Sat.Sep 07, 2019 - Fri.Sep 13, 2019

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The Network Effect: The Importance of the Viral Coefficient for SaaS Companies

OpenView Labs

It seems like everyone wants to “go viral.” From SaaS startups to Instagram celebrities, businesses and wannabes are searching for the magic moment that will propel them into the stratosphere. But, even the founders of so-called “unicorn” companies know that magic isn’t a viable growth strategy. There are, however, more predictable and controllable ways to harness viral and network effects.

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The Three Rules of Freemium

The Angel VC

At the SaaStr Europa conference in Paris a couple of weeks ago I sat down with Joaquim Lecha, the CEO of our portfolio company Typeform , to talk about “Freemium at Scale”. Founded and headquartered in Barcelona, the company launched a free version of its service seven years ago. During our conversation Joaquim revealed that this free service helps drive 180,000 monthly signups, and about 3% of those signups convert into paying users who are billed anywhere from €25 to €70 per month, depending o

Scale 172
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How to scale a sales team: what the different stages of growth require from sales leadership

Predictable Revenue

Scale 127
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How to Make the Most of Customer Journey Insights

Totango

If you want to make your business customer-centered , you’re going to need customer data. Without it, you can’t keep track of your customers’ needs, business goals, and challenges. When you gather and analyze customer data, you can uncover customer journey insights that will allow you to take action to deliver a more personalized customer experience.

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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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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Hybrid Payment Facilitation for SaaS Platforms

Agile Payments

A Payment Facilitator can be thought of as a Master Merchant that facilitates and processes credit and debit card transactions for their platform users.

More Trending

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How should startup founders think about exit strategies?

SaaStr

I think there are two different phases you’ll go through, and your exit strategy should evolve. Phase Early: You Can Be Killed. This is probably up until $8m-$10m ARR in SaaS, although it can vary. Here, you might not be able to raise another round. Or continue to build a competitive enough product. Or get disrupted by a partner or someone else. Or keep up with customer needs.

Strategy 163
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How do I generate leads for a B2B SaaS business?

Net-Results

Being the person in charge of generating leads for a B2B SaaS business ( Net-Results , a marketing automation platform along the lines of Pardot and Marketo ), let me try and answer this question. With varying success, here are some things that we’ve tried to generate leads: Paid ads. Even though it’s gotten pricey, Google Ads still has positive ROI for us (measure by a cost per lead and revenue per lead source).

B2B 40
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8 Signs a New VP Won’t Work Out. And 3 Things Not to Worry So Much About.

SaaStr

Hiring a VP that doesn’t work out is tough. What’s even tougher? Keeping him on for more than a few months. Because the damage compounds. You fall further and further behind on the plan. You hire a bunch of folks that don’t perform. Morale suffers. Everyone gets a bit lost. So if you do make a mis-hire — and everyone does — at least course correct quickly.

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Customer Success Without Recurring Revenue

OpenView Labs

The mission statement of Customer Success is simple: ensure customers realize value from your products or services. A defining characteristic that separates Customer Success from Customer Support is being proactive in delivering that value. And allocating additional resources toward your customer’s long-term success pays huge dividends – improving retention by just 1% affects a company’s bottom line by around 7%.

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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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The Siren Song of ROI Based Sales

Tom Tunguz

Selling based on ROI (return-on-investment) sounds great. A salesperson lays out an iron-clad case for how the customer will make 5x or 6x or 10x their initial investment in a piece of software in three years or less. The champion will use ROI math to assuage upper management and procurement’s concerns. Or so the thinking goes. If we reflect on the most successful software companies, the very largest, very few sell based on ROI.

Sales 179
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Human-Centered Design Network’s Gerry Scullion on inclusive architecture

Intercom, Inc.

?. Like the built world, the internet is constructed for the majority. Too often, our online architects fail to take into account differently abled users. Design can help, to be sure, but it can also hurt – and that’s likely to be the case when the teams we assemble are one-dimensional, exclusive or lack diversity. As a rule, design should first do no harm.

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Your First VP Does Not Have to Be a VP of Sales

SaaStr

There’s a simple point I’ve been talking about a lot lately, but it’s a super important one: When the time comes when you have enough momentum, capital, etc. to hire a real VP or two … you don’t have to start with the VP of Sales. It’s the natural place many of us start. We get 1-2 reps to hit quota, and we realize we need help to scale past that.

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7 Advanced SEO Strategies I’m Trying to Implement Before 2020

Neil Patel

Google makes over 3,200 algorithm changes per year. That’s a lot of changes. Just think about that for a minute… and let that sink in. It’s roughly 9 changes per day. So how can you beat this gigantic company at their own game and rank high? Especially when you consider that they generate over $100 billion+ per year in ad revenue? You could follow their advice on how to rank well but that won’t do much for you.

Strategy 111
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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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9 Shrewd Negotiation Tips Proven to Close More Deals

Sales Hacker

Negotiating is one of the most important skills salespeople can develop, yet it’s often overlooked. Which is a real problem… Because after you’ve put effort and resources into researching and creating a solid pitch and proposal, it only makes sense to come to the table prepared to negotiate with the prospect. The key is to create a negotiation strategy in advance, which helps you talk about price and other important elements of the deal.

