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Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer. Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers. We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine. The motivation behind the MVP is still valid: Build something small, because small things are predictable and inexpensive to test. MORE
There are different uses of cement such as to make cement mortar, cement concrete which are used in various types of masonry and concrete structures. Building Materials Building Technology Guide Buildings Cement MORE
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Over the past 12 months I’ve invested considerable time thinking about, experimenting with and optimising my daily routine. I relish figuring out new ways to become more efficient and better at my work. There’s a limited number of hours in the working week, so the challenge is to use our time so that we not only produce our best work, but also clearly understand what’s going to have the biggest impact. Despite what you may think, productivity is a perennial, rather a millennial challenge. MORE
Back in 2010, on a Monday at 5 PM, I found myself at a bar called Memphis in Southern California in a heated discussion with two close friends. Patrick Vlaskovits was cheerfully drinking a mint julep while Sean Ellis and I were each enjoying a cold beer. At the time, Patrick was working on a startup and a book. Sean was advising a handful of high-growth tech startups including Dropbox, Eventbrite and my own company, KISSmetrics. MORE
Forget work/life integration for a minute. How much time do you have, regardless of partitioning? From your 24-hour daily allotment, the 1950s-style break-down is 8 hours for work, 8 for home and commute, and 8 for sleep and ablutions. So, “work” and “home” are the two things in which you can spend 40+ hours per week. This is the amount of time it takes to tackle something huge. A career. A parent. A startup. MORE
In the first part of this post , I looked at what some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry said about Product/Market Fit (PMF) and how they try to define and measure it. While everybody seems to agree on the broad concept of PMF there is (unsurprisingly) no consensus on how exactly it can be defined and measured, and some people set the bar much higher than others. MORE
How hiring our first salesperson led me to recognize that cluelessness is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Make More Happen MORE
Building a company is a lot like trying to predict the future. You’re looking through a crystal ball to see where the market is moving, and how you can adapt your product accordingly. You have limited cash, which means that you only have a finite amount of time and resources to scale your business. The longer you take to make decisions about your company, the more time and money you burn. Optimizing your startup for speed is the only way to keep your head above the water. MORE
It was 2008, and I was having a classic founder moment. I had no idea what I was doing. But at least I was doing! I was founding a SaaS business, KISSmetrics. Like any startup, we were flailing, failing, and on fire, all at the same time. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. I was in charge of product development, operations, finance, funding, and probably 44 other things. At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing. MORE
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. I get asked, “What should I look for when hiring someone for Sales Operations?” or “What skills should I have to break into Sales Operations?” a lot. Thinking about the best and worst Sales Operations professionals I’ve worked with over the years, I’ve come up with four skills that the best have and the worst lack. MORE
Customer Health Score takes multiple dimensions of customer data metrics and classifies them into a single representation of green, yellow or red. It is a consolidation of all the information the company has about the customer, from all probes, people and systems, past and current. Companies use customer health to speed up and scale communication, prioritization, decision making and forecasting of their customer success operations. MORE
Zendesk is a family of products that helps companies manage the entire customer lifecycle in different ways. They are on a scale that is uncommon for B2B companies, with a $350M run rate, 90K paying customers, and an additional 50-100K free or trial customers at any given time. MORE
Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend a lot of time with so far. I usually just “OK” them, since the founders we are working with are all super reasonable people who carefully weigh how much they need against the interests of the company – their company. But sometimes founders ask me for a suggestion or some guidance because they are uncertain as to what is fair, and so I thought it might be useful to create a simple model. Here it is. MORE
Today’s customer success executives are being challenged to use unprecedented amounts of customer data to build more predictable revenue outcomes and run more efficient operations. That’s on top of their existing efforts to manage an entire customer base. If you are a VP of Customer Success, it is time to go beyond defining strategy and start ensuring the execution of your strategy across the organization. MORE
The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes - strategic communication is an integral part of successful sales enablement. Communication matters in business. And the success (or failure) of a sales enablement function is intertwined with its ability to influence a sales organisation and change behaviour. While it may not be immediately apparent, communicating well with and managing stakeholders is a prerequisite for successful sales enablement. MORE
Without doubt, one of the most exciting parts of being a marketer today is the perpetual challenge of finding new channels and tactics to leverage. There’s a whole host of marketing arbitrage opportunities out there - if you know where to look and spend your time. Identifying opportunities that we think will create business value is not only a lot of fun, it's key to driving future growth. For that reason, organisations need to invest in the discovery and cultivation of such opportunities. MORE
I run a European based sales agency for software and technology companies. In this article, I will summarize what I’ve learned about the most important ingredients for a successful outbound sales process. The Key to Outbound Sales Success – Understand the Problems & Pain You Are Solving With Your Product. Sounds basic and redundant, I know. But we often present our product as a solution. Be frank! What solution? And for what problem/pain/need? MORE
