The Angel VC

MARCH 3, 2015

Growth is the single biggest determinant of startup valuations at IPO , as my fellow SaaS investor Tomasz Tunguz concluded based on an analysis of 25 IPOs in 2013. Growth (a.k.a. traction) is also the most important factor that attracts VCs and drives valuations in private financing rounds. Of course your team, product, technology, business model and market matter too, but when you’re past the seed stage the expectation is that these factors will have resulted in excellent growth.

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Compensation Business Model Startup Benchmarks 185

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 2, 2015

A few weeks ago, I joined Mike Volpe, CMO of Hubspot, on the Growth Show where we had a great time talking about a few SaaS topics. A few listeners to the podcast picked a line from that podcast that I think is a really important point for content marketing. I said, “Content is one of the few forms of marketing that has a compounding return.” Like a bank account that starts out small and earns incremental gains, but over time becomes quite large, content marketing efforts require con

Content Marketing 158

Content Marketing Marketing Banking Investment 158

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MARCH 7, 2015

It wasn’t that long ago that just describing your application as a "software-as-a-service (SaaS)," or saying that it ran “in the cloud” was enough to get attention. Companies like salesforce.com and a few other pioneers could differentiate themselves largely by saying they weren’t traditional on-premises software. 'Why buy applications built on old technology when you can buy solutions built on new technology?

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SaaS Cloud Finance Technology 113

ReSci

MARCH 31, 2015

Whether or not you're a fan of sugary pop princess Taylor Swift's music, one thing can't be denied: the woman is a pro at retaining her customers. Did I say customers? I meant fans. Or Swifties, as they prefer to be called. Swift has always been canny about building her brand, and…. The post Retention Marketing Tips from Taylor Swift appeared first on ReSci.

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Retention Marketing Branding Social Media 59

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For SaaS businesses, improving retention is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive revenue and profits. With a clear link between failed payments and customer churn, having a robust failed payment recovery solution isn’t optional—it’s essential. Achieving your retention goals starts with the right solution.

Payment Solutions

CloseSaaS

MARCH 30, 2015

Everybody who wants to be great at sales needs to master one skill: the art of listening.The better you become at listening, the more you sell.

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The Angel VC

MARCH 14, 2015

In the last few weeks I talked to two entrepreneurs who both recently made a hire that didn't work out. In both cases I asked how the reference calls went, and in both cases the answer was that they hadn't done any before hiring the candidate. This made me almost angry, especially because the two entrepreneurs are fantastic founders who could have saved themselves from this costly mistake by following a simple rule: Don't hire people without taking references.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2015

Leads are the lifeblood of every SaaS company. As a SaaS startup grows, the limiting factor of the business quickly becomes demand generation. Can the marketing team generate enough leads for the inside sales team to attain their monthly quota? The Marketing team’s mandate is to generate these leads in a cost-effective way and develop a portfolio of lead-generation mechanisms.

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Scale Marketing SaaS Content Marketing 133

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 25, 2015

Whether implicitly or explicitly, it’s critical for a startup to map out accounts to understand the purchasing dynamics of a buyer. When sales teams start selling, their goal should be to create the sales playbook. The playbook all begins with understanding the key dynamics among the five players in the sales process. These are the five people: The Proponent of the Sale champions the sales.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 4, 2015

After writing about the Seed Market in 2015 , I wondered whether I could find some data to support Sam Altman’s observation that acquihires have fallen in frequency over the past year by 66-75%. The chart above shows an estimate of the acquihires in US technology companies over the past four years. There is no perfect data set on acquihires because many of these transactions are never announced.

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Startup Trends Marketing Technical Review 113

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Payment Solutions

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 9, 2015

There’s a magical property to the classic sales funnel SaaS startups use to evaluate the effectiveness of their go-to-market organizations: an increase in effectiveness at any stage of a sales funnel cascades through to the end funnel. But improvements to the early parts of the funnel are more important than those later in the funnel, because they meaningfully improve key SaaS metrics like cost-of-customer acquisition and pay-back period.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 31, 2015

Every morning, it seems like a startup raises a massive growth round. In fact, the data proves the point. In 2014, there were 251 working days and 211 $40M+ growth rounds - just about one per day. In contrast to the frenetic private market, there were 15 US IT venture-backed IPOs with offerings greater than $40M last year, slightly more one IPO per month in 2014.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 29, 2015

Like most things in a startup, a sales commission plan should evolve as the company scales. For example, as Mark Roberge, CRO of Hubspot, wrote in The Sales Acceleration Formula , Hubspot adopted three different sales compensation plans throughout its early evolution which embody the three key ingredients of a sales compensation plan. Hubspot’s first sales plan paid $2 of commission for every $1 of MRR an account executive booked.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 23, 2015

