Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 27, 2015
Quota attainment is an incredibly powerful diagnostic tool when understanding your SaaS startup’s go-to-market health. Quota attainment measures both the success of individual account executives and the performance of the team. To achieve best-in-class quota attainment, a startup must execute the go-to-market strategy well across five dimensions.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 13, 2015
In theory, raising venture capital could roughly look like this: You create an investor deck and send it to 5-10 VCs that you like (1 week) You meet the ones that are interested and quickly figure out the 3-4 that are really bullish (1-2 weeks) You have a few more meetings with those 3-4 VCs and answer their questions (2 weeks) You negotiate with 2-3 of them and sign a term sheet with your favorite one (a few days) You hand it over to your lawyer for the final due diligence and the legal paperwo
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Chaotic Flow
OCTOBER 13, 2015
I’ve been thinking a lot about how my SaaS experiences have shaped my thinking on agile management , and visa versa. SaaS and agile present complementary aspects that enable a uniquely symbiotic relationship. Agile aims to help businesses increase responsiveness to customer needs, while laying a foundation for continuous improvement. SaaS opens up real-time customer communication and product delivery channels, while simultaneously establishing a long term customer relationship.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 3, 2015
It's possible that the competition for your technologically sophisticated, software-as-a service (SaaS) solution is somebody else’s technologically sophisticated SaaS solution. Some markets are jam-packed with SaaS solutions, all scratching each others' eyes out to win deals. But while you're battling tooth and nail with other SaaS solutions, don’t forget about the other competitor in the picture: inertia.
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CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 26, 2015
Hearing the word “no” is never fun—but think about it this way: If everyone said yes, there wouldn’t be a need for salespeople. The reason why you have a job is because people say “no,” all the time.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 7, 2015
When I was a PM at Google, we conducted customer research often to understand our customers’ opinions on AdSense. In 2005, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were vying to win dominant share of advertising pages across large publishers. Customer knowledge, both qualitative and quantitative, informed product development, and that research became a key part of AdSense’s success.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 23, 2015
Last week I wrote a post titled “What makes fundraising so stressful?” and asked founders to tell me which parts of the fundraising process suck. As of this writing, about 110 founders have completed the Typeform survey. The results are very interesting, and in some cases shocking. More on that below, but let’s start with the responses to the first question: “Your optionality is an illusion” More than 60 founders took the time to answer the additional free-form question (“What else has stressed
ReSci
OCTOBER 28, 2015
Forget “digital marketing’s workhorse” – it’s time to acknowledge email as the prizewinning thoroughbred it really is. Although flashier channels like social media and mobile marketing routinely steal headlines, email is still the core of every effective digital marketing strategy. The reason…. The post Research Report: How to Create the Perfect Marketing Email appeared first on ReSci.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 6, 2015
This is a guest post by Jenny Buch, who recently joined us as a Talent Manager. It's the first in a series of two posts. The second one will appear here soon. To follow up on the recently posted interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings , I’d love to share my experience about reference checks with you. So, many of you probably made the experience of hiring someone that you would have stated as “a really promising candidate” upfront.
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.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 8, 2015
This is part two of Jenny's article about the importance of reference checks. If you haven't read the first part yet, start here. Last time we spoke about WHY you should do reference checks and what impact a bad hire can have on your organization. In this second part I’d like to share my personal experience as well as some outcomes that have recently been discussed within the Point Nine family around the HOW.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 25, 2015
Last week, I interviewed Tien Tzuo, the former CMO & CSO at Salesforce, and founder/CEO of Zuora. During our conversation, he spoke about one of the major challenges facing fast growing startups. He called it recognizing the breaking points of management. At the founding a startup, the structure of the company is flat. Everyone is effectively a peer.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 22, 2015
On November 4, SaaS Office Hours at Redpoint will welcome Kenny van Zant , former COO of Asana and Chief Product Strategist at Solarwinds, a $4.1B market cap maker of infrastructure software. Kenny is renowned for pioneering the flywheel sales model that propelled Solarwinds to a $150M company profitably. Unlike traditional sales models, the flywheel sales model requires sales people to close business only from existing users.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 4, 2015
How big is your SaaS startup’s sales pipeline? How big does it need to be to achieve next month’s bookings target? What is the ratio of the sales pipeline to bookings? What should it be? When asked these questions during a fundraising pitch, one CEO responded with the number of demos per account executive per day to attain next month’s bookings, impressively conveying his command of his business.
