Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 16, 2016
A senior SaaS executive once told me, “Reports sell software.” In a top down sale, that’s absolutely true. The CEO wants better predictability of bookings so she’ll buy a CRM tool to gather the data. Classically, software has been built for that mantra. First, a company buys a database. The sales people, marketers or customer care staff continue working as normal.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
AUGUST 6, 2016
Here’s the easiest way to waste your marketing budget: spend money to promote your message… before you know what your message is. Until you’ve developed a compelling and consistent value proposition, there’s no sense in broadcasting anything out to the world. Unfortunately, I see this all the time: a beautifully designed website, a well-produced video, or a clever email campaign that doesn’t clearly convey the company’s message.
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Hacking Revenue
AUGUST 4, 2016
We don’t know how to code, yet we built and sold online businesses. We’re a business person and a product person who always wanted to learn how to program, but just never gave it enough effort (that’s what we like to think). We can put together a WordPress website and we have some fancy badges in CodeAcademy, but no CTO in his right mind will let either of us touch their production environment and/or keyboard.
CloseSaaS
AUGUST 1, 2016
There’s no such thing as a perfect interview question. There’s no one question you can ask to figure out whether someone is the right candidate and will be amazing at sales.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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Aber Law Firm
AUGUST 8, 2016
We represent lots, literally 100s and 100s, of SaaS companies and there are a few nuggets of useful information that we want to share with other SaaS companies when they think about negotiating an enterprise SaaS agreement. Ok, here goes. Setting the Right Expectations. I find that setting the right expectation of what the customer is buying is the #1 issue in any SaaS enterprise agreement negotiation.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 9, 2016
They operated from a clandestine apartment in Harlem, a block from Columbia University at 401 West 118th Street. A cell comprising 18 of the most respected American mathematicians and statisticians spirited datasets up the stairs, analyzed them, and stole to Washington DC on military aircraft to present the results of their rumination to the admirals of the Navy and the Marines, the generals of the Army, Marines, and Air Force during the Second World War.
Saasler
AUGUST 22, 2016
Onboarding processes are critical to the success of SaaS companies. Check our first blog post of the series to see how high touch onboarding and integrations contribute to customer success. “40-60% of users who sign up for a free trial of your software or SaaS application will use it once and never come back…” – software entrepreneur Patrick McKenzie.
yoursales
AUGUST 4, 2016
SUMMER SLUMP: THE MYTH OF NO B2B SALES DURING SUMMER VACATION SUMMER SLUMP: THE MYTH OF NO B2B SALES DURING SUMMER VACATION SUMMER SLUMP: THE MYTH OF NO B2B SALES DURING SUMMER VACATION “T he summer sales slump” – ever heard of that? It’s that time of year where EVERYONE goes on vacation and NOONE is left in offices for B2B sales people to call, email, or visit.
CloseSaaS
AUGUST 31, 2016
At Close, our CEO Steli Efti preaches on the power of the follow up, and our Success team lives by these words too. Here's how the Close Success team built a reputation as a trusted advisor for sales teams around the globe.
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.
Aber Law Firm
AUGUST 8, 2016
We represent lots, literally 100s and 100s, of SaaS companies and there are a few nuggets of useful information that we want to share with other SaaS companies when they think about negotiating an enterprise SaaS agreement. Ok, here goes. Setting the Right Expectations. I find that setting the right expectation of what the customer is buying is the #1 issue in any SaaS enterprise agreement negotiation.
ReSci
AUGUST 11, 2016
At Retention Science, we are committed on making machine learning and artificial intelligence more accessible and understandable. This blog introduces our process of evaluating the accuracy of two crucial predictive models, Customer Churn Prediction and Customer Future Value (CFV). These two predictions provide invaluable insights. The post Evaluating Machine Learning Predictions: Customer Churn & CLV [RS Labs] appeared first on ReSci.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 28, 2016
Jeff Wiss has managed demand generation and corporate marketing for some iconic software companies. MySQL, the most valuable open-source acquisition; Zendesk*, the $3B leader in customer support software; DataStax, The business commercializing Cassandra; and most recently Duo Security*, an Ann Arbor-based trusted access company that has some of the most sensational SaaS metrics I’ve ever seen.
Saasler
AUGUST 9, 2016
It takes a lot more than having some strategies for user acquisition in place to guarantee SaaS growth. In fact, the most critical stage in the funnel can easily be retention, not acquisition. The key to a successful retention plan is keeping customers satisfied and avoiding churn. Keep in mind that it’s easier and cheaper to retain a happy customer, than having to go out and find new ones.
