2020

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A Framework For Your First SaaS Sales Comp Plan

SaaStr

I’m not ashamed to admit that when I set up our first SaaS sales comp plan, I had no idea what I was doing. In my first start-up, yes I sold to the enterprise. I sold $6m our first year (man, that sounds good looking back on it). But I did all the sales myself, and stupidly, had no sales comp plan at all ??. Then at Adobe Sign / EchoSign I had some good — and painful — learnings.

Scale 363
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Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things

Andreessen Horowitz

New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply … The post Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

Branding 145
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More on the SaaS Sales Playbook for Product-Led Growth

SaaSX

The SaaS sales playbook applied best to a product-led growth when it is adapted to be sales-assisted versus sales led

Sales 130
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The Top 10 Mistakes First Time SaaS Founders Make

SaaStr

Second-timers know the playbook and can execute against it faster. But often times, they also have a bit of healthy skepticism, a bit of baggage, from the last time. First-timers often know very little, but are baggage free. That can be very powerful. I’ve had a chance to watch a whole cohort of SaaS first-time founders go from $1m to $10m ARR in 5 quarters or less (more on that here ) and just been awestruck by how much better than me they are as founders, and how much better they̵

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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 7 Best Pieces of Business Advice I Was Ever Given

SaaStr

Here’s my list of the best golden advice I was given as a first-time — and second-time — CEO: Manage People — In General, and Earlier. The earlier in your career you can learn how to manage people, the faster you can excel in learning to scale. Managing people isn’t always fun. But embrace it if you want to be a CEO, a founder, and/or be a part of something bigger.

Scale 363

More Trending

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Why IPOs, Direct Listings, and SPACs Will Flourish in Startupland

Tom Tunguz

Most high-growth software investors value public companies on enterprise value to forward revenue multiple. But investors in private companies use a different metric, enterprise value to forward annual recurring revenue (ARR).The private markets project the ARR a year from now. The public markets project revenue for the next 12 months. What if we could compare the relative valuation multiples of public and private high growth software companies?

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Six principles of system design

Intercom, Inc.

The start of any journey begins with consulting a map. But if you’re a product designer starting out on a new project, you might find yourself with a blank page, and the job of drawing the map: of defining the high-level design direction that your team is going to use to chart their course. Mess it up, and you could find yourself quickly marching your team off a cliff.

Scale 289
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The secret to customer engagement success? Gamification

DeepStream

What can you learn from video games to engage your customers and get them addicted to your products? Gamification Gamification is to key to successful engagement

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Lessons learned while adding "as A Service"? to software applications

SaaS Brief Submitted Articles

Not just WHY you should SaaS-enable your software application, but also HOW to SaaS-enable it. Transitioning an application into a modern SaaS enabled offering in more of a challenge than many people realize or expect.

Software 130
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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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How to Effectively Use Memes in Your Content Marketing

Neil Patel

Did you know that archeologists have traced the origin of the meme back to the year 3 B.C. ? Memes, a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe how ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve, are a way to carry a shared idea or trend to engage a target group. Over time, different groups take memes and tweak them to make them their own.

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6 Copywriting Tips for Creating Persuasive Landing Pages (and Converting More Visitors)

Unbounce

As a modern marketer, you’re expected to be a multitasker with a diverse skill set. “Multiple hats … love ‘em!” In reality, though, it’s a pretty tough gig. So, of course you’re constantly looking for ways to shrink the workload—and that includes beefing up your landing page copywriting skills to maximize conversions. What are the highest-performing landing pages doing that makes them so effective?

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The State of Crypto: A Builder’s Guide From Crypto Startup School

Andreessen Horowitz

Crypto has gone through an eventful year. Decentralized exchanges and platforms that allow users to trade, loan, or borrow cryptocurrency have soared in volume. Developers are taking advantage of the flexible, interlocking nature of blockchains to create new applications that … The post The State of Crypto: A Builder’s Guide From Crypto Startup School appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Sales Motions for a Product-Led Company

SaaSX

Many product-led companies get to the sales fork in the road and scratch their head wondering where and how to start building their sales machine. It's entirely new for them and the path forward isn't always clear. It's helpful to understand the options.

Sales 130
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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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Books That Will Make You a Better Leader and Human in 2021

Nimble - Sales

We are almost at the end of the year; and what a year it’s been. Phew! A lot of you might be thinking about setting New Year’s resolutions, creating lists of skills to work on next year, while probably also thinking about things you could gift your team members, family, and friends. In a year […]. The post Books That Will Make You a Better Leader and Human in 2021 appeared first on Nimble Blog.

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What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In?

SaaStr

IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m ARR VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR VPCS: $2m ARR VPP: $3m-$4m ARR VPE: $5m-$6m ARR CFO: $10m ARR COO: $20m ARR. More here: [link]. — Jason BeKind Lemkin (@jasonlk) July 21, 2019. The other day I was meeting with a great CEO who had raised a modest seed round. Enough to invest, but not enough to go crazy with. He’d found several good First VP candidates, in particular, a strong first head of marketing and a strong first head of product.

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Best Employee Monitoring Software

The Daily Egg

Employee monitoring software is more than just a tool for keeping an eye on your staff. These tools ensure that your entire team stays on-task and avoids distractions while they’re working. Employee monitoring tools have features for security, time tracking, and even productivity management. Overall, business owners and managers can use monitoring software to gain […].