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
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 3, 2015
Jack Newton, co-founder & CEO of Clio, at the 1st PNC SaaS Founder Meetup in 2012 About three years ago we thought that it would be nice to organize a little meetup for the founders of our still quite young but growing SaaS portfolio. The idea was that by putting all of the SaaS founders in one room for a day, we'd give them an opportunity to compare notes, share war stories and learn from each other.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 26, 2015
Taxis. Food. Cars. Mobile phones. Communications. Banking. Healthcare. Entertainment. In the past ten years, is there an industry startups haven’t upheaved? Startups have been the most transformational force in US society over the past 20 years. Uber has transformed the taxi industry, reducing taxi rides in yellow cabs in San Francisco by 65% in 2 years.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 21, 2015
Last night, at our inaugural event, SaaS Office Hours welcomed Bill Macaitis , CMO of Slack, former CMO of Zendesk and former SVP of Online Marketing and Operations at Salesforce. Having worked in three hypergrowth companies, Bill is an expert in building massively successful marketing teams. These are the five kernels of wisdom I learned last night.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 20, 2015
How much should your startup pay its sales people? According to Pacific Crest’s Annual SaaS survey , 9% of a sales rep’s annual contract value. This figure doesn’t vary much on whether your startup’s salespeople are inside reps or outside/field sales reps. The table below computes the effective salary + commission of a sales reps as a function of average contract value and an estimated quota.
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 18, 2015
In 1964, IBM announced a mainframe computer family called the System 360. The mainframe wouldn’t ship for another three years, but the announcement reduced the mainframe sales of their competitor , Control Data Corporation, sufficiently to warrant an FBI investigation. And so a new marketing technique was born. To be clear, there are many different forms of vaporware.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 14, 2015
The purpose of a price is to tax usage of a product. That’s how companies generate revenue. Discovering how to tax a product properly is a perpetual challenge. It’s a moving target and so it requires an ongoing discovery process as the company and market evolve together. These are some mistakes I’ve noticed. Complex or unintuitive pricing model.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 12, 2015
Over the weekend, it seemed to me that the sentiment in the valley seemed to change abruptly. Dan Primack wrote Fear and Sadness in Silicon Valley , and Danielle Morrill punctuated her post Somewhere Over the Brainbow: The Unicorn Window is Closing images of unicorn cannibalism. While the attitudes may be changing, the effects haven’t yet revealed themselves in the data.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 10, 2015
In sales processes, showing a product is always better than talking about a product. Better still is co-customizing the product with the customer during the sales pitch. This customization could be as simple as integrations or changing colors. There’s no better way for customers to understand a product, imagine how it would fit their needs, and become committed to the purchase than customizing their instance during the sales process.
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 6, 2015
Starting on October 21, I’ll be hosting a bi-weekly event from the Redpoint San Francisco offices called SaaS Office Hours. During these two hours, we will discuss the tactical issues and questions facing seed and Series A SaaS companies in a small group. That’s why we call them Office Hours. Rather than deliver presentations, SaaS Office Hours are meant to be casual, tactical and collaborative.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 1, 2015
Customer pull is an amazing feeling for a startup. Because the customer demand is visceral, everything seems to move quickly: sales is booking deals quicker than can be on-boarded; product and engineering are rushing to build the features customers request; marketing’s efforts to raise awareness of the business are magnified by word of mouth; and recruiting is doing all they can to fill the looming vacancies.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 7, 2015
Scheduling sales calls or meetings can be frustrating, unproductive, and costly. With the maxed-out schedules of contemporary workaholics, it’s difficult to find a common opening that fits for all parties involved. To put it bluntly, coordinating time can be a real pain.
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 5, 2015
In the early days of your startup, you shouldn't send thousands and thousands of emails. The worst way to begin your marketing push is by spamming people—that’s not how you want to build awareness for your business.
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
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 1, 2015
In case you’ve missed them or are in serious need of sales motivation quotes, here are all 30 videos we published this month. Theoretically, since each video is less than a minute long, you could watch them in half an hour. Although we can’t guarantee what will happen to you if you do!
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 28, 2015
Here's a much-needed SaaS sales myth buster for everyone building a startup. Have you fallen for any of these myths?
CloseSaaS
OCTOBER 23, 2015
You might have seen Steli’s crash course on sales hacking and deal closing from the Pioneers Festival 2013. In 2014, he laid out the inner game of hustling. This year, he wants everyone to stop f **g around and learn how to sell it!
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