If you want to understand how to build a great SaaS sales organization, you should read Mark Roberge’s The Sales Acceleration Formula. It’s the single best book on the topic. Mark is the Chief Revenue Office at Hubspot, a company which has created tremendous success by perfecting the inbound marketing plus sales model. The book is invaluable for every founder, CEO and member of the management team because it not only explains how the Hubspot sales team is structured, but why the stru

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Sales Hiring Sales SaaS Construction 100

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

Revenue

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 21, 2015

In 2.5 years, Adobe has transformed its business from a software license business into a SaaS business. It’s been a remarkable transition, and one not talked about very much in the SaaS world. Transitions from licensed software to SaaS are rare. The travel and expense management behemoth, Concur, recently acquired by SAP for $8.3B , is another great example that made the transition first from CD-ROM packaged software, then to enterprise license software and then to SaaS.

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SaaS Travel Education Software 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2015

Over the last 15 months, the typical high growth public SaaS company’s multiple has halved. The chart above plots the average enterprise value to forward revenue multiple for established SaaS companies and high growth SaaS companies. High growth companies peaked in February last year at about 22x forward revenues and have fallen to 11x on March 1, 2015.

Marketing 100

Marketing SaaS Investment Pricing 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 15, 2015

Every SaaS company should be focused on mitigating churn because greater retention enables a business to grow far more rapidly , to reduce the cost of customer acquisition , and to slash the amount of capital required for the business to grow. But there’s one additional reason to focus on churn: predictability. The more dollar churn a business creates, the less predictable its performance - and vice versa.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 12, 2015

In a recent survey, 40% of VCs pointed to SaaS as the startup sector most likely to be impacted by a market correction. There’s no question that the early stage SaaS founders are benefiting from substantial multiple expansion and pre-money valuation increases. But I was curious about how widespread aggressive investments are in software companies.

Marketing 100

Marketing SaaS Investment Startup 100

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Enterprise

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 10, 2015

When you walk into Looker’s offices , the first thing you’ll see are the surfboards standing in a corner, still sandy from a morning’s outing. Looking around, you’ll notice the sunny outdoor patio where a chef once made enough paella in one enormous paellera for Looker’s 100 employees, and you might sit at the long tables where they shared the feast.

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Engineering Startup SaaS Business 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 5, 2015

Over the past four years, the amount of seed investment has increased by more than 200%. And the typical seed investment size has risen by 25% in just the last 12 months. In 2014, for the first time in four years, median Series A round size have increased. When we analyzed the data last year, this wasn’t the case. But in 2014, the median Series A hit $6.8M, increasing 14% over the trailing three year average.

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Startup Investment Pricing Data 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 1, 2015

The seed stage investment market feels like it’s changing quickly. Last year and the year before, the institutional seed investor came to the fore. These firms raised between $5 and $75M to invest in seed stage companies. In addition, VCs have been participating in the seed stage market as well, making 2013 a banner year for seed investment. Startups raised 132% more in seed rounds than in 2012.

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CloseSaaS

MARCH 27, 2015

I recently had the honor of doing a 500 Startups fireside chat to share some sales hacks with a group of awesome founders.

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Startup Sales 52

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali

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.

Trends

CloseSaaS

MARCH 25, 2015

“Brilliant!” That’s what I thought when I heard Kevin sell this deal. He was giving a product demo to a prospect, but in a way I’ve never heard of before, and it ultimately helped to make the sale. If you're looking for ways to demo your product more effectively, keep reading.

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Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MARCH 24, 2015

This is a guest post by Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures. Check out his great blog on SaaS marketing, customer acquisition & churn reduction. When it comes to sales hustle, Steli is the man. He’s taught us about thepower of the follow-upandturning failed demos into sales.

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CloseSaaS

MARCH 23, 2015

Self-service. Oh, show me a SaaS founder who doesn’t love self-service customers. They find your product through word of mouth, inbound marketing or partnerships. They eagerly sign up for your trial. Automatically convert into paying customers.

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SaaS Sales Marketing 52

CloseSaaS

MARCH 20, 2015

Our very own ace of sales, Kevin, recently did a webinar for early-stage startup founders. If you want to know how to get your first customer, then this is for you.

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Startup Sales 52

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.

Artificial Intelligence

CloseSaaS

MARCH 18, 2015

I hate failing. I hate failing publicly even more. Yet, I do it all the time, and so should you if you’re managing a sales team.

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CloseSaaS

MARCH 17, 2015

Here's a guest post from Patrick McKenzie [[link] He published this epic piece on how to move upmarket from a low-touch sales SaaS into a more rigorous sales process back in December to his subscribers.

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Software SaaS Sales 52

CloseSaaS

MARCH 16, 2015

One of the most difficult things I ever had to do as a CEO was to fire half of my team.

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