I gave a talk this year at the 2017 SaaS North conference in Ottawa, where I discuss the fundamentals of building a repeatable, scalable, & profitable growth process for a startup. Building a Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth Process [View on Slideshare]. Startup Help Business Model Growth SaaS SaaS business Sales & Marketing Machine MORE
Net negative churn occurs when your expansion revenue from existing customers totals more than your lost revenue from existing customers. This SaaS metric does not factor in any revenue from new customers, just existing customers. As Nathan Latka puts it in his “The Top” podcast, this is the holy grail of SaaS. Your recurring revenue […]. The post What is Net Negative Churn in SaaS appeared first on The SaaS CFO. Churn Nathan Latka Net Negative Churn MORE
Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. In 2010, classic SaaS was booming, the benefits of a subscription model were finally becoming clear to the public markets and the mass-market. Since then, many other types of software businesses have been created in new categories like agriculture technology and robotics. Which of these markets are growing the fastest for investment dollars? MORE
Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they are going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage going forward. Yet, many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. These executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting the new generation of cloud-based applications and services that make the digital enterprise possible. MORE
Today is January 10, 2017. That means that in ten days, this jerk will become the leader of the free world. It still feels surreal to me. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. As a reminder, in the original post I tried to give a "back of a napkin" answer to this question: What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016? Today I'd like to take a stab at the (early) 2017 answer to that question. MORE
Free trials are a great marketing tactic. Everyone loves free. Signing up for one is easy. A first name here, an email address there, and you have access. But as a business owner, there’s a massive gap between getting names and getting dollars. How many free trial users end up as paying customers? Depends on your conversion model: A Totango study in 2012 found an average of 50% when a credit card was required for the free trial, but only 15% when a credit card wasn’t necessary. MORE
As a sales leader, you’re only as good as your team, and it starts by managing a team effectively. It’s important to create a process to systematize the way your reps generate, manage and close opportunities. To encourage the right behaviors, you must provide evidence that shows your process is effective, and straightforward. MORE
Intro Many potentially great companies fail each year because, while they have an incredible product, they don’t figure out how to get it to market fast enough. Figuring out how to reach customers and break through to Product-Market-Fit remains one of the hardest parts of building a successful startup. This post introduces a four stage. Startup Help PMF product market fit SaaS sales Sales and Marketing MORE
For the last 6 months or so I've been working on my own SaaS start-up, Outseta. Most of my time to date has been spent on content marketing, in an effort to build a relevant audience of early stage SaaS businesses prior to our product launching later this year. After several years of leading marketing teams, I found myself once again in the familiar position of being a sole contributor. I am our marketing team. MORE
I’ve seen hundreds of startup pitch decks in my time at Matrix, and have found total addressable market (TAM) slides to be among the most frequently mis-executed. I get the sense they are often included as a formality in an attempt to get VCs to check a mental box and continue on hearing about other. Getting Funded Startup Help Business Model Funding SaaS TAM TAM slide Total Addressable Market Venture capital MORE
If you think your customers subscribe to your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution only because they love the features or the price, think again. Of course, customers look at the solution’s features, the fact that it’s easy to use, or the attractive price… but that’s not all they look at. They’re also figuring out if they can trust you. MORE
No matter how long the list of amazing features you offer, if you’re marketing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, that’s not all you’ve got to sell. You should be talking about the “non-feature” pieces as well. If not, you’re underselling your solution. That’s because prospects are usually thinking about more than just features when they’re evaluating a solution. They’ve got other questions that you need to address: Can the solution be implemented successfully? MORE
InsightSquared
DECEMBER 29, 2017
There are different uses of cement such as to make cement mortar, cement concrete which are used in various types of masonry and concrete structures. Building Materials Building Technology Guide Buildings Cement
For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
DECEMBER 6, 2017
I’ve seen hundreds of startup pitch decks in my time at Matrix, and have found total addressable market (TAM) slides to be among the most frequently mis-executed. I get the sense they are often included as a formality in an attempt to get VCs to check a mental box and continue on hearing about other. Getting Funded Startup Help Business Model Funding SaaS TAM TAM slide Total Addressable Market Venture capital
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Hitenism
JANUARY 6, 2017
It was 2008, and I was having a classic founder moment. I had no idea what I was doing. But at least I was doing! I was founding a SaaS business, KISSmetrics. Like any startup, we were flailing, failing, and on fire, all at the same time. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. I was in charge of product development, operations, finance, funding, and probably 44 other things. At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 18, 2017
Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend a lot of time with so far. I usually just “OK” them, since the founders we are working with are all super reasonable people who carefully weigh how much they need against the interests of the company – their company. But sometimes founders ask me for a suggestion or some guidance because they are uncertain as to what is fair, and so I thought it might be useful to create a simple model. Here it is.
