2018

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We’re Overthinking Seed Round Signaling Effects

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

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.

Startup 538
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1% of Salesforce's Revenue Makes a Unicorn

Tom Tunguz

Salesforce is worth $113 billion. 1% of $113 billion is $1.13 billion. ServiceNow is worth $34B and Workday is worth $33B. 3% of $33-34B is $1B. Atlassian is worth $20.5B. 5% of $20.5B is $1B. Why am I doing all this simple math you might ask? We have reached a point in SaaS where a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. If you start a business tomorrow that is able to cleave 1% of revenue from Salesforce, you will have built a billion-dollar business. 1% is not that much.

Revenue 273
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Live chat for business: everything you wanted to know about live chat but were afraid to ask

Intercom, Inc.

A great customer experience today is about meeting people where they already are. And today, there’s one channel where more potential customers are than any place else: messaging and live chat. Think about the way that you talk to people every day. If you’re anything like me, you use iMessage to talk to your family, WhatsApp for your close friends, and you probably spend your entire day on Slack talking to your teammates at work.

Business 239
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Eliminate Churn Forever in 5 Simple Steps

Sixteen Ventures

Churn… ya boring. Yawn. Time to move on. I’m so over talking about churn and if you really understand what Customer Success is all about , you should be, too. Churn is so easy to get rid of… you just have to do five simple things. If churn is a problem for you, this post will change that (if you’ll let it) and then you can move onto bigger and better things.

Churn 130
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The Forrester Wave™: AI/ML Platforms: Vendor Strategy, Market Presence, and Capabilities Overview

As enterprises evolve their AI from pilot programs to an integral part of their tech strategy, the scope of AI expands from core data science teams to business, software development, enterprise architecture, and IT ops teams. Enterprises need a platform that can make broader AI teams more productive, implementing more complex use cases and harnessing the fast pace of new AI technologies.

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Why Good Site Architecture Is The Only CRO You Need

Neil Patel

When you hear the words “site architecture,” the first thing that comes to mind is probably SEO. It doesn’t take much digging into SEO best practice to learn that Google loves a site with clearly defined architecture that’s easy to crawl and index. But if you stopped your site architecture planning with just your SEO, then you’ve missed out on the greater picture.

More Trending

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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.

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Part 1: How to Walk Away from a Bad Deal

Sales Hacker

“It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again”. Another quarter sales target just barely made. It was a close call. As you go over the numbers with your team you realize that trying to close a sale with XYZ Industries cost you a ton of time, almost made you missed your quota and almost cost you your job (maybe – you never know, but you suspect it). It’s not that you haven’t been down this path before.

Sales 110
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How Zapier Reached $35M ARR With This SaaS SEO Strategy

Ryan Berg

Want to drive more search traffic to your SaaS? In this case study, we’ll step outside the usual content marketing tactics most SaaS companies use. And look at how Zapier leverages SEO to drive millions of high intent searchers to their product every month. This strategy has nothing to do with blogging (although we’ll take a look at how they added a blog later to enhance this approach).

SaaS 111
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Don't Let Your North Star Metric Deceive You

Brian Balfour

We’ve all heard the rallying cry of the “One Metric That Matters”. Choose your north star and focus. Grow 7% week over week. If you grow daily active users (DAUs), the rest will follow. But blindly buying into the concept of the one metric that matters (OMTM) is a fatal oversimplification. In a recent essay , Casey Winters, formerly Growth at Pinterest, says: “The search for one key metric for a complex ecosystem like Pinterest over-simplifies how the ecosystem works and prevents anyone from foc

Metrics 103
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Top Fraud and Payment Trends for 2023: What SaaS Pros Need to Know

Fraud is ever changing – especially for merchants that offer online services and subscriptions. This report outlines the most common types of fraud to look out for in 2023 and offers merchant-reported preferred best practices to help minimize fraud losses. In the report, you’ll find: The scale and type of fraud seen in the global marketplace. How fraud changes based on the size of business.

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Three Things To Consider Before Your Next MarTech Purchase

CloudKettle

Marketers are living in a golden age of marketing. No longer do marketers have to rely. The post Three Things To Consider Before Your Next MarTech Purchase appeared first on CloudKettle.

Marketing 101
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Matrix Growth Academy – Zero to 100 Videos

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

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.

B2B 278
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Why Fast Learning Curves are So Important to Startups

Tom Tunguz

Startups are business machines engineered to grow quickly. The forces of hypergrowth exert enormous strain on every aspect of the company. Internal break all the time as the company moults into a new skin. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when hiring. Every lead hired today, whether marketing , sales, engineering or product, will have a very different job nine months from now, much less two years from now.

Startup 260
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Your guide to a successful live chat support implementation

Intercom, Inc.

Live chat is a powerful tool , but only when it’s used properly. If you want to support customers with live chat, you’ll need to make smart decisions about where it’s added to your site, how your customer service team will use it, and how it integrates with your other support processes. We’ve put together this guide to help you not only successfully implement live chat on your website, but also to offer the right kind of experience for your customers.

