The Angel VC
JUNE 25, 2016
When founders show me their sales pipeline, the data is typically visualized in some variations of one of these formats: When I see charts like this, I often find it hard to quickly wrap my head around the data and draw meaningful conclusions. Sometimes, important numbers are missing altogether. In other cases, they are there but are shown on another page or in another report.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 4, 2016
When it comes to content marketing, more isn’t necessarily better. If one blog post per month is good, it doesn’t always follow that two posts will be really good. In fact, it might be worse. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen content marketing work. It can be especially effective for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that need to keep customer acquisition costs under control.
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Tom Tunguz
JUNE 27, 2016
On the prospects list of every SaaS startup, you will find a list of company names and next to them a projected dollar amount projecting the potential revenue from closing the deal. Each line item might represent a sale to team, department or the entire company. Regardless, there is a single champion advocating internally for the company to invest in this software product.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 30, 2016
I was walking through the Westfield mall in San Francisco when I suddenly hear: “Nice jacket! Where is it from?” I turn around and spot a guy neatly dressed in black plants and a black shirt, standing next to a mall kiosk perfectly located by the huge skylight.
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ReSci
JUNE 22, 2016
What comes to mind when you think of Home Depot? Perhaps it's the smell of plywood, pristine model bathrooms, and friendly employees in orange aprons. In more recent years, Home Depot reminds marketers of a seamless mobile to in-store experience. An early…. The post What retailers can learn from Home Depot’s mobile app appeared first on ReSci.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Angel VC
JUNE 2, 2016
My "SaaS Funding Napkin" , published a few days ago , got lots of love on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thanks everybody! Some people (rightfully) mentioned, though, that the image is hard to read on mobile devices. So if a napkin has a good format for a desktop or laptop screen, which real-world-analogy could be a fit for mobile screens? You guessed right.
Pierre Lechelle
JUNE 7, 2016
Many people begin to experiment and fail to see the desired results. They’re often missing on the key ingredient: The Growth Mindset. They want to grow and they have a vague idea of how to get there. But, they lack the key principles to achieve their goals. They lack of a general understanding behind the […]. Cet article Growth Mindset: 10 Principles to Growth est apparu en premier sur Pierre Lechelle.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 19, 2016
What is the optimal pricing strategy for a start up? That depends. It depends on at least three other variables: the product, the placement, the positioning. Combined with price, these are the four 4Ps of marketing created by Dr. E. Jerome McCarthy, former professor of marketing at Michigan State and Notre Dame. Also called the marketing mix , these four variables need to be aligned when determining pricing for your startup.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 27, 2016
"When we let data drive our marketing, we all too often optimize for things that are easy to measure, not necessarily what matters most." — Ezra Fishman Too many startups focus on the numbers, rather than the people behind the numbers.
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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.
ReSci
JUNE 8, 2016
For the last few years, big data has been gaining momentum as an industry-wide hot topic. Though people have had no qualms with overusing the term, even experts have had a difficult time pinning…. The post The Data Scientist’s Role in eCommerce Marketing appeared first on ReSci.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 1, 2016
Three billion dollar SaaS acquisitions were announced this week with Salesforce paying $2.9B for DemandWare, an eCommerce platform provider, Vista Equity Partners paying $1.8B for Marketo, the marketing automation company, and Thoma Bravo buying Qlik, a business intelligence companies for $2.9B. In addition to the absolute size, the first two trans transactions distinguish themselves high valuation multiples of 12x and 8x on trailing revenues.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 30, 2016
Salesforce’s initial public offering in 2003 demarcated the beginning of a new era, the era of Software as a Service. In the 13 years that followed, many startups have followed their path to build innovative software that has transformed their respective industries and sectors. The shift has been revolutionary both in software delivery as well as sales.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 26, 2016
I’ve been reading Robert Greene’s book Mastery. Greene has amassed biographies of tens of great people from Henry Ford to Paul Graham, from Alexander the Great to Larry Page. Across many of them, he identifies two common paths to mastery: mentorship and grit. The story of Leonardo da Vinci captures both ideas. Da Vinci was born out of wedlock and was prohibited from attending school.
