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Since last week's post about 6-7 things to pre-empt 90% of Due Diligence was liked/shared/retweeted quite a bit, I'd like to follow up with some additional details on what exactly SaaS Series A/B investors will look for when you supply them with the data and material that I've mentioned. In my post I suggested that you should prepare a key metrics spreadsheet, a chart with your MRR movements, a cohort analysis, a financial plan, an analysis of your customer acquisition channels and, if you're se
As the next generation of SaaS companies achieve maturity, they have begun to serve larger and larger customers, who in addition to demanding a great product, often request services. Professional services, as they are often called, entail training and customization. For product driven startups, the decision to offer professional services is a tricky one.
It’s common for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to offer free trials. That’s because a lot of times they work. Done well, free trials can be a very effective way to attract new customers. But done poorly, they can be an expensive failure. I’ve seen SaaS companies make several common mistakes with their free trials. 1. “Free” isn’t really “free” Sure, it’s called a “free trial.
We've already covered how to schedule more demo appointments with qualified prospects. Today we're going to talk about the probably most unglamorous part of giving demos: the nuts and bolts of preparing demos that turn into sales.
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.
In the past few months, we at Retention Science have been cooking up some exciting initiatives to help jumpstart meaningful conversations about marketing and technology in eCommerce. One of our newest and favorite initiatives is RetailPlus, a thought leader event series that connects…. The post RetailPlus NY: eCommerce Insights from Deena Bahri, Birchbox CMO appeared first on ReSci.
Ariba went public in 1999 three years after having been founded. In its first year of selling, the company generated $800,000 in revenue. Then it ramped. $8 million, then $45 million, then $274M. In a three-year period, the company had grown 33x and achieved an astounding CAGR of 224% over the same period. Ariba shares increased 300% on its first day of trading at IPO, valuing the company at $6 billion.
Ariba went public in 1999 three years after having been founded. In its first year of selling, the company generated $800,000 in revenue. Then it ramped. $8 million, then $45 million, then $274M. In a three-year period, the company had grown 33x and achieved an astounding CAGR of 224% over the same period. Ariba shares increased 300% on its first day of trading at IPO, valuing the company at $6 billion.
An entrepreneur last week asked me if bottoms up businesses are more efficient software companies than top down sales processes. Enabled by web and mobile app distribution, the bottoms up software business acquires individual users, small teams and eventually departments. The top down model sells to a C-level executive (CEO, CIO, CFO) and captures the relevant part of the organization through one sales process.
Of the 43 SaaS companies to have gone public in the time period between 2006 and 2014, 60% are trading above their IPO pop price – the price at the end of their first day of trading. The median company has appreciated 69% since its IPO. The chart above shows the trends for each of the companies in this data set. Xero tops the list that more than 17x appreciation.
In 2000, the majority of tech acquisitions were primarily stock. One company would buy another using its own shares, instead of paying for the target business in cash. But since then, there’s been a secular trend to cash deals. In 2014, 90% of the tech M&A transactions consummated by companies, and excluding private equity firms, in the US with disclosed deal values were cash deals.
Creating a sense of urgency is one of the most powerful sales tools available to SaaS companies. There are many different ways of accomplishing this, but one of the most common ways is to offer discounts that expire. Discounts are powerful incentives to increase sales. But, they have to be crafted correctly, or they can have dramatic impact on a startup’s cash position.
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.
Traditional software was initially sold by perpetual license. Then in the mid-00s with the advent of SaaS, the market shifted to per seat per year pricing. And simultaneously, freemium marketing strategies blossomed. Freemium companies provide software for free temporarily to entice users to try and use the product. Eventually, these users cross a threshold and convert to a paid subscriber.
Orbiting the Giant Hairball is one of the most unusual business books I’ve read. It’s irreverent, full of drawings, and completely chaotic in the most wonderful way. Gordon MacKenzie, the author of the book, worked at Hallmark cards for 30 years to the day. He started initially in the creative department imagining greeting cards and ultimately found himself with the title Creative Paradox.
In the late 1990s, two of the dominant talent management platforms were founded. Taleo and SuccessFactors grew very quickly after they entered the market, bringing novel delivery to the human capital market. Both companies eventually offered talent acquisition, performance management, and learning tools for human resources teams. But they started in different places.
At Gainsight’s Pulse Conference on Customer Success, Mike McKee of Rapid7 spoke about the structure of his customer success team. He projected a slide, which I’ve copied in the image above, that depicts the way Rapid7 sells a contract, deploys its software, engenders adoption and expands accounts. It’s the best visualization I’ve seen to describe the sales and customer success process and the inter-team collaboration required to be successful.
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
At the Gainsight Pulse conference yesterday, I moderated a panel with Boaz Maor, VP of customer success at Mashery and Mike McKee, SVP of customer success and services at Rapid7. During the panel, both men described their path to building substantial customer success organizations at their respective companies. Boaz’s team numbers 60 people, and Mike’s exceeds 160.
The rate at which startups are raising follow-on rounds is decreasing, and has decreased steadily from 2003 through 2013. Between 2003 and 2006, post-Series A startups raised series Bs about 57% of the time. However from 2011-2014, that figure fell to 28%. The same trend is true in series C rounds, where success rates fell from 43% to 35%. This decline in startup follow-on fundraising success is the result of an increased number of series A, which have been growing at a rate of 18% per year sinc
Mobile visits account for more than 50% of all e-commerce. During the holiday season in 2014, that figure exceeded 70% for Walmart. In India, mobile usage dominates traffic to such an extent that Myntra, the largest retailer, is shutting down their web application to focus exclusively on their mobile apps. Instagram launched a website only after the mobile app reached more than 100M users.
In the late 90s, one company changed its name five times before they settled on one which today is a well-known brand. The business started as Silver Computing in 1995, then Stellar Computing in June 1997. Six months later, the company would rebrand as next ActiveTouch Systems, then six months later to ActiveTouch Inc., and finally, six months before IPO to WebEx.
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.
My first major negotiation was a potential advertising agreement between Google and Facebook. I was PM on the social advertising team at the time. There was a call scheduled at 2pm one afternoon, and I had been told that morning about it. I’m wasn’t an experienced negotiator, so I panicked. I didn’t know how these conversations worked.
There are hundreds of books on how to negotiate. You can spend a year reading them all to become a great negotiator. Or you can do the one thing that will give you the upper hand in every negotiation: be willing to walk away.
Want to give awesome product demos? Want to present your software in a way that makes your audience want to buy it? Learn from these seven demo masterpieces and see how you can bring their ideas and techniques into your own repertoire.
We've covered how to qualify prospects in general in the past, but qualifying for a demo is unique in some ways and crucial for improving your demo-win rates.
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.
The Close engineering team has been hard at work on some coming-soon email, task, and workflow features. In the meantime, we also took care of some miscelleneous improvements in the past 6 weeks that we wanted to let you know about.
Most startup founders don’t think of themselves as master negotiators and struggle to come up with the right things to say in crucial moments. These moments are the perfect time to exercise one of sales’ most valuable tricks: silence.
Product demos are a great way to convert qualified prospects into paying customers. But getting a prospect to attend a demo can be hard. Most prospects would rather tinker around with your software on their own than schedule an appointment with a sales rep to walk them through a presentation.
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
ad:tech in San Francisco is always an exciting conference, but this year is going to be even better than ever. The agenda is crafted specifically to meet the needs of the marketing, technology, and media communities, focusing…. The post Don’t miss these three sessions at ad:tech San Francisco appeared first on ReSci.
One of the most beneficial shifts about moving from 'old school' marketing to digital marketing is the ability to actually track your marketing efforts with key metrics. It's no longer the Wild West where you shoot from the hip and hope your message hits the target. You can now track how your messages…. The post 4 Key Metrics for the Data-Driven Email Marketer appeared first on ReSci.
Subscription commerce seems to be having a moment. Subscription businesses were on the receiving end of more than $350 million in venture capital funding in 2014, a nearly 100 percent year-over-year increase in funding growth, according to CB Insights. The Honest Company, one of the subscription economy's…. The post Battle of eCommerce Business Models: Why #SubscriptionWins appeared first on ReSci.
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