Advertiser: Heap
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Totango
OCTOBER 14, 2017
Customer Health Score takes multiple dimensions of customer data metrics and classifies them into a single representation of green, yellow or red. It is a consolidation of all the information the company has about the customer, from all probes, people and systems, past and current. Companies use customer health to speed up and scale communication, prioritization, decision making and forecasting of their customer success operations.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
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Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
Over the past 12 months I’ve invested considerable time thinking about, experimenting with and optimising my daily routine. I relish figuring out new ways to become more efficient and better at my work. There’s a limited number of hours in the working week, so the challenge is to use our time so that we not only produce our best work, but also clearly understand what’s going to have the biggest impact. Despite what you may think, productivity is a perennial, rather a millennial challenge.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 4, 2017
No matter how long the list of amazing features you offer, if you’re marketing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, that’s not all you’ve got to sell. You should be talking about the “non-feature” pieces as well. If not, you’re underselling your solution. That’s because prospects are usually thinking about more than just features when they’re evaluating a solution. They’ve got other questions that you need to address: Can the solution be implemented successfully?
Sales Hacker
NOVEMBER 7, 2017
I run a European based sales agency for software and technology companies. In this article, I will summarize what I’ve learned about the most important ingredients for a successful outbound sales process. The Key to Outbound Sales Success – Understand the Problems & Pain You Are Solving With Your Product. Sounds basic and redundant, I know. But we often present our product as a solution. Be frank! What solution? And for what problem/pain/need?
Entrepreneur - SaaS
APRIL 21, 2017
How hiring our first salesperson led me to recognize that cluelessness is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Make More Happen
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
The fight to find new customers and retain existing ones is the biggest business challenge for many companies. Technology will continue to play a part in fostering buyer allegiance and building brands in the “new normal.” In 2021, as companies continue to move more functions online, employees will take a more virtual -- and flexible -- mindset and lifestyle in parallel to the digitization of businesses. To succeed, you must change the way you conceive and build new products as a digital business. Download the report today to discover more!
Tomasz Tunguz
JANUARY 26, 2017
Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. In 2010, classic SaaS was booming, the benefits of a subscription model were finally becoming clear to the public markets and the mass-market. Since then, many other types of software businesses have been created in new categories like agriculture technology and robotics. Which of these markets are growing the fastest for investment dollars?
InsightSquared
DECEMBER 11, 2017
As a sales leader, you’re only as good as your team, and it starts by managing a team effectively. It’s important to create a process to systematize the way your reps generate, manage and close opportunities. To encourage the right behaviors, you must provide evidence that shows your process is effective, and straightforward.
For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
DECEMBER 13, 2017
Intro Many potentially great companies fail each year because, while they have an incredible product, they don’t figure out how to get it to market fast enough. Figuring out how to reach customers and break through to Product-Market-Fit remains one of the hardest parts of building a successful startup. This post introduces a four stage. Startup Help PMF product market fit SaaS sales Sales and Marketing
Hitenism
JANUARY 9, 2017
Building a company is a lot like trying to predict the future. You’re looking through a crystal ball to see where the market is moving, and how you can adapt your product accordingly. You have limited cash, which means that you only have a finite amount of time and resources to scale your business. The longer you take to make decisions about your company, the more time and money you burn. Optimizing your startup for speed is the only way to keep your head above the water.
Speaker: Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant, Rothman Consulting Group
Join Johanna Rothman, Author and Consultant, for her session that will discuss why instead of designing for the users, CTOs and their teams should collaborate with empowered users to create a great product together.
The Angel VC
JANUARY 10, 2017
Today is January 10, 2017. That means that in ten days, this jerk will become the leader of the free world. It still feels surreal to me. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. As a reminder, in the original post I tried to give a "back of a napkin" answer to this question: What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016? Today I'd like to take a stab at the (early) 2017 answer to that question.
Totango
SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
Zendesk is a family of products that helps companies manage the entire customer lifecycle in different ways. They are on a scale that is uncommon for B2B companies, with a $350M run rate, 90K paying customers, and an additional 50-100K free or trial customers at any given time.
A Smart Bear
OCTOBER 17, 2017
Forget work/life integration for a minute. How much time do you have, regardless of partitioning? From your 24-hour daily allotment, the 1950s-style break-down is 8 hours for work, 8 for home and commute, and 8 for sleep and ablutions. So, “work” and “home” are the two things in which you can spend 40+ hours per week. This is the amount of time it takes to tackle something huge. A career. A parent. A startup.
