For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

There is much hand wringing in the startup ecosystem about various forms of signaling between the seed and A rounds. Conventional wisdom, and advice, abounds: entrepreneurs should never include a venture firm in their seed round because it’ll scare other VCs off from pursuing the A. After all, the “insider” VC has more information and. Getting Funded Entrepreneur Funding Raising capital seed deals Venture capital

Venture Capital 366

Venture Capital Startup 366

InsightSquared

MARCH 6, 2018

Sales operations has been around for quite some time, but lately the function has been gaining momentum. Instead of behind-the-scenes sales support, sales ops now acts as a strategic partner for sales VPs and leadership. It’s clear that sales ops plays a critical role in any organization, but creating your own sales operations team can be a daunting task. Who do you hire first? How should the team be structured?

Sales 239

Sales Compensation Forecasting Leadership 239

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2018

Building your first sales team will be an endless series of mistakes. It’s OK. Plan for me. But there are a few avoidable , key mistakes I see start-ups making > 50% of the time.

Sales 194

Sales Scaling Onboarding Strategy 194

Incredo

DECEMBER 28, 2018

As technology progresses, it's unavoidable to face the tough turf that consists of your competition. For this reason, many company owners have taken measures to adopt strategies that will help them overcome the competition. Without a doubt, these mobile app marketing strategies are very well-documented. But while they are effective, you are not automatically assured of the success it delivered its original user.

Mobile 159

Mobile Strategy Marketing Technology 159

Advertiser: Data Robot

How are organizations using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to derive business value? Renowned author and professor Tom Davenport explains the rise of automated machine learning, its benefits, and success stories from businesses that are already using it.

Machine Learning

The Angel VC

MAY 12, 2018

In last week's post I shared some thoughts about Dropbox and why, although Dropbox is unquestionably one of the most amazing SaaS companies ever built, I am a tad less confident in the company's long-term future than I am in other SaaS leaders such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, or Shopify. As mentioned in the first part of the post, I took a closer look at Dropbox’s recent IPO filing and would like to share some tidbits, along with a few observations. #1

Retention 158

Retention Subscription Revenue Enterprise 158

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

SEPTEMBER 17, 2018

Everybody likes to win. And while you undoubtedly learn much about your skills, attributes and character from losses, there’s nothing quite like that sense of satisfaction when your team secures a hard earned victory. I’ve been fortunate, both as an individual contributor and as part of a team to have racked up some important wins (jobs, promotions, new business and awards), but in truth, there’s only been three periods where I’ve been part of teams where there’s been an expectation of winning.

Construction 135

Construction Innovation Sales Enablement Leadership 135

ChurnZero

NOVEMBER 2, 2018

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.

Churn 91

Churn Metrics Customer Success Branding 91

Totango

JUNE 28, 2018

Totango’s mission is to enable organizations to proactively and intelligently operate around their customers. With industry-leading enterprises confidently running on Totango’s Customer Success Platform, we are dedicated to innovating and bringing to market products that deliver Customer Success results. Extending Product and Engineering Teams.

Innovation 91

Innovation Machine Learning Acquisition Engineering 91

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 27, 2018

It’s that time of the year again! Time for Sales Hacker’s Annual Top 10 Sales Trends and Predictions for the Future of Sales in 2019. Due to the proliferation of modern sales technology and people’s love of it, I added a new element this time. This new element is, “Companies to watch”. You know, since it’s extremely apparent that the sales technology landscape keeps growing like wildfire. the 2018 sales tech landscape. When growth is as rapid as this, things change quickly.

Trends 87

Trends B2C Machine Learning Sales 87

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B2B

Aaron Beashel

MARCH 9, 2018

I’ve been fortunate to work in a number of SaaS businesses in my career. Some of them, like InVision and SafetyCulture, seemed to just grow naturally without any help. Sure adding sales & marketing help fuel the growth, but these business were growing pretty rapidly before they injected the sales & marketing rocket fuel. In others however, growth has seem like a slog. We had great sales & marketing teams and growth definitely did happen, but it just seemed a lot more difficult.

