June, 2018

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Machine learning isn?t as hard as it looks

Intercom, Inc.

It’s easy to believe that machine learning is hard. An arcane craft known only to a select few academics. After all, you’re teaching machines that work in ones and zeros to reach their own conclusions about the world. You’re teaching them how to think! Indeed, the majority of literature on machine learning is riddled with complex notation, formulae and superfluous language.

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A High Growth SaaS Playbook – 12 Metrics to Drive Success

For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

I recently gave a talk at the 2018 SaaStock NYC conference in June. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish, present a simple model to understand SaaS business and to show a simple model of a SaaS business and to show the key levers a CEO can pull to achieve the greatest impact on their business.

Metrics 211
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When You Hire an Executive, You're Hiring a Network

Tom Tunguz

You’ve just raised a round of financing. Your next step is to build your management team. There are several criteria for finding the right executive. Competency in the field, cultural fit, communication skills, management experience. All of those should be obvious. There is one that is often overlooked. Network. Recruiting is one of the most important responsibilities for a head of a department.

Scale 205
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SaaS Marketing Isn’t All About Talking; It’s More About Listening

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

If you’ve ever sat through a marketing agency’s pitch or seen an episode of Mad Men, you’d think that marketing is all about talking – pushing out clever messages so that people will buy whatever it is that you’re selling. Not exactly. You’re right that there’s plenty of delivering messages through email, blog posts, paid adwords, Twitter, TV, radio, or print ads or whatever media reaches the buyer.

Marketing 161
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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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The Sales Enablement Bot I Built at HubSpot

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

Today, everyone working in and around sales and marketing knows that bots are hot, in vogue and quite simply, of the moment. That’s no secret. After years of dreaming about what might just be possible, over the past 12-18 months numerous software as a service (SaaS) companies from around the globe have taken their respective bot offerings to market.

More Trending

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Retention, cohorts and visualizations

Intercom, Inc.

There are few issues more important than customer retention when running software-as-a-service businesses. It’s no good acquiring customers for $10, if they only stick around for a month or two. Retention can be measured qualitatively by talking and checking in with your customers regularly so you’ll know what their main questions and issues are, and when they occur.

Retention 223
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Totango Adds Personity.ai Team

Totango

Totango’s mission is to enable organizations to proactively and intelligently operate around their customers. With industry-leading enterprises confidently running on Totango’s Customer Success Platform, we are dedicated to innovating and bringing to market products that deliver Customer Success results. Extending Product and Engineering Teams. We are constantly hiring the best and brightest Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, and Data Scientists