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Platforms vs Verticals and the Next Great Unbundling

Andreessen Horowitz

One of the holy grails in the newco world is to build out a digital platform that successfully serves the needs of a broad number of adjacent verticals, and become the definitive platform in its space.

Startup 107
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How much money do the best SaaS inside sales AEs make?

SaaStr

You can back into it. Ultimately, in most SaaS models, in the U.S., sales reps will take home about 20% of the total deal value they close. In the early days, especially if the company is venture-backed, it might be more, as much as 30% or even a smidge higher with accelerators, etc. VC dollars are there to accelerate growth, and if paying a bit more to the sales reps helps there, that can often be worth it.

Scale 186
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Nailing the Essentials of Data Migration for Small Businesses

Nimble - Sales

Data is important for more types of organizations than ever before. No longer are giant corporations the firms that depend the most on big data for decision-making. Small businesses and even nonprofits rely on their data for support in nearly every aspect of their operations. Your small business almost certainly already uses its data about […].

Data 108
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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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Achieve Exponential Growth by Focusing on CAC Efficiency

Sixteen Ventures

Companies struggling with growth are the ones that try to figure out how to spend as little as possible to acquire customers. The companies growing like crazy have figured out it’s not about how much you spend, but the efficiency of that spend. They know that if you can outspend your competition to get in front of prospective customers, you’ll win.

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Campaign Attribution Models

InsightSquared

Before we dive in, let’s cover the basics: what are campaign attribution models and why are they important ? . Attribution modeling is a way to analyze which marketing channels are accredited with lead conversion. Think of your attribution model as a map of sorts. You have a starting point (the campaign) and a finish (the deal), and it is your attribution model that will reveal how your buyer travelled from point A to point B.

B2C 78
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Using Product Led Growth as an Indicator for Investment w/OpenView Venture Partner, Ashley Smith (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

Congratulations you’ve built a product that’s proven itself in the marketplace! So how can you leverage that product’s success to obtain the valuation and funding you need to scale? Ashley Smith, Venture Partner at OpenView provides insight on what investors are looking for in product metrics and growth indicators so you can capitalize on your product’s story for funding.

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Customer Engagement Strategies to Try in 2019-2020

Nimble - Sales

The speed of development and the profitability of a business depends on the number of clients. For these reasons, companies are spending more and more resources on attracting new customers and increasing the loyalty of existing customers, and on converting consumers from the “user” category to the “business partner” category. Some methods have already proven […].

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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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Is ACH a Requirement for Applications With a Recurring Payments Component?

Agile Payments

Applications that have a subscription component can differ in many ways, but almost universally there is an advantage for the application to integrate to an ACH API for origination and management of recurring payments. requirement, maybe not. Advantage to integrate and offer, most certainly. One of the common problems that subscription based applications.

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Fintech’s Second Wave: Lenders in Disguise

Andreessen Horowitz

In 2006, LendingClub introduced a then-novel business model: the ability to offer online personal loans to millions of underserved customers. The peer-to-peer lender was a media and investor darling, hailed as a tech-enabled alternative to traditional banks.

Banking 79
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How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value

Totango

To succeed as a subscription or recurring revenue enterprise, you need to adopt a customer-centered approach. Instead of focusing just on the acquisition of new business, you have to prioritize retaining and nurturing existing customers. This is because the digital transformation of business has greatly increased customer fluidity and lowered the revenue value of the first purchase.

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How to Motivate Your Team to Achieve Their Highest Potential

Nimble - Sales

Effective team members are crucial to any company’s success. They can shape the vision of the brand, affect the degree of client contentment and, in the long run, the amount of profit the business turns over. What determines the ultimate success or failure of the company is team morale. What Causes Low Team Morale? The […]. The post How to Motivate Your Team to Achieve Their Highest Potential appeared first on Nimble Blog.

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10 Red Flags in Integrated Payment Partnerships: Moving Towards a Mutual Benefit

Navigate the complex world of integrated payment partnerships with this essential guide, a treasure trove of insights for software companies. It unveils ten critical red flags to watch out for, from the dangers of hidden fees to the constraints of restrictive contracts. This guide is crucial for identifying potential pitfalls and aligning with the right partners.

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The Three Rules of Freemium

Point Nine Land

At the SaaStr Europa conference in Paris a couple of weeks ago I sat down with Joaquim Lecha, the CEO of our portfolio company Typeform , to talk about “Freemium at Scale”. Founded and headquartered in Barcelona, the company launched a free version of its service seven years ago. During our conversation Joaquim revealed that this free service helps drive 180,000 monthly signups, and about 3% of those signups convert into paying users who are billed anywhere from €25 to €70 per month, depending o

Scale 75
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a16z Podcast: How To Pay For Healthcare Based on Health

Andreessen Horowitz

There’s been a lot of talk about the need for our healthcare system to shift away from volume and fee-for-service, where you pay by appointment, procedure, etc, to value-based care, where you pay for both quality and outcomes—essentially, good health.

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Sales Tax: What You Need to Know For Your Business

FastSpring

Software and digital products are changing the way we live in drastic ways. Just about everyone interacts with digital products at some point in their day—obviously some more than others. However, this means the software market in the United States is a very lucrative and competitive landscape. In fact, the software market revenue in the United States is expected to exceed $200 billion dollars by 2021.