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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
Selling to c-level executives is a different ball game. You have to be concise, respectful of their time, and really think about how to differentiate yourself in order to break through the clutter and earn the right to ask for something. Here is a message to sellers from a real c-level buyer: Outbound tactics without strategy are sheer lunacy. We must lead with an insight-driven value narrative (‘hypothesis of value’), otherwise hammering away in blended channels is worthless. 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
Every company, especially a large enterprise, builds an organizational structure around their customer operations. Whether by region, product, vertical, or any other business parameter they define, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are broken into teams to give them focus, tailored processes, and specific metrics that make sense for their line of business. 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
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
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
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
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
How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? This is a very nuanced question, but benchmarks do provide some guidance for what is reasonable. Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity. 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
It's the middle of January, which means most companies are fresh off of their annual planning processes and are a couple of weeks into their assault on their newly minted goals. For SaaS marketers, lead projections and conversion rate goals swim through our heads. A new year always brings with it new marketing projects, new marketing channels to test, new growth strategies to employ. Maybe your company underperformed last year. 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.
Speaker: Robin Zaragoza, Product Coach and CEO of The Product Refinery
Join Robin Zaragoza, product coach and CEO of The Product Refinery, as she shares tips on how to create a powerful Value Proposition that keeps your customer at the heart of your product development process.
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.
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.
Sales Hacker
DECEMBER 18, 2017
Selling to c-level executives is a different ball game. You have to be concise, respectful of their time, and really think about how to differentiate yourself in order to break through the clutter and earn the right to ask for something. Here is a message to sellers from a real c-level buyer: Outbound tactics without strategy are sheer lunacy. We must lead with an insight-driven value narrative (‘hypothesis of value’), otherwise hammering away in blended channels is worthless.
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?
Tomasz Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 16, 2017
How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? This is a very nuanced question, but benchmarks do provide some guidance for what is reasonable. Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity.
Speaker: Nickey Skarstad, Director of Product at Duolingo
Join Nickey Skarstad, Director of Product at Duolingo, as she discusses why it’s important to actively gather customer feedback, how to build customer feedback loops into your product planning, the best ways to decipher different types of feedback, and different frameworks for how/when to apply feedback processes.
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.
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.
Advertiser: Data Robot
In March 2020, the world was hit with an unprecedented crisis when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. This whitepaper reviews lessons learned from applying AI to the pandemic’s response efforts, and insights to mitigating the next pandemic.
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.
SaaS Growth Strategy
JANUARY 17, 2017
It's the middle of January, which means most companies are fresh off of their annual planning processes and are a couple of weeks into their assault on their newly minted goals. For SaaS marketers, lead projections and conversion rate goals swim through our heads. A new year always brings with it new marketing projects, new marketing channels to test, new growth strategies to employ. Maybe your company underperformed last year.
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.
Speaker: Ramli John, Managing Director at ProductLed and Author
Let’s face it. Today’s users are impulsive and easily distracted. They don’t have the time (or patience) to try and figure things out by themselves. They expect the product to be intuitive. Easy. And fast. Add to that a few, unfairly poor reviews and you’ll be more than just stuck. Ramli will share a simple but powerful framework to get more users to experience a product’s "Eureka!" moment and turn them into lifelong customers.
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?
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.
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
Totango
OCTOBER 2, 2017
Every company, especially a large enterprise, builds an organizational structure around their customer operations. Whether by region, product, vertical, or any other business parameter they define, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are broken into teams to give them focus, tailored processes, and specific metrics that make sense for their line of business.
Speaker: Bruce McCarthy, Co-Author of Product Roadmaps Relaunched and Founder of Product Culture
Join Bruce McCarthy, co-author of Product Roadmaps Relaunched, as he discusses the best ways to innovate your product roadmap. So that it reflects your customers’ needs while simultaneously and accurately communicating your products strategy and vision.
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: Data Robot
Manufacturers want to deliver the best products on the market as quickly and ethically as possible. Learn how to solve your most urgent manufacturing and business needs with an enterprise AI platform.
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
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.
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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