Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JANUARY 9, 2016

I know this is hard to believe, but sales people occasionally complain about marketing. And they usually moan about two things in particular: Not enough leads Poor quality leads I’ve seen this a lot, so I can tell you how lots of marketing people react. They focus on fixing the first item - generate more leads - but pretty much ignore the second - improve the quality.

Acquisition 113

Acquisition Compensation Education SaaS 113

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 12, 2016

How have public SaaS companies fared in the public markets over the past few years? It’s been mixed. Over this three year period, 32 of 50 companies are worth more today than they were either at IPO or at their trading price three years ago. Of the remaining 18, 7 of those companies went public in 2015. It was a tough year for SaaS companies to go public.

Startup 111

Startup Marketing Pricing Investment 111

Sylvia Ng

JANUARY 10, 2016

Looking for growth blogs? I don’t know about you, but I am sick of reading hokey growth hacks promising to increase your customer base from 0 to 1M in 60 seconds. So here are personal favorite 11 blogs, all ones from thought leaders that give practical advice on acquiring and retaining customers. Quality content with personal anecdotes, case studies, visuals and a mix of media that’ll satisfy your need for thought provoking reads. 11 Serious Growth Hacking / Marketing Blogs to Follo

Growth Hacking 58

Growth Hacking Engineering Content Marketing Startup 58

CloseSaaS

JANUARY 27, 2016

Most companies have realized that a blog can be a powerful inbound lead generator. But it has the potential to be so much more. Many of us are so focused on acquisition and growth, that we aren't taking advantage of our blogs throughout the entire sales process.

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Sales Acquisition 52

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AI

Ramp Ventures

JANUARY 22, 2016

As a seasoned marketer and former CEO of a multi-million dollar marketing agency, I’m a little embarrassed to say that I never really fully recognized the true value of personally talking with customers until just a few months ago. It’s not that I didn’t understand the importance of customer engagement and support—I did. But I never made it an ongoing part of my own day-to-day responsibilities as the former CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain or as the VP of Marketing for When I Work ,

Marketing 40

Marketing Education Customer Support Onboarding 40

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 31, 2016

I know 12 things about you. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.

Construction 100

Construction Compensation Data Analysis Interviewing 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 28, 2016

In 1983, Lorne Whitehead, a physicist from the University of British Columbia proved he could knock down the Empire State Building with 29 dominos. A domino can knock over an other domino one-and-a-half times its size. Whitehead’s theory concretely demonstrates the power of a chain reaction. Like a series of dominos, a startup’s success is a chain reaction.

Business Model 100

Business Model Startup Business Scale 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 25, 2016

My father keeps a copy of Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy on his bookshelf. An imposing dark gray tome, Competitive Strategy is a business classic. I remember reading it sometime in high school, and not understanding very much of it. It was only six years later in a college macroeconomics class, my professor helped me understand the value of the Five Forces.

Startup 100

Startup Investment Technology Strategy 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 23, 2016

Quick. Casual. Human. Chat differs from other forms of communication. Because of these three attributes, chat seems to be reemerging as a potentially disruptive user interface for both consumers and business users. The typical teenages emits more than 3000 text messages per month, not to mention messages on other networks. Most retailers provide customer support via chat.

Artificial Intelligence 100

Artificial Intelligence SaaS Machine Learning Construction 100

Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments

Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.

Payments

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 20, 2016

65% of entrepreneurs believe that fundraising in 2016 will be more difficult than in 2015, according to First Round’s survey. The volatility in the stock market, the steady erosion of public multiples, and the broad decline of seed, venture and growth investment in Q4 2015 seem to portend a repricing of the startup market. In light of those changing circumstances, entrepreneurs should prepare a few different analyses for 2016.

Startup 100

Startup Underperforming Technical Team Forecasting Investment 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 18, 2016

Suppose you’ve been selected to participate in a game show. The game show host asks you to pick one of three doors. Behind one, the grand prize awaits. Behind the other two are goats. You choose Door 1. Then the hosts opens Door 3, revealing a goat. The host prompts you again, “Would you like to select Door 2?” Should you choose it? This statistics question rose to fame in 1990 when Marilyn Vos Savant asked it in Parade Magazine.

Data 100

Data Education Scaling Business 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2016

2015 is the end of an era, the era of startup growth at any cost. In 2016, the question that will immediately follow, “What is your annual growth rate?” will be “What are your unit economics?” This change in investor mentality is catalyzed by the increasing cost of startup capital. Starting in 2014, and perhaps even a bit before, startups have been able to raise capital at better terms than at any time since 2000.

Startup 100

Startup Metrics Transportation Marketplace as a Service 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 10, 2016

For all the talk about late stage rounds, megarounds and unicorns, early stage startups are benefitting disproportionately from near-record years of venture capital investment. Of the $42B invested in startups in 2015, 34% or about $14B was raised in series A and seed rounds. That figure is up from 18% in 2005. The 35% attained in 2013 share for early investment ties the 1996 record.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Startup Marketing B2C 100

Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage

When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m

Artificial Intelligence

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2016

In his book describing Google’s People Operations called Work Rules! , Laszlo Bock presents this chart to describe the difference between the way many companies think about talent today, as a normal or Gaussian distribution, and how Google thinks about it, as a power law. It’s the most provocative idea about employee compensation I’ve found.

Compensation 100

Compensation Startup Benchmarks Engineering 100

CloseSaaS

JANUARY 20, 2016

MicroConf is the conference for self-funded startups and single founder software companies. That's why Steli gave a talk at MicroConf on how to build your own SaaS sales machine if you don't have piles of money from venture capitalists lying around.

Sales 52

Sales SaaS Startup Software 52

CloseSaaS

JANUARY 18, 2016

Sales isn’t always a high-octane race, where you close deals left and right at 200 mph. There’ll be times when the market slows and everything moves at a glacial pace, especially if you work in a seasonal space like tourism or retail.

Sales 52

Sales Marketing Management 52

CloseSaaS

JANUARY 16, 2016

We’re happy to announce a new integration with our sales software and QuickMail.io, an email automation tool which allows you to send personalized emails at scale.

Scale 52

Scale Scaling Software Sales 52

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CloseSaaS

JANUARY 11, 2016

Your sales team is crushing it. They’re closing deals left and right. Revenue is way up, and your growth looks off the charts. At this rate, that huge valuation you’ve been dreaming of seems well within reach.

Revenue 52

Revenue Sales Management 52

CloseSaaS

JANUARY 7, 2016

Building a SaaS sales team from scratch? Watch this interview with Justin Gold where he shares from the frontlines of a fast-growing SaaS startup in San Francisco: Poll Everywhere.

Sales 52

Sales Interviewing Startup SaaS 52

CloseSaaS

JANUARY 4, 2016

You’ve hired a couple of snazzy new sales reps. They’ve impressed you with their natural hustle, competitive spirit, and initiative. Dollar signs light up in your eyes as you imagine all the new bookings and revenue these new reps will bring to your business.

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Sales Hiring Onboarding Sales Revenue 52

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 6, 2016

At its essence, a product is a combination of different funnels bringing the user from one state to another. How many funnels does your startup’s product have? How many are you measuring? How many are you optimizing? Uber’s consumer experience has two funnels. The first is user on boarding: registering a user and collecting their payment information.

Startup 100

Startup Payments Transportation Payment Solutions 100

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