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
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 22, 2016
LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook. Asana. RelateIQ. Slack. 3 Email Accounts. Each of those is an inbox, an implicit or explicit to do list. If I count the feed and the messaging products as separate inboxes, I have a grand total of 12 inboxes for work. 12 things to check first thing and last thing. How many do you have? I look at that number 12 and it’s astounding to me that I have that many, but I don’t think the figure will decline any time soon.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 20, 2016
The rate of new software company formation seems to have declined materially in the past few years. In 2011-2013, about 1450 software companies were founded each year on average. In 2014, that figure fell to 1186 and in 2015, we count 481. Why does Crunchbase data indicate this decline? First, there might be a few data issues in the most recent years.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 15, 2016
As a SaaS startup scales from finding initial product market fit to building its go to market organization, one of the most important goals in building that go to market organization is developing a multifaceted marketing team. Marketing’s role in SaaS sales has expanded to the success of SaaS companies as customers prefer to educate themselves more than they have in the past.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 12, 2016
The acquisition frenzy continues in SaaS. This morning Microsoft announced it would acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, which prices the business at 8.1x trailing 12 month revenues and 6.7x next 12 month revenues. In addition, Symantec announced that it would acquire Blue Coat for $4.7 billion, a 7.7x trailing multiple. In the 2016 acquisition market, the median acquisition multiple is 7.8x trailing 12 month revenue and 6.4x next 12 month revenue.
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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?
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 9, 2016
Which are the ripest areas for startups to disrupt using machine learning? At the core, machine learning/artificial intelligence relies on two key ingredients: advanced algorithms and data sets to train those algorithms. Novel algorithms are increasingly making their way into the public domain in the form of open-source libraries. So, the key differentiator for startups and ultimately long-term competitive advantage is access to proprietary data sets.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 7, 2016
How does a chat bot company transform a technology advantage into a distribution advantage? This is the key question facing startups in this part of the ecosystem. Deep learning is advancing at an incredible rate. Google has released TensorFlow and Parsey McParseface. These advances will improve natural language understanding, enabling chat interfaces to amaze and delight users.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 6, 2016
When is the right time to increase sales headcount for a SaaS startup? It is one of the most strategic decisions for early-stage business to make given the amount of effort and expense involved in building, managing and scaling a sales team. While there is no single absolute sign, neither qualitative nor quantitative, these are some of the signals I have found indicate it might be a good time to scale sales.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 1, 2016
There are two main ways of building a SaaS sales team: top down or bottoms up. Top down SaaS sales organizations start with a VP of Sales who often hires senior account executives. Bottoms up sales teams hire the first account manager and promote from within. Which is better? Let’s create a framework to compare the bookings capacity, the ramp period and the cost for three levels of sales hires.
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.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 22, 2016
What’s the quickest way to tell any investor, advisor, or experienced entrepreneur that you have no idea what you’re doing? Simple. Just tell them this: “We didn’t spend any money on marketing.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 16, 2016
We’re happy to announce a new integration with snapADDY, sales support software for finding B2B contact data. With this integration, use snapADDY to grab contact information from the web, e-mail signatures or documents and save it in Close.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 14, 2016
Every year, more and more people are leaving the security of their corporate jobs for the thrill of working at a startup. Maybe you’re thinking about making the switch yourself, but you’re not sure if it’s for you. And even if it is, you aren’t sure how to make the change.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 6, 2016
Recently, I was talking to an intern here at Close. Someone who’s incredibly talented, very smart, hardworking and disciplined. After a few weeks at Close he said, “Steli, I think things are going well, but I’m not sure I’m growing fast enough.
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.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 2, 2016
No one worries more than a first-time entrepreneur, and it’s not hard to see why. From fundraising to product demonstrations to initial hires, it seems like there’s always something to worry about.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 20, 2016
Imagine you’re a brand new sales rep and you’ve just been given your first prospect. It’s a small account, but your heart still races as you make your first cold call.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 13, 2016
You finally did it. After all that time spent on design, development, and testing—you’re ready to launch your startup. Now it’s time to figure out how to launch it.
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