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How to Predict the Forward Multiple of a Software Company

Tom Tunguz

High growth software companies are valued based on forward revenue multiples. In other words, to calculate the enterprise value of a business, you multiply the revenue by the forward multiple. But, how does the market set the multiple? What predicts the forward multiple, or correlates with it? I pulled together the data for the basket of the roughly 60 publicly traded SaaS companies and ran a linear regression to understand the predictive power of the many key metrics reported by public companie

Software 363
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Addressing Top Enterprise Challenges in Generative AI with DataRobot

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.

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Product Judgment: How some people can repeatedly create product success

Intercom, Inc.

Let’s talk about that trickiest of subjects: Product Judgment. Also known as Product Intuition or Product Instinct or Product Taste, it is the idea that you can use your own judgment to (1) accurately predict what your customers need, want and value, and (2) design and ship the right solution for them. Here, I will tackle some of the common questions around it: Does it exist?

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Building software: what you want vs what you need

DeepStream

Developing reliable, high-quality software which solves real problems is already a tough enough. Map that onto procurement and it seems impossible.

Software 141
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Reality Check: Still Spending More Time Gathering Instead Of Analyzing

SaaS Brief Submitted Articles

All the technology advances have not flipped the productivity paradigm.

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How to Boost Your SEO by Using Schema Markup

Neil Patel

One of the latest evolutions in SEO is called schema markup. This new form of optimization is one of the most powerful but least-utilized forms of SEO available today. Once you grasp the concept and method of schema markup, you can boost your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs). My goal in this article is to show you exactly how to get started using schema markup for your website.

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Building User-Centric and Responsible Generative AI Products

Speaker: Shyvee Shi - Product Lead and Learning Instructor at LinkedIn

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, Generative AI products stand at the cutting edge. These products, with their unique capabilities, bring fresh opportunities and challenges that demand a fresh approach to product management. This presentation unveils a comprehensive 7-step framework designed to navigate the complexities of developing, launching, and scaling Generative AI products.

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Black Friday Isn’t Dead. Here’s How to Win More Online Sales in 2020

Unbounce

When you think of Black Friday, you might think of getting trampled at Walmart trying to snag a half-price TV or the latest toy phenom for your kids. (“Baby Yoda purchase, you must.”) This year is a bit different though—COVID-19 has upended the economy and new social distancing measures have changed the in-person shopping experience. Some experts say the writing is already on the wall: Black Friday, the most important shopping day of the year, is either dying or already dead.

Sales 145
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Bio Eats World: The Machine that Made the Vaccine

Andreessen Horowitz

A year ago, none of us would believe that mRNA vaccines would be a household name. And yet here we are, at the end of 2020, counting the days towards a vaccine that could not just save lives but help … The post Bio Eats World: The Machine that Made the Vaccine appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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How to Use Customer Expansion to Skyrocket Growth (+ examples)

Baremetrics

Think about the time, energy and resources you put towards acquiring new customers. Now, how much time, energy and resources do you put towards increasing the revenue you get from your existing customers, a.k.a customer expansion? If you’re like a lot of SaaS companies, chances are you’re fixated on customer acquisition. Most of your marketing dollars are probably spent on ads and content to get more people to sign up for your product.

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The Unspoken Hard Bits of Bootstrapping

Outseta

The challenges that I’ve faced as a bootstrapped founder simply aren’t the ones that are commonly talked about By Geoff Roberts · 17 min read The internet is littered with horror stories detailing the many challenges of entrepreneurship. We’ve all read the tales of founders wrestling for years to find product market fit , of co-founders squabbling over equity, of the CEO riddled by anxiety as he drains his infant daughter’s college fund to keep his start-up afloat for another month.

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Brick & Mortar Retail Relevance: How to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Speaker: Jay Black, Senior Account Executive

Let's set the record straight: in-store retail isn't dead - it's evolving! Faced with the digital age and the demands of omnichannel shopping, some retailers are thriving while others are struggling to adapt. Join Jay Black in this exclusive session as he explores the strategies that set successful stores apart, including: Crafting unique and unforgettable in-store experiences 🛍️ Mastering the art of retail demands 🛒 Navigating inventory challenges in today's climate 📦 an

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Turns Out, 85% of the World Likes “Contact Me”. Even Though You Don’t.

SaaStr

I know you are probably like me. You go to a web service. What do you do? Free trial. Sign Up Now. The very, very last thing I am going to click is “Contact Me.” The last thing I want, as a web-centric small customer/user, is some sales rep selling me on some product I just want to try for 20 minutes and see if it works for me. You and I are like that.

Pricing 363
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Best Blogging Platforms

The Daily Egg

Ready to start a blog? Whether you’re blogging as a hobby or starting a blog for your business, the benefits of blogging are seemingly endless. It’s an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and build authority in your niche or industry. But you need to choose a blogging platform before you can write […]. The post Best Blogging Platforms appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Business 363
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Why Burnout Should be a Topic at Your Next Board Meeting, and What to Do About It

Tom Tunguz

The Economist ran a story about the future of work this week. Working remotely, we have reduced meeting length by about 15% and increased our total time at work by 2 hours per day. We might declare we have found an extra 10 hours in the workweek from nothing. This productivity boost might seem universally positive, but there’s a catch. One of the critical topics in many boardrooms today is managing employee burnout.