B2B 161

B2B Strategy SaaS Acquisition 161

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

DECEMBER 5, 2018

Matrix Growth Academy – Zero to 100 was an educational event held in San Francisco, aimed at providing B2B Founders with a road-map for how to get from Zero to a repeatable, scalable and profitable growth process that would take them to $100m in revenue. Please find below the primary videos for They have been. Startup Help

Education 202

Education B2B Revenue Startup 202

InsightSquared

OCTOBER 15, 2018

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a lawyer, the path is pretty clear: Get a Bachelor’s degree. Take the LSAT. Earn your JD. Pass the bar. The process may not be easy, but at least it’s laid out. You know exactly what steps to take, including recommended classes and exam prep courses, in order to put yourself on a path to success. When I think about sales operations, there is no defined route to take.

Sales 223

Sales Revenue Business Communication 223

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 5, 2018

If you’re past $4m-$5m or so in revenue, this post isn’t for you. You’ll have figured this out, at least mostly. But if you are on either side of $1m in ARR, there are 3 things you can almost always do from a pure process standpoint to squeeze materially more revenue out per lead.

Revenue 185

Revenue Consulting Strategy Scaling 185

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User Experience

Incredo

DECEMBER 14, 2018

Adapting apps and services to foreign markets is something that many businesses are sleeping on, and it is often the missing link that stops them from really flourishing. That's not an overestimation. Around 90% of the content that companies generate is written in one language, which often prevents existing or potential clients to have a long-term and meaningful relationship with a brand. SaaS Development

SaaS 138

SaaS Branding Marketing Business 138

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 14, 2018

A few days ago I wrote that there’s more than one path to $100 million. I argued that while it’s awesome to see that some companies are able to get from 0 to $100 million in ARR in 7-8 years or even less, trying to grow that fast may not be the best choice for most companies. That raises the question: What are your chances of growing a little slower and still achieving massive success?

Revenue 149

Revenue SaaS Data Subscription 149

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JUNE 1, 2018

If you’ve ever sat through a marketing agency’s pitch or seen an episode of Mad Men, you’d think that marketing is all about talking – pushing out clever messages so that people will buy whatever it is that you’re selling. Not exactly. You’re right that there’s plenty of delivering messages through email, blog posts, paid adwords, Twitter, TV, radio, or print ads or whatever media reaches the buyer. But there’s more to it than catchy taglines, ads, or social media campaigns.

Interviewing 142

Interviewing Social Media Marketing SaaS 142

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

FEBRUARY 5, 2018

To me, there’s never been a better time to be a sales enablement professional. It’s a rapidly growing area and while there’s a lack of publicly available sales enablement statistics or indeed, widely adopted best practices and standards, this is due, largely to the fact, that many of us are figuring out exactly what sales enablement is, means and does.

Sales Enablement 129

Sales Enablement Sales Banking Venture Capital 129

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Branding

Close.io

DECEMBER 10, 2018

When I first began selling, nervous doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt about sales prospecting. Picking up the phone to call leads that didn’t know who I was, to pitch them on why they should hand over their hard-earned money in exchange for my product, was enough to make my stomach turn in my early days of sales prospecting. But as with all things in selling.

Sales 86

Sales Pricing B2C B2B 86

Casey Accidental

JANUARY 2, 2018

This blog post was adapted from a presentation I did recently. Hence, slides. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I receive a lot of questions about growth teams. Naturally, there is a lot of confusion. Is this marketing being re-branded? Who does this team report to? What is the goal of it? What do they actually work on? When do I start a growth team for my business? The purpose of growth is to scale the usage of a product that has product-market fit.

Onboarding 87

Onboarding Education Retention Advertising 87

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 20, 2018

The path to sales enlightenment requires continuous self-learning, but there’s a real problem. Salespeople are BUSY. With the insane rise of text based content, we understand that not all salespeople have time to sit and read articles. That’s why we’ve rounded up the complete list of best sales podcasts to turbocharge your journey to achieving sales mastery. Listen To Sales Podcasts, Then Go Listen To Your Prospects! . Success in sales requires a lot of listening.

