April, 2017

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A Tale of Two Go To Market Strategies

Tom Tunguz

There are approximately 22 million trucks in the US. Many of these trucks run software to track the location of the vehicle, manage inventory, and comply with regulation. There are two SaaS companies operating at greater than $100M in ARR in the space and they illustrate one of the mantras on this blog: there are many different ways to build a SaaS company.

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Why startups should hire an HR person sooner rather than later

The Angel VC

At the excellent SaaStr Annual 2016 conference about a year ago, a very experienced SaaS CEO said on stage that an internal recruiter can be a startup CEO’s secret superpower. I couldn’t agree more, and I think startups should make that hire sooner rather than later. If you can hire only one or two handful of people with your seed round, hiring anybody who doesn’t either code or sell is hard to justify.

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The Five Phases of Sales Enablement Maturity

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

Sales enablement is a rapidly emerging, but immature function. Many companies are investing in the creation of sales enablement teams, but as they’re so new, there’s a distinct lack of thought leadership, standardised measurement and best practices available. Subsequently, people often (and understandably) struggle to fully grasp the function. This fuels ambiguity about what sales enablement is and the value it creates for a business.

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Why Being Clueless Can Be a Great Thing

Entrepreneur - SaaS

How hiring our first salesperson led me to recognize that cluelessness is at the heart of entrepreneurship.

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The Next Evolution in Subscriptions and Recurring Payments

Rise to the next level of recurring revenue. Discover how recurring payments are reshaping industries beyond simple subscriptions, driving a $1.5 trillion market. Learn the crucial strategies for building scalable, secure, and seamless recurring payment infrastructure to boost customer retention and fuel growth.

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3 Ways to Waste Your Marketing Budget

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

I’ll admit it. Over my long career marketing all kinds of technology solutions, I’ve run a few marketing campaigns that flopped: events that attracted no real prospects, email campaigns that generated no serious leads, promotions that drew no response from prospective customers. It happens. And I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone among my marketing brethren.

Marketing 100

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The Asset Allocator in Chief

Tom Tunguz

At a recent board meeting, a CEO said, “This experiment will cost $250,000 to run. After three months, we will know whether our new go-to-market strategy is viable.” There’s a brilliance this type of framing. By quantifying the cost of the experiment, the CEO frames company prioritization as asset allocation. What is asset allocation?

Startup 139
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Why Every Saas Company Should Try Concierge Onboarding

Sujan Patel

Selling a SaaS product is HARD. I know – I’ve been there – both as a buyer and a seller. Consumers are spoiled by having so many choices, and getting noticed among the competition is really tough. Even if you get someone to visit your site and try out your product, the battle has only […]. The post Why Every Saas Company Should Try Concierge Onboarding appeared first on Sujan Patel.

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Free book: The Follow-up Formula: How to Get Everything You Want by Doing What Nobody Else Does

CloseSaaS

The follow-up bible has arrived! Grab your free copy of The Follow-up Formula: How to Get Everything You Want by Doing What Nobody Else Does.

B2B 52
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In 5 Min Combine all Advertising Reports

Rakam

We were aware the spend hours for a single acquisition or advertising report sort of a waste time, instead you might use that time for different purposes. That’s why now you can create any kind of advertising report based on your needs. Therefore you are able to create your own dashboards based on your KPI’s as well. Monitor performance of campaigns in a single dashboard, and any data can be layered with other sources like Stripe, Intercom and Google Analytics for a deeper understanding of campa

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Struggling to Scale Test Coverage Under Pressure?

When test coverage falls behind release velocity, quality suffers, and your team feels the consequences. This guide outlines when it makes sense to outsource quality assurance (QA), the risks to watch for, and how to scale testing without increasing headcount or slowing down engineering. You will learn how leading teams are leveraging external QA partners to expand coverage, enhance defect detection, and remain aligned with CI/CD timelines.

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Ixia goes native to build its cloud visibility solution

Network World

Earlier this month Ixia announced an update to its CloudLens product where it could now provide visibility into public clouds. Ixia wasn’t the first packet broker vendors to roll out a solution that extends the visibility infrastructure to the cloud. That honor goes to Gigamon, which announced the general availability of its visibility platform for Amazon Web Services.

Cloud 40
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3 Major Recommendation Algorithm Mistakes Fortune 500 Companies Make

ReSci

Several recommendation algorithms power email-marketing campaigns as well as on-site product recommendations. With Amazon’s success in driving revenue and engagement from product recommendations, several companies leverage these algorithms to cross-sell/up-sell products to users. The data science team at Retention Science has helped power onsite/app and.

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Startup Best Practices 25 - Bounding the Unknown Unknowns

Tom Tunguz

Intel’s Business Plan. Every once in a while, I receive a FedEx from an entrepreneur I haven’t met. Inevitably, this mail contains a modern rarity - a business plan. Ten to twenty pages describing the idea, the genesis, the business model, the team and its structure, customer acquisition strategy, sales model and other key details of the business.

Startup 128
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Growth hacking was invented with a mint julep and two beers

Hitenism

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.

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Signal-Based Selling: How to Leverage 4 Key Buying Signals

As prospects define their problem, search for solutions, and even change jobs, they are generating high-value signals that the best go-to-market teams can leverage to close more deals. This is where signal-based selling comes into play. ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck recently broke down specific ways to put four key buying signals into action with the experts from 30 Minutes to President’s Club.

