is successful using your product. But there is a more important, more fundamental question you need to ask first.

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4 Neglected Truths About Live Chat For Start-ups

Outseta

By Geoff Roberts 9 min read If you’ve been hanging out anywhere near B2B marketing circles the past few years, you couldn’t possibly have missed it - live chat, modern messaging apps, conversational marketing - call it what you will. It’s a space that’s on fire in 2018. Fueled by companies like Intercom and Drift, the live chat battleground has become the new darling of the marketing technology world with countless start-ups and established companies from Hubspot to Zendesk jumping into the ring

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How to Solve the Scale-Productivity Paradox of a Fast-Growing SDR Team

Sales Hacker

The post How to Solve the Scale-Productivity Paradox of a Fast-Growing SDR Team appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Scale 56
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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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Academy as a Perfect Multi-Tool for a SaaS Startup

Incredo

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The Very First Question a Customer Success Team Needs to Ask

TriTuns

If you are like many customer success managers, you are probably extremely focused on the question, “Will our customers be successful with OUR software”. You and your team probably ask yourselves what you, as a customer success professional, need to do to ensure the customer is successful using your product. But there is a more important, more fundamental question you need to ask first.

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Negative Customer Reviews: What Should You Do About Them?

TrackStreet

Negative customer reviews can cost your company sales, undermine your relationships with key retail partners, and ultimately harm your brand. The research on this is clear: Online shoppers look at customer reviews often and take them seriously. According to 2017 research cited in the media publication The Drum , 60% of consumers read online reviews at least once a week, and 93% say customer reviews affect their purchasing decisions.

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What B2B Buyers Really Want You to Know

Sales Hacker

The post What B2B Buyers Really Want You to Know appeared first on Sales Hacker.

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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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Tj Randall on Delivering Customer Success for Fortune 500

CustomerSuccessBox

The secret of successful managing is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the four guys who haven’t made up their minds. —?Casey Stengel. What is Customer Success? Is it maximization of value to the customer right from onboarding to the stage where the customer becomes a product champion? Or is it the delivery of the desired outcome? Come to think of it every customer gets onboard a platform with the goal of meeting certain desired outcomes.

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Paranormal (User) Activity: 4 Terrifying IT Stories on Insider Threats

BetterCloud

What keeps you up at night? Whether it’s ghost stories, creepy podcasts , or the long-awaited sequel to Halloween , this $9 billion holiday has something to keep everyone double-checking the closet before bed, hoping not to see Slender Man or a 61-year old Michael Myers. For IT and security professionals, spooky season can feel like a year-round experience.

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Analyze Your Shopify Revenue in ChartMogul

Chart Mogul

We’re thrilled to share that Shopify merchants can now analyze their revenues in ChartMogul. New: Analyze Non-Subscription Revenue in ChartMogul. Shopify is the leading omni-channel commerce platform and is used by merchants all over the world. For years, many of our customers have asked for a way to analyze their non-subscription Shopify revenue data alongside their subscription billing data.

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The Great Subscription Billing Solutions Debate: Build vs Buy

Zuora

In this webinar with IT and Product leaders from Zillow, moderated by IDG, we take on the age-old debate about whether to build vs buy a subscription billing solution. Topics covered include leading your IT systems strategy, building a flexible stack, the "magic mix" for dev resources, and more. The post The Great Subscription Billing Solutions Debate: Build vs Buy appeared first on Zuora.

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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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Co-browsing for Insurance Companies

Upscope

Speed and clarity of response is essential to insurance companies in helping customers complete forms and that's why they're taking up Upscope co-browsing. A problem of forms Even those comfortable filling in forms would take a step back at your average claims form and naturally we all have questions. The speed and clarity at which those questions are answered will make all the difference to that customer's experience.

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How To Create Data Lake?

Rakam

What Do We Mean By Data Lake? In this article, I will be talking about a commonly used term data lake. So what do we mean by data lake? Obviously we are not talking about an actual lake here. I hope I can enlighten you guys about this topic. Data lake is a place where you can store both structured and unstructured data. You can store the data here in raw format without a need to structure it.

Data 40
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Breaking Down the Ultimate Question – NPS

ChurnZero

Breaking Down the Ultimate Question – NPS (Net Promoter Score). First, let’s start with the very basics- what is a Net Promoter Score ? Net Promoter Score was first developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix in 2003. Since then it has been used heavily by companies, both large and small, to assess customer satisfaction and has become an important metric for growth-driven technology businesses.

Scale 95