April, 2020

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Wartime SaaS Forecasting: Fighting Uncertainty by Accounting for Unknowns

Chart Mogul

In an environment marked by a global pandemic and market volatility, advocating for SaaS forecasting seems like a lost cause. But Matt Wensing argues that it is even more important now to chart a path for the road ahead to provide guidance for employees, stakeholders, and shareholders. Ben Horowitz teaches us the traits of peacetime and wartime CEO’s.

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Marketing During Coronavirus: 8 Ways SaaS Companies Reacted to the Pandemic

Incredo

Almost all industries witness decline in revenue because of the coronavirus crisis. And SaaS companies aren’t exceptions. But human nature and the will to move forward help companies even in the hardest times to come up with creative initiatives to spread the word about their companies. We interviewed tens of SaaS companies worldwide to understand what special campaigns they launched or how they tried to help people in general.

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The SaaS Year of Hell. And Then – Reignition.

SaaStr

I wrote an early SaaStr post way back in 2013 on my “Year of Hell” as a SaaS CEO in 2008. In 2013, we were just 2 years removed from the real recovery from ’08-’09. And the one thing that was clear to me was that as hard as it was to see at the time, once we got out of our Year from Hell at Adobe Sign / EchoSign … things roared back.

Scale 330
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Subscription Businesses Prove Their Resilience (Surprise, Surprise)

Zuora

This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Every sector of the economy is being hit, and technology […]. The post Subscription Businesses Prove Their Resilience (Surprise, Surprise) appeared first on Zuora.

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An Omnichannel Payment Solution––Without the Complexity

Simplify omnichannel payments with a solution that unifies every channel through your platform. By integrating front-end systems like online, mobile, and in-store payments with robust back-end infrastructure, you can deliver a seamless payments experience without the need for heavy engineering. Omnitoken technology enhances security by tokenizing card transactions for reuse, enabling merchants to drive cross-selling opportunities.

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The Startup Sectors Most Impacted by the Coronavirus

Tom Tunguz

Which startup sectors are most affected by coronavirus? Roger Lee is maintaining Layoffs.fyi , which is a table of all the startups who have unfortunately cut staff. On the brighter side, it is a resource for startups looking to hire as they grow. Over the weekend, I analyzed Roger’s data to answer this question. First, let’s look at layoffs by day.

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The Subscription Economy: Doing What’s Right

Zuora

No one can predict a sudden change in the economic climate — it can happen anywhere, to any business, at […]. The post The Subscription Economy: Doing What’s Right appeared first on Zuora.

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SaaS Businesses Weather Hard Times by Focusing on Efficient Growth

Andreessen Horowitz

We’ve been in a bull market for over 11 years, and it has been all about growth for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Not only has the number of SaaS companies exploded, but companies like Slack, Zoom, and Shopify have grown into … The post SaaS Businesses Weather Hard Times by Focusing on Efficient Growth appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

SaaS 140
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Your Product Has to Be Easier to Buy Than to Use

SaaStr

In the last year we’ve been leveling up a lot of our systems at SaaStr, and as part of that, moving from a lot of self-service and simple products to more robust ones. Such is the way as you grow. And one thing I’ve been shocked about is how few sales processes have kept up. Pressure tactics, exploding discounts, 48-hour trials that end on you, us-vs-them pricing, are all still alive and well.

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Grow Something That Matters. Even If It Isn’t Revenue.

SaaStr

Times are tough for many of us now. What do you do, if half your customers have just gone out of business? If your growth has gone from 60% to 0% overnight? Well you can’t fix everything. And maybe — you can’t even grow your ARR. Some of you won’t be able to grow revenue at all for now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still grow.

Revenue 299
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How Clinic Sense Reduced Churn and Unlocked More Revenue

ClinicSense is a SaaS platform that supports over 7,000 massage therapists who use it for appointment management, payments, scheduling, marketing activities and more. Despite having a relatively low payment failure rate, the company discovered that the failures disrupted the customer experience. This often led to churn as customers decided to cancel or abandon their account, preventing ClinicSense from realizing the full lifetime value (LTV) of its users.

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A Pause is Better Than a Cancel. And A Downgrade is Not Churn.

SaaStr

Many of you will come under a lot of pressure these days to pause accounts, to downgrade accounts, and more. It’s challenging almost everywhere. And even where it isn’t, there are at least big pockets of customers under severe stress. Should you let folks easily downgrade? Should you let them even pause their account, and pick it up later when their business picks up?

Churn 261
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Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier

Kellblog

Many moons ago when I was young product marketing manager, I heard a new VP of Marketing speak at a marketing all-hands meeting. He spoke with a kiwi accent and his name was Chris Greendale. What he said were six words that changed my career: Marketing exists to make sales easier. While this has clearly been a theme in Kellblog posts over the years, I realized that I’ve actually never done a dedicated post on it, despite having written reductionist mission statement posts for both profes

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Offices Are Going to Get Smaller After This. Except Maybe for Salesteams.

SaaStr

Gartner recently did a survey of 317 CFOs and finance professionals, and found the vast majority plan to permanently shift to more remote work going forward. This doesn’t mean letting their loffice eases expire. It does mean cramming more folks into the same or even less space. The one exception seems to be sales teams. Only 8% of sales leadership planned to make related changes here.

Finance 302
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Best Dropshipping Companies

The Daily Egg

With ecommerce trends on the rise, dropshipping has quickly grown in popularity over the years. It’s an appealing alternative to traditional sales methods. Rather than buying inventory upfront, storing it, and shipping it to customers on your own, dropshipping makes it possible for you to sell online without ever touching your inventory. With dropshipping, the […].

Trends 361
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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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Why Margin Matters Now in Startupland

Tom Tunguz

Over the last decade, growth has been the winning card for startups to play. The faster the business grew, the higher its valuation. Margins didn’t matter much. Neither gross margin, nor net income margin weighed heavily on a company’s valuation unless they deviated grossly from norms. Today, runway ranks as the first consideration in evaluating a company’s strategy.

Travel 342
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Measuring performance the right way and working smart to peak productivity

Predictable Revenue

No sales team, or no sales process, is perfect. Even the most successful ones – there’s always something to fix, refine, or scrap altogether. Belal Betraway talks about measuring performance the right way and working smart to peak productivity. The post Measuring performance the right way and working smart to peak productivity appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Revenue 264
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Reading list: Advice for customer retention

Intercom, Inc.

We continue our series of posts looking back through the Inside Intercom archive with a selection of some of our most popular posts on customer retention. This has long been one of the most popular topics on Inside Intercom, and over the years we have examined retention from a number of different perspectives – from measuring net dollar retention to understanding activity churn; from cohort analysis to re-engagement messaging strategies. “Retaining customers will be more important for surv

Retention 245
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3 Simple Steps to Get Your First 10,000 Visitors from Google

Neil Patel

Today’s going to be fun. I’m going to make a bet with you that if you follow the 3 steps below, and you really follow them, you can get 10,000 visitors from Google. I promise it won’t be hard, but it will take time. And if you follow my steps and don’t get the results, hit me up and I will personally help you with your marketing. All I ask is you do it for 3 months straight.

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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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10 Things New Sales Reps Are Taught. That They Shouldn’t Be.

SaaStr

Q: What sales tactics that are taught to new salespeople bother you enough that you refuse to use them? A few that I think really do you a disservice in SaaS, especially before you have a huge brand: “Be careful of prospects that waste your time.” Yes, your time is precious in sales. But this is backwards. Almost no one wants to waste a salesperson’s time.

Sales 342
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The 13 Most Effective Ways to Increase your Conversion Rate

The Daily Egg

Website conversion rates average around 2 percent. For every 100 visitors, you can expect to only get 2 customers. And honestly, that’s a pretty good conversion rate. Many sites only have a 0.1 to 0.2% conversion rate. That takes 1000 visitors to get 1 customer. How do we improve our conversions so we can get […]. The post The 13 Most Effective Ways to Increase your Conversion Rate appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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What Customer Demand and Your Startup Balance Sheets Imply about Your Startup's Strategy

Tom Tunguz

Among the most useful frameworks I’ve found to manage a company in this era is the 2×2 matrix above. This matrix answers the question: what should the company’s stance be. It also raises the question: when should it change? One could argue times like these all good opportunities to adopt a defensive posture: focus on product, limit GTM hiring, and modulate burn.

Strategy 296
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The World of Sales Development is Changing

Predictable Revenue

n the not so distant past, many organizations, including Predictable Revenue, had very little difficulty generating sales meetings by sending routine, cold prospecting emails. But things are rapidly changing. The post The World of Sales Development is Changing appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

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Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, and Terrence Sheflin

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

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Navigating the surge: A customer support roundtable

Intercom, Inc.

Around the world, with offices closed and people staying at home, most of life is happening online now. That means brick-and-mortar shops are learning on the fly to take their businesses digital, and folks at home are pushing their utilities and SaaS products to the brink. It’s the perfect storm that produces a swell of people who need to get in touch with customer support.

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How to Build an Email List from Scratch (A Step-By-Step Guide)

Unbounce

We want to support you as much as we can during this uncertain time. Check out the COVID-19 Small Business Care Package for a roundup of useful resources—including tech discounts, government subsidies, and marketing tips to help lessen the impact on your business. If you’ve already got your first online store or landing page promotion set up , the next step is to get it in front of an audience.

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Is This The Beginning of the End of the Bay Area as The Global HQ of SaaS?

SaaStr

Things are so crazy right now, and beyond that, the pace of change is almost incomprehensible. Zoom has grown 20x in usage in a little more than a month. But at the same time, we added 6,000,000 new to the unemployment rolls. SaaS for some industries is being decimated in just a week or two. In other cases, unexpected upgrades and leads seem to come out of nowhere.

SaaS 326
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14 Best Website Visitor Tracking Software Tools (By Category)

The Daily Egg

Website visitor tracking can mean a lot of different things. We broke our list down into 3 common use cases—so you can find the tool you need fast. The post 14 Best Website Visitor Tracking Software Tools (By Category) appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Software 363
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Launching LLM-Based Products: From Concept to Cash in 90 Days

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

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Narrative Economics and the Power of Stories

Tom Tunguz

If I start a salacious tweetstorm that our local bank is running out of money, that rumor will circulate quickly. Eventually, the rumor will trigger a bank run. By tomorrow, the bank will face insolvency, even though it was business as usual at the bank this morning. This is the idea behind Narrative Economics. Robert Shiller wrote Narrative Economics , in which he explores how stories impact the economy.

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Unpacking the “Why” Behind Who You Should Hire Next with Amy Volas

Predictable Revenue

Amy discusses the context of why you should hire someone, how easy it is finding a potential hire’s digital footprint, and asking the right questions; why, how and what am I hiring for. The post Unpacking the “Why” Behind Who You Should Hire Next with Amy Volas appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Revenue 218
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Everything just changed: How to keep your customers at the center during turbulent times

Intercom, Inc.

As marketers, our job is to understand our customers – their hopes, their wants, their needs – and then communicate the value of our product in the context of their lives. But what do you do when everything is turned upside down? At SaaStr Summit , I spoke about how businesses can adapt during these uncertain times by focusing on customer impact. I shared how we’re navigating these big changes, from the immediate impacts on customers, to the implications for our marketing and product plans, and,