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
DECEMBER 4, 2017
Without doubt, one of the most exciting parts of being a marketer today is the perpetual challenge of finding new channels and tactics to leverage. There’s a whole host of marketing arbitrage opportunities out there - if you know where to look and spend your time. Identifying opportunities that we think will create business value is not only a lot of fun, it's key to driving future growth. For that reason, organisations need to invest in the discovery and cultivation of such opportunities.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 7, 2017
If you think your customers subscribe to your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution only because they love the features or the price, think again. Of course, customers look at the solution’s features, the fact that it’s easy to use, or the attractive price… but that’s not all they look at. They’re also figuring out if they can trust you.
Sales Hacker
NOVEMBER 2, 2017
Free trials are a great marketing tactic. Everyone loves free. Signing up for one is easy. A first name here, an email address there, and you have access. But as a business owner, there’s a massive gap between getting names and getting dollars. How many free trial users end up as paying customers? Depends on your conversion model: A Totango study in 2012 found an average of 50% when a credit card was required for the free trial, but only 15% when a credit card wasn’t necessary.
Think Strategies
NOVEMBER 11, 2017
Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they are going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage going forward. Yet, many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. These executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting the new generation of cloud-based applications and services that make the digital enterprise possible.
SaaS Growth Strategy
JUNE 1, 2017
For the last 6 months or so I've been working on my own SaaS start-up, Outseta. Most of my time to date has been spent on content marketing, in an effort to build a relevant audience of early stage SaaS businesses prior to our product launching later this year. After several years of leading marketing teams, I found myself once again in the familiar position of being a sole contributor. I am our marketing team.
Advertiser: Heap
In this workbook, you’ll find a comprehensive set of templates product development and cross-functional teams can adopt to better leverage your existing skills and your data.
InsightSquared
OCTOBER 16, 2017
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. I get asked, “What should I look for when hiring someone for Sales Operations?” or “What skills should I have to break into Sales Operations?” a lot. Thinking about the best and worst Sales Operations professionals I’ve worked with over the years, I’ve come up with four skills that the best have and the worst lack.
For Entrepreneurs with David Skok
NOVEMBER 28, 2017
I gave a talk this year at the 2017 SaaS North conference in Ottawa, where I discuss the fundamentals of building a repeatable, scalable, & profitable growth process for a startup. Building a Repeatable, Scalable & Profitable Growth Process [View on Slideshare]. Startup Help Business Model Growth SaaS SaaS business Sales & Marketing Machine
Hitenism
APRIL 24, 2017
Back in 2010, on a Monday at 5 PM, I found myself at a bar called Memphis in Southern California in a heated discussion with two close friends. Patrick Vlaskovits was cheerfully drinking a mint julep while Sean Ellis and I were each enjoying a cold beer. At the time, Patrick was working on a startup and a book. Sean was advising a handful of high-growth tech startups including Dropbox, Eventbrite and my own company, KISSmetrics.
The Angel VC
JULY 5, 2017
In the first part of this post , I looked at what some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry said about Product/Market Fit (PMF) and how they try to define and measure it. While everybody seems to agree on the broad concept of PMF there is (unsurprisingly) no consensus on how exactly it can be defined and measured, and some people set the bar much higher than others.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
In our 24-criterion evaluation of B2B marketing data providers, we identified the 11 most significant vendors — Data Axle, Dun & Bradstreet, Enlyft, Global Database, InsideView, Leadspace, Oracle, SMARTe, Spiceworks Ziff Davis, TechTarget, and ZoomInfo Technologies — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps B2B marketing professionals select the right one for their needs.
Totango
SEPTEMBER 27, 2017
Today’s customer success executives are being challenged to use unprecedented amounts of customer data to build more predictable revenue outcomes and run more efficient operations. That’s on top of their existing efforts to manage an entire customer base. If you are a VP of Customer Success, it is time to go beyond defining strategy and start ensuring the execution of your strategy across the organization.
The SaaS CFO
DECEMBER 8, 2017
Net negative churn occurs when your expansion revenue from existing customers totals more than your lost revenue from existing customers. This SaaS metric does not factor in any revenue from new customers, just existing customers. As Nathan Latka puts it in his “The Top” podcast, this is the holy grail of SaaS. Your recurring revenue […]. The post What is Net Negative Churn in SaaS appeared first on The SaaS CFO. Churn Nathan Latka Net Negative Churn
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
NOVEMBER 28, 2017
The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes - strategic communication is an integral part of successful sales enablement. Communication matters in business. And the success (or failure) of a sales enablement function is intertwined with its ability to influence a sales organisation and change behaviour. While it may not be immediately apparent, communicating well with and managing stakeholders is a prerequisite for successful sales enablement.
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