Interviewing 87

Interviewing Social Media Entertainment Entrepreneurship 87

yoursales

DECEMBER 12, 2018

SALES STACK 2019 SALES TOOLS FOR. PROFESSIONAL SALES SALES STACK 2019: THE TOOLS SALES STACK 2019: THE TOOLS I t’s 2019 and we’re back at the sales tools workshop, working out the best sales tools for your sales process. It’s going to be an exciting year. You’ll get lots of content from us along with advice for your sales process. The focus for 2019 is going to follow this prioritized order: Which customer journey experience are you creating?

Sales 84

Sales Forecasting Growth Hacking Social Media 84

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Revenue

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

JANUARY 3, 2018

In working with a number of SaaS portfolio companies, I have found that there are two causes of churn that occur more frequently than any others. They are: Failure to successfully onboard the customer Loss of the champion who drove the purchase Looking at these in order: Failure to successfully onboard It’s easy to understand. Customer Success churn SaaS SaaS churn SaaS customer engagement SaaS customer retention SaaS renewals SaaS retention Startup Help

Churn 182

Churn Onboarding Retention Engagement 182

InsightSquared

JANUARY 29, 2018

During a recent analysis of the available “operations” jobs on LinkedIn, we discovered a significant number of “revenue operations” jobs — 59,110 to be exact. It sparked the question, “Is revenue operations just another word for sales operations, or are the roles fundamentally different?”. We spoke to several operations professionals to help us better define revenue ops, and understand how the role fits into an organization relative to sales ops.

Revenue 222

Revenue Sales Data Metrics 222

Totango

JANUARY 22, 2018

Customer Success Summit brings together the best and brightest minds in Customer Success. Our world-class speaker lineup for 2018 Customer Success Summit will share the impressive business results that customer success best practices should deliver. The first wave of speakers has been announced and the experience and CS knowledge they bring to #CSSummit18 is priceless. Here are a few of our first wave speakers you don’t want to miss: Nicolle Paradise. Senior Director of Client Experience.

Customer Success 85

Customer Success Consulting Travel Leadership 85

Incredo

DECEMBER 19, 2018

Does your business have everything it needs? With new demands and even newer technology, it’s much harder for a business to develop its own mobile app or website interface. Finding a good software development team in North America for a reasonable budget is a rare occurrence. This is why most companies look elsewhere when looking for a software development team. Europe shines when it comes to delivering results at reasonable prices. SaaS Development

Development 122

Development Mobile Pricing SaaS 122

Speaker: Shannon Lietz, Director of DevSecOps Team, Intuit

The new DevSecOps team is up and running, and you feel ready to take on rising security threats while delivering quality software updates. But that leaves just one question: how do you monitor your new program as effectively and efficiently as possible? Join Shannon Lietz, Director of DevsecOps at Intuit, and award-winning innovator, to learn the answers to these questions so you can lead your DevSecOps team to the top!

Innovation

The Angel VC

NOVEMBER 8, 2018

Understanding the mechanics of founder re-ups in financing rounds This post will likely not make me more popular and might offend some people. But if your core beliefs on how business should be done are at stake, you can’t try to win the popularity contest. If you know me a little you’ll probably agree that like everyone at Point Nine, I’m a pretty nice guy. We’re trying hard to make venture capital a little more human , and we really mean it when we say that we aspire to be good VCs.

Venture Capital 144

Venture Capital Finance Investment Startup 144

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

APRIL 3, 2018

When the lead generation effort is failing and we’re trying to fix it, we marketing pros usually head right into the weeds. Are there too many characters in the subject lines? Should we add more long-tail keywords? Is the call-to-action button the wrong shade of green? It’s not that those details don’t matter at all. At high volumes, they could matter a lot. But for many software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, focusing on those details is a distraction. We're looking in the wrong places.

Social Media 139

Social Media B2B Acquisition Communication 139

Chargebee

MAY 17, 2018

There are three strategies you can use to turn good questions into good asks—gradual engagement, information priming, and immediate impact delivery

Onboarding 85

Onboarding Engagement Strategy 85