September, 2018

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We’re Overthinking Seed Round Signaling Effects

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

There is much hand wringing in the startup ecosystem about various forms of signaling between the seed and A rounds. Conventional wisdom, and advice, abounds: entrepreneurs should never include a venture firm in their seed round because it’ll scare other VCs off from pursuing the A. After all, the “insider” VC has more information and.

Startup 538
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Access is the Scarcest Commodity in Startupland

Tom Tunguz

The SEC announced last week that it wants to find ways to let Main Street investors access stage private venture companies. This news item underscores an important trend that is reshaping the industry. Today in Startupland, startup access is the scarcest commodity. Everybody wants an allocation, an opportunity to invest in the very best companies. The SEC story highlights how much has changed in Startupland.

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Customer engagement guide: the what, why and how of effective messages

Intercom, Inc.

In the world of recurring revenue, SaaS companies realize they need engaged customers if they are to grow a healthy, sustainable business. This is where having a solid customer engagement strategy comes in. Remember those halcyon days when software was sold through licenses and you only had to win over each customer once to stay profitable? Those days are over.

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The Expectation of Winning

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

Everybody likes to win. And while you undoubtedly learn much about your skills, attributes and character from losses, there’s nothing quite like that sense of satisfaction when your team secures a hard earned victory. I’ve been fortunate, both as an individual contributor and as part of a team to have racked up some important wins (jobs, promotions, new business and awards), but in truth, there’s only been three periods where I’ve been part of teams where there’s been an expectation of winning.

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An Omnichannel Payment Solution––Without the Complexity

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.

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Your value proposition: Don’t set it and forget it

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

If you’re marketing your SaaS solution without a compelling and consistent value proposition and messages, you’re doing something wrong. Without a value proposition – a crystal clear explanation of who should buy your solution, what problem it solves for them, and why they should buy it from you – you’re missing an essential foundation for all your marketing efforts.

More Trending

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Onboarding your first Sales Hire as an Entrepreneur

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

In today’s blogpost I would like to introduce my partner for Zero to 100, Stephanie (Schatz) Friedman. Stephanie has been an executive in 3 successful startups and was most recently the SVP of Sales and Customer Success at Xamarin which has since been acquired by Microsoft. Stephanie joined Xamarin as its first non-engineering hire in.

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In Early Markets, Services Can Be a Competitive Advantage

Tom Tunguz

In early markets, customers prefer entire solutions, not best in class point products. These solutions often include significant professional services and education. At the beginning of a new wave, most customers don’t understand the technology well. So, they seek experts to guide them. Companies that provide services and education often win the early market.

Marketing 136
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Five essential onboarding tactics for complex products

Intercom, Inc.

The ideal onboarding experience is an easy and frictionless path to finding value. Consumer products perfected this by building onboarding experiences with maniacal focus on a single metric: Facebook’s 7-friends-in-10-days, or Pinterest’s 1rc7 (percentage of new signups that repinned a pin or clicked on a pin in the week following signup). But some products include irreducible complexity.

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Customer Success Content Will Save Your SaaS

Inturact

All successful business owners know that the key to their success is due to the customer’s satisfaction. The customer always comes first. Being proactive about the customer’s needs by going out of your way to anticipate them will undoubtedly provide you with a satisfied and consistent customer base.

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How Clinic Sense Reduced Churn and Unlocked More Revenue

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.

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A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

A Smart Bear

We all know that startups should make decisions quickly. Fast decisions leads to rapid action, which accelerates the loop of production and feedback, which is how you outpace and out-learn a competitor, even one that already has a lead. But some decisions should not be made in haste, like a key executive hire , or how to price , or whether to raise money, or whether to invest millions of dollars in a new product line.

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8 Critical Questions to Ask Yourself as You Build a Sales Incentives Program for 2019

Sales Hacker

Good sales leaders are always on the hunt to bring in new talent that can help a business grow. Still, they don’t always nail down the details when it comes to the things that might entice a prospective salesperson — like a well-rounded sales compensation plan , for example. Creating a strong sales incentives program will help you attract and retain A-list sales talent, so it is worth putting in the legwork to create a strong plan. .

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We’re Overthinking Seed Round Signaling Effects

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

There is much hand wringing in the startup ecosystem about various forms of signaling between the seed and A rounds. Conventional wisdom, and advice, abounds: entrepreneurs should never include a venture firm in their seed round because it’ll scare other … The post We’re Overthinking Seed Round Signaling Effects appeared first on For Entrepreneurs.

Startup 130
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Elastic S-1 Analysis - Another Open Source Monster

Tom Tunguz

Last week, Elastic filed their S-1 to go public. Elastic is a Dutch company founded in 2012. Just five years later, the company generated $159.9M in revenue. Elastic commercializes open source software called the Elastic Stack, a set of different products that enable users to search and store data in many different sources and formats. This software is used for application search, website search, enterprise search, application performance monitoring, and analytics for business and security data.

Scale 130
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Usage-Based Monetization Musts: A Roadmap for Sustainable Revenue Growth

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

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How to tell your company story

Intercom, Inc.

As a human being, storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. It works in just about every situation where other human beings are involved and, contrary to what you might think, it’s actually surprisingly simple to construct a compelling story. In my talk for Intercom’s tour last year, I walked the audience through a simple structure for building strong stories and spoke to several experiences I’ve had where a story made all the difference to the outcome.