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NYC Enterprise Sales Forum: Fireside Chat with Steli Efti

CloseSaaS

Steli recently gave an interview at the NYC Enterprise Sales Forum, a community for B2B sales professionals involved in complex sales cycles. Whether you’re doing enterprise sales or not, you'll still get value out of listening.

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How You Battle the "Data Wheel of Death" in Growth

Brian Balfour

This is the Data Wheel of Death: Data Isn’t Constantly Maintained -> Data Becomes Irrelevant / Flawed -> People Lose Trust -> They Use Data Less If the above looks familiar, you’re not alone. I estimate that greater than ? of data efforts at companies fail. This is trouble because data plays a key horizontal role in the growth process and mindset.

Data 62
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Ixia goes native to build its cloud visibility solution

Network World

Earlier this month Ixia announced an update to its CloudLens product where it could now provide visibility into public clouds. Ixia wasn’t the first packet broker vendors to roll out a solution that extends the visibility infrastructure to the cloud. That honor goes to Gigamon, which announced the general availability of its visibility platform for Amazon Web Services.

Cloud 40
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Loyalty Prime Amongst The Five Munich-based Startups Which “deutsche statups Will Definitely Keep An Eye On”

The SaaS Garage

5 Münchner Start-ups, die wir definitiv im Auge behalten. by Alexander Hüsing, Thuesday, 4. April 2017. München ist immer eine Start-up-Reise weit. In der Isar-Metropole tummeln sich einige große und bekannte junge Digitalunternehmen. Einige haben aber noch mehr Aufmerksamkeit verdienst. Hier deswegen einmal 5 junge und ältere Münchner Start-ups, die wir definitiv im Auge behalten. .

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Apache Airflow® Best Practices: DAG Writing

Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

In this new webinar, Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate, will walk you through many Airflow best practices and advanced features that can help you make your pipelines more manageable, adaptive, and robust. She'll focus on how to write best-in-class Airflow DAGs using the latest Airflow features like dynamic task mapping and data-driven scheduling!

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A Spike of Venture Debt in Startups

Tom Tunguz

Instead of raising an equity round, a startup might choose to borrow money - and for good reason. Venture debt dilutes founders much less than equity rounds. Low interest rates have increased the attractiveness of venture debt, because the cost to borrow is low. Venture debt is an attractive financial product. No wonder it has grown in popularity by 16x in the in the last six years.

Startup 114
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My Algorithm is Better than Yours

Tom Tunguz

My algorithm is better than yours. My algorithm performs better on the precision/recall tradeoffs. It surfaces fewer false positives. It converges to an answer faster. Perhaps it requires a bit less data. Those statements might all be true. But none of these advantages confer a competitive sales advantage in the market. They aren’t technology innovations leading to a go-to-market advantage.

Scale 100
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When Machine Learning Just Isn't Enough

Tom Tunguz

At SaaStr earlier this year, I spoke about the huge potential of machine learning in SaaS. In that talk, I broke down some of the advances in ML that might be useful for software companies. In the discussion that ensued, I stressed the importance of not letting the technology obfuscate the value proposition of the software. Yes, ML is a huge step forward, but it’s not enough by itself.

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The Four Dimensions of a Demand Generation Portfolio

Tom Tunguz

After a startup establishes product market fit, scaling demand generation becomes the the next major challenge. Doubling or tripling ARR each year for several consecutive years is not easy. The best marketers create a demand generation portfolio. There are four axes to measure this portfolio: scale of investment, sophistication, breadth and potential.

Scale 100
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Usage-Based Monetization Musts: A Roadmap for Sustainable Revenue Growth

Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O'Neill Stoll

Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng

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Managing a User's Trust with Machine Learning SaaS Software

Tom Tunguz

There’s no quicker way to lose a user or buyer of your software than to lose their trust. The software didn’t save my data. The database suffered corruption. The website is down frequently. Data integrity is a challenge every company storing data faces. Machine learning SaaS startups face another trust risk – one introduced by probability.

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Benchmarking Cloudera's S-1 - How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up

Tom Tunguz

Cloudera is the second of the Hadoop players to go public. Last week, the company filed their S-1 and revealed a massive business. Cloudera generated $261M in revenue, counts 500 clients and grows those accounts by 43% annually. 18% of their customers run Cloudera software in the cloud, a surprisingly large number. Hortonworks is Cloudera’s chief competitor.

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13 ridiculous sales hiring mistakes even smart sales leaders make (and how to fix them)

CloseSaaS

Here’s a simple truth: The world has too many mediocre salespeople, and not enough great ones. Which makes hiring the great ones really, really difficult.

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10 bad habits that make sales reps less productive

CloseSaaS

“One difference between the Top 10% and the Top 1% is the very top are extremely efficient with their time.” — Jason Lemkin, SaaStr Ever struggle to turn inspiration into action?

Sales 52
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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?

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Price negotiations: How to respond when a competing vendor underbids you

CloseSaaS

You’ve put yourself in an enviable position as a salesperson. Over the course of several weeks or months you’ve worked hard to qualify a prospect, familiarize him with your product and build a relationship.

Pricing 52
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Customize your Phone settings on the fly with the new Phone Settings Popover

CloseSaaS

Spring has arrived, and so has a list of new features and improvements to Close.

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How the best sales software DOUBLES productivity instead of running it into the ground

CloseSaaS

Companies purchase sales software primarily with strategy in mind. They want to collect data that will help inform the business’ evolving strategy and drive long-term growth.