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The Hidden Costs of Poor Customer Onboarding

Churn starts within the first 30 days of customers purchasing a product. A lot of it comes down to the first impression customers get through the onboarding process. A poor experience can result in losing current and future customers, and unnecessary overhead. It’s important to know what a poor onboarding experience looks like, the associated hidden costs, and how to build a top-tier onboarding experience for your customers so you can avoid losing hard-earned revenue.

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Quick Ways to Make Your Google Ads Stand Out from the Competition

Unbounce

Google Ads amounts to billions of dollars in revenue for the search engine giant, but what about your revenue? Standing out in this competitive—and, let’s face it, cluttered—environment can be a huge challenge for advertisers, especially if they’re just starting out. There’s only so much space on a search results page to go around, after all.

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My Secret Playbook: 28 Hacks Guaranteed to Grow Your Traffic and Sales

Neil Patel

Are you tired of algorithm updates? Well, who isn’t? From Facebook to Google, marketing is continually changing and getting harder. Even if you are willing to give these platforms money, it still doesn’t guarantee success. You can experiment, run tests, but digital marketing isn’t as easy as it used to be. Years ago, when I started as an online entrepreneur, companies used to raise money to hire engineers and build infrastructure.

Sales 111
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Five Key Skills for Sales Ops Career Success

InsightSquared

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 110
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Sales Stack 2019: The Tools

yoursales

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.

Sales 98
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ChatGPT for SEO: the comprehensive guide

When I saw chatgpt is extremely powerful, I decided to make a comprehensive guide covering start to end. this means keyword research to link building.

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46 Bad Ass Sales Podcasts Every Sales Professional Should Follow in 2019

Sales Hacker

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.

Sales 111
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What Are Growth Teams For, and What Do They Work On?

Casey Accidental

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?

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Good Questions, Bad Asks: The UX Of Questions In User Onboarding

Chargebee

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

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Why B2B is finally investing in brand

Chart Mogul

These SaaS companies are raising the table stakes for business software by leveraging the power of brand experience. So what does it take to build a standout B2B brand in 2018? It all started with subtle changes — the inclusion of friendly illustrations, new colors in landing pages and tweaks to website copy. Many growth industries — SaaS included — congregate around new trends.

B2B 97
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The Path to Payment Control: How SaaS Companies Can Maximize Enterprise Value

For software company executives, maximizing revenue, profitability, and enterprise value is of utmost importance. A key factor in achieving these goals is having a solid integrated payment strategy in place — one that allows for control, ownership, and leverage over customer relationships and payment service contracts.

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2018 SAAS Private Survey Results- Part 1

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

For the seventh year in a row, we’re proud to work with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) to share results from a survey of ~385 private SaaS companies. Thank you to the readers of forEntrepreneurs who participated in taking the survey! Thank you also to David Spitz (@dspitz) and the team at KBCM Technology Group for their.

SaaS 271
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Ten Year's Worth of Learnings About Pricing

Tom Tunguz

Last week, I shared a presentation with an executive team at a large public SaaS company on everything I’ve learned about pricing. Here’s a summary of the frameworks and theory that I’ve aggregated over a decade of investing in startups. Why do we set prices? Setting aside the important reasons of generating revenue and maintaining solvency for a business, there are many other reasons to set price.

Pricing 223
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The ultimate marketing technology stack for 2019

Intercom, Inc.

You might be familiar with Scott Brinker’s famous martech landscape slide. Known as the Martech 5000 — nicknamed after the 5,000 companies that were competing in the global marketing technology space in 2017, it’s said to be the most frequently shared slide of all time. By early 2018, Brinker had updated it with almost 2,000 more vendors — that’s nearly 7,000 marketing software companies fighting for the same buyers’ attention.

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2019 Is the Year of Page Speed. Are You Ready?

Unbounce

Page speed matters. We’ve been hearing it for years, though any one of us would be forgiven for letting it slide. There are other priorities, after all. Marketers have been busy ensuring content is GDPR compliant. We’ve installed SSL certificates, made sure that our pages are mobile-responsive, and conducted conversion optimization experiments. Some of us have had kids to raise.

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SaaS & Embedded Finance: From 101 to $1 Trillion

Speaker: Simon Torrance, Embedded Finance Expert & Advisor

Our guest on this podcast is Simon Torrance. Simon is a globally recognized expert in the field of embedded finance, and he currently serves as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Platforms & Ecosystems working group. Simon and Todd Ablowitz (Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Infinicept) talk about the basic principles of embedded finance, why this market is a trillion-dollar opportunity and the key challenges that companies face in capturing that opportunity.

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Why Being the Loudest Makes You the Weakest

Neil Patel

What’s one thing that you are constantly seeing on the web? Especially if you are on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube? Come on, take a guess… No, I am not talking about people taking half-naked selfies of themselves or posting their lunches. I’m talking about people showing off. From taking pictures of their cars or money and even their homes to standing in front of private jets and yachts.

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Is revenue operations just another word for sales operations?

InsightSquared

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 109
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Sales Stack 2019: The Tools

yoursales

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.

Sales 98