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The last post in my series on DOs and DON'Ts for early-stage startups was about lead generation. The next logical step is sales, and so I want to write about what you can do to convert as many of those leads into paying customers. 7th DO for SaaS startups Build a repeatable, profitable sales process Sales is a very different animal depending on the stage of your company, the market segment you're going after and on whether we're talking about inbound sales or outbound sales.
I have never worked for a company that was dogmatic about project postmortems but I have always wished I had. After all, project postmortems teach us so much. Learning from the mistakes and experiences of others constitutes the better part of our business education. It’s why we ask successful entrepreneurs to coffee and hang on every word when they speak at conferences.
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way.
If you subscribe to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, in most cases you can quit whenever you want.* That's great for SaaS customers, but not so great for SaaS providers. It puts a special burden on providers: They need to be sure that the folks buying their solution are actually using their solution. If buyers don't become satisfied users, they'll eventually leave.
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?
Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?
One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask me is how does their business compare to others? Benchmarking is a great tool, if you can get access to representative data. Pacific Crest and David Skok have released a fantastic survey benchmarking SaaS metrics for early and growth stage companies. The entire report is well worth reading. Below is my list of the six most important benchmarks and observations from that report.
A technology advantage isn’t enough to build an enduring enterprise SaaS company because at the core, all SaaS software share the same architecture. A relational database stores data and a web site presents the data. This is true for CRM (Salesforce), marketing automation (Marketo), email (Exchange), content management systems (Sharepoint) and so on.
The single best content marketing channel is email subscriptions powered by Twitter/social media distribution. Thirty days ago, I began an experiment with this blog to determine whether email, Twitter or RSS would be the better content marketing channel. My goals with RSS, Twitter and email are two: first to maintain a relationship with a reader longer than a single website visit by creating a communication channel and second to use that marketing channel to drive re-engagement.
The three words roll off the tongue: monthly recurring revenue (MRR). What’s not to love about subscription models? Negative working capital, predictable revenue growth and an average of 13x market cap to annual revenue in the public markets, with some darlings reaching 50x multiples. The list goes on. But the words recurring revenue belies one small detail.
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.
During the past week, I’ve been tapping out letters on a 1921 Underwood portable typewriter that my wife gave me as a present. Sitting in front of it and watching the letter hammers pound ink onto paper reminded me that computer programming is still a very new field. Not 50 years ago, prehistoric programmers punched FORTRAN code on punch cards in this way.
On the day of Android’s five year launch anniversary and my fifth consecutive year of using exclusively Android devices, I switched to a yellow iPhone 5c. Like a well worn pair of jeans, it’s easy to grow accustomed to a mobile phone OS. Changing into a new pair is always a little uncomfortable at first. In that same way, migrating from Android to I iOS, I discovered the quirks and kinks of each OS: The iOS keyboard always shows uppercase letters, no matter if the letter being typed is upper or
I’ll never forget the first large tech conference I attended after joining Redpoint. Held in the movie theater in downtown Redwood City, the TechCrunch conference attracted several hundred entrepreneurs, investors and journalists. Not one of whom I knew. After a handful of conferences and a few awkward quick-name-badge-glance-then-say-hello conversations, I started to recognize faces and became friendly with the conference regulars.
We know by heart that half of our marketing dollars are spent improperly. But what’s worse is most products waste half of their chances to deepen a relationship with their customers. There are two different kinds of email within products: product marketing emails and transactional emails. The first of these marketers optimize continuously and the other is oft forgotten.
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
As a PM at Google, I carried a laptop to every meeting I went to. I typed notes, jotted down action items, and distributed the minutes of almost each one of my meetings. I stayed organized and tracked my teams’ progress this way. But, as I learned when I starting working at Redpoint, outside the rainbow bubble of the Googleplex very few people take notes on laptops during meetings.
After I wrote a post on six important cohort reports , I received a handful of questions about how to interpret cohort charts effectively. When I review cohort data from companies I work with, I look into three different trends to evaluate a product’s performance. This is a cohort chart of hypothetical product indicating percentage of monthly active users each week for 12 weeks.
I’ve been reading Scott Berkun’s book The Year Without Pants which details his working life at Wordpress. The book reveals a thought-provoking collection of lore behind Wordpress and in particular, the day-to-day operations of a distributed volunteer team who built a technology that powers about 20% of the internet. Scott embeds insightful gems about daily startup work life into his stories.
The NoSQL movement launched officially in 1999 but rose to prominence much later perhaps closer to 2008 when Hadoop and other key value pair technologies became en vogue. Today, it’s hard to argue with the success of the movement. Large banks, insurance companies, biotech companies and dotcoms rely on NoSQL to power their services and inform their most important decisions.
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.
One of the hardest but least spoken about transitions in a startup’s life is crossing people management chasm. At the outset of the startup, there might be three people, then eight, then fifteen. As they grow, startups often create ad hoc managers I call team leads. Team leads manage 3 to 5 people. They work alongside their team, whether engineering, sales or marketing and contribute actively to achieving the goals of that team team.
The venture capital fund of the future will perform the same tasks as the venture funds of today: help portfolio companies, evaluate new investment opportunities and build networks of other investors, potential hires, and founders. But to succeed over the next 25 years, venture capital firms must increase the scale and sophistication of each of these duties by order of magnitude through technology.
It’s not engagement. Engagement, (time-on-site, page views, number of sessions per day) is the wrong concept because it doesn’t apply to most products. The best metric is share of habit. Engagement fails the majority of products as the best metric to optimize because maximizing engagement/time-on-site contradicts the product’s purpose. Google relentlessly whittles down the time it takes for users to complete a search.
In a very kind gesture, Ivan Kirigin submitted this blog (and Intercom.io’s blog) to answer the question posed by Disqus, What is the best content marketing campaign you have seen and why? I’m honored by his comment. In response, David Fleck, head of revenue at Disqus asked whether the blog has ever led to an investment and whether that’s the right KPI for it.
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.
It is easy to think the sales process ends once a customer has signed a contract or downloaded an app or created an account. But it’s a huge mistake. Great products have a point of view on the way things ought to work. GMail chose labels over folders for email categorization. Pandora chose recommendations over libraries for music libraries. Looker chose spreadsheets over an SQL prompts for data exploration.
Mobile apps are like packaged software, a friend who is a head of product at a successful mobile first company told me over breakfast. On the web, you can launch a product that’s 80% functional to hit a promised launch date. Around 1 am that night, when most users are asleep, you can surreptitiously push an update with bug fixes and new features, reboot the servers, and no one is the wiser. iOS apps don’t work this way.
[link] What did you use before Close? Why did you decide to switch? We used Capsule CRM prior to Close. Capsule is a nice lean CRM, but there is no way to properly track or integrate call/email activity within it.
Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?
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
Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?
Yea I know the $ and the functionality of the SaaS offering are important in any SaaS contract negotiations, but there is a lot more going in the mind of your buyers. I think the best metaphor for this, is from the book “Switch. How to Change Things, When Things are Hard.” Imagine a rider on an elephant. How do you get the elephant to go where you want it to go?
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