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
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 2, 2016
Channel distribution represents one of the biggest and most important changes in customers acquisition for SMB SaaS startups in quite a while. Historically, channel distribution has been reserved for the most expensive software and hardware. IBM, Intel, Cisco and their kin generate more than 80% of their revenues through a universe of resellers and distributors.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 30, 2016
If your SaaS startup were to trade in the public markets today, what would it be worth? The true answer is we don’t know, but we can approximate it by comparing it to the other publicly traded SaaS companies and benchmarking the business by its growth rate. The chart above shows the median multiple of public SaaS companies by growth rate bucket, 25%-49%, 50%-74%, and 75%+ trailing twelve month revenue growth rate.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 24, 2016
It’s no secret I believe speech is the next input mechanism. We are in the Voice-to-Text Era. I wrote in late 2014 that speech is the fastest user interface , and the newest speech recognition experiments confirm it. Andrew Ng, a luminary in the world of machine learning, and his teammates at Baidu, Stanford and University of Washington have developed Deep Speech 2 , a neural network based speech recognition system.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 23, 2016
Success has 1000 fathers and failure is an orphan. I heard this aphorism in my first year as a venture capitalist having forgotten it. There’s a lot of wisdom to it and I think it’s most applicable when interviewing. I remind myself of the same each time I speak with a candidate for a role. When I see a sterling resume, I know that I am susceptible to confirmation bias.
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Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 21, 2016
I met an entrepreneur last week with an amazing command of technology history. He spoke about the way the Xerox Alto has influenced graphical design over the past forty years. I learned a lot. For this first computer’s monitor has a portrait orientation, not a landscape orientation? His knowledge of history provides him a huge competitive advantage because he understands why things have evolved a certain way and the assumptions that underpinned previous decisions.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 18, 2016
In February, public SaaS companies had fallen 57% from their highs. The enterprise value to forward revenue more than halved from 7.7x to 3.3x. This ostensibly random valuation correction has triggered a flurry of consolidation in software, with nearly $70B+ worth of exits year to date in 2016. Over the last six months, however, forward multiples have reverted to the mean.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 14, 2016
Sales teams are the tip of the spear for SaaS companies. They close accounts and book the revenue. Many sales teams often find themselves confronting the same issues. Mike Anello and Kane Hochster, two HBS students, researched this topic by surveying more than 30 VPs of Sales. The survey included both rising and seasoned leaders across a range of revenue ranges but with a concentration in earlier stage startups.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 7, 2016
Average Series A valuations have hovered around $15M for the last 9 quarters. Series B rounds have settled into $50M, while Series C rounds have rebounded to $100M. Later stage rounds, however, have fallen by 50% from their high of $400M to just under $200M. However, in the early stages the frequency of down rounds (e.g., a Series D with a smaller valuation than a Series C) aren’t at historic or even six year highs.
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Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 3, 2016
When you’re selling a SaaS product to a potential customer, you have to convince them switching is worth the effort. And once you’ve sold the product, you have to do the opposite: convince the customer that switching to anything else isn’t worth it. In chemistry, there’s a notion of an activation energy. A Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius coined the term to describe the minimum amount of energy required to start a chemical reaction.
CloseSaaS
AUGUST 29, 2016
Hiring is a tough nut to crack. The amount of dilly-dalliers that hide behind good looks and quick wit is impressive. So how do you weed out bad candidates?
CloseSaaS
AUGUST 24, 2016
Monroe Systems for Business has a legacy like few other companies. The inventor, manufacturer, and supplier of commercial calculators was founded in 1912 by Jay R. Monroe. Today, the 104-year-old company is a household name to accounting professionals.
CloseSaaS
AUGUST 22, 2016
How much do you know about your competitors? Most people spend a lot of time doing online research to find information about their competitors. Truth is, often that time is wasted.
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
AUGUST 18, 2016
Calling is a central part of your day. That’s why we work hard on improving the experience. We’ve updated the phone settings page to give you a better way of managing your phone numbers and give you more visibility and control over your numbers.
CloseSaaS
AUGUST 16, 2016
We’re continuously working towards making Close a better platform for your sales team so that you can focus on closing deals, not doing busywork. Here are the latest developments.
CloseSaaS
AUGUST 15, 2016
Arguments. Politics. Tension. Your salespeople hate each other. They hate their workplace. They want to see everyone else fail. Perhaps you say to yourself, “Maybe things will get better.” No.
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