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Top 7 Biggest Content Marketing Mistakes

Inturact

You know that content is king for creating a loyal and engaged customer base. But businesses sometimes find that content marketing is just as challenging as marketing the product that the content is designed to sell. Content marketing should seamlessly drive customers to the product or service you're selling, not become just another source of stress for your business.

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5 Digital Marketing Tips You Need to Try for a Successful SaaS Launch

FastSpring

Thanks to the pervasive presence of the internet, digital marketing has become an increasingly popular tactic in the go-to-market strategy for many SaaS businesses. In fact, over half of the world’s population now has access to the internet, according to Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends report. When done well, digital marketing allows your business to tap into both organic and paid channels to place memorable marketing campaigns in front of your ideal audience.

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Sales Engagement: The Intersection of Sales and Science

Sales Hacker

Sometimes, simple ideas can spark revolutions. What if I can bring and use a phone anywhere I go? (Hello cellphones; goodbye phone booths !). What if my friend can receive my letter as soon as I send it? (Goodbye snail mail; hello email!). What if sales reps can really harness the full potential of the pricy software tools we thought would turn us into sales superstars?

Scale 80
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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

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?

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Onboarding your first Sales Hire as an Entrepreneur

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

In today’s blogpost I would like to introduce my partner for Zero to 100 , Stephanie (Schatz) Friedman. Stephanie has been an executive in 3 successful startups and was most recently the SVP of Sales and Customer Success at Xamarin … The post Onboarding your first Sales Hire as an Entrepreneur appeared first on For Entrepreneurs.

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How the Economics of Professional Services Have Changed in Software

Tom Tunguz

A founder asked me recently if there were any trends in professional services across public SaaS companies. I had examined the gross margins and share of revenue from professional services about 3 years ago. Professional services are consulting fees software companies charge to customers for software configuration, customization and education. What has changed over the past 3 years?

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How Custom Bots can reshape your entire sales cycle

Intercom, Inc.

In many ways, how we do business today is a model of efficiency and convenience – people come to our websites and we sell to them. That interaction is increasingly being conducted over live chat , and at Intercom, we strive to make those interactions as personal as possible. As this mode of business has evolved, however, there are two unavoidable facts that we sometimes prefer to ignore.

Sales 144
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A Remarkably Large Portion of Businesses Are Still Reluctant to Embrace Cloud Computing

Entrepreneur - SaaS

Even the smallest businesses can benefit from readily available technology, so why won't they use it?

Cloud 105
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Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

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.

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When “fits and starts” is the most efficient path

A Smart Bear

You roll down the windows and wear a helmet when you take your car to the track. This does not make me less terrified of a fiery death. The American Autocross champion was sitting in my passenger seat screaming at me to not let my foot off the pedal until I bounced off the RPM limiter. She was properly intense. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it’s fun to power through curves in a high-speed tenuously-controlled skid in my Mini Cooper S (plus Cooperworks).

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The GTM Learning Loop: How to Optimize Your Funnel with Applied Learning

InsightSquared

Kaizen. The Japanese term “Kaizen” stands for the continuous improvement of a process. Adopted by Japanese manufacturing companies after World War II as a way to reduce waste and create competitive advantage, kaizen evolved beyond the assembly line in manufacturing to all business processes and became the precursor to lean manufacturing. “Kaizen is a daily process, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement.

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[Infographic] What You Need to Know about Online Payment Processing

FastSpring

It doesn’t matter if you’re an established digital business or an up-and-coming online store looking to sell software, digital downloads, or digital content, a key part of selling online is making sure you’re familiar with how online payment processing works. However, many businesses quickly realize that is easier said than done. Especially since there is a lot of technical jargon and terminology within the payment ecosystem.

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Three Observations About the Adobe/Marketo Acquisition

Tom Tunguz

About two years ago, Marketo was publicly traded and valued at roughly $1.1B. Vista Equity paid $1.8B to take the company private, a 64% premium. At the time it was taken private by Vista, Marketo generated $241M in trailing revenue, growing at 35% annually. Its net income margin was -31%. Last week, Adobe announced they acquired Marketo for $4.75B.

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Launching LLM-Based Products: From Concept to Cash in 90 Days

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.

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The 3 core skills to master real-time selling

Intercom, Inc.

For a long time, many companies had only one way to capture visitors to their website: contact forms. Lengthy lead forms became the lifeblood of modern customer acquisition. But more and more businesses are starting to ask, why do we make people fill out forms just to talk to us? Why aren’t we trying to connect and speak with them when we have their attention?

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The importance of Founder-generated content

Baremetrics

It’s pretty clear that when Allen Gannett, CEO and Founder of TrackMaven, wrote his first book The Creative Curve , it was to scratch a certain itch. On the one hand, it was time for him to write a book. Every founder is “supposed” to write a book after a certain amount of success in the industry. It’s almost like a rite of passage in a way.

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How InVision Built a Billion Dollar SaaS (Without Losing Its Soul)

Ryan Berg

Is it possible to build a billion dollar SaaS without focusing on traditional marketing channels like paid advertising, using high pressure sales tactics, or relying on manipulative growth hacks? After spending several weeks reverse engineering and dissecting InVision’s growth marketing strategy I can say the answer is: yes! InVision’s un-orthodox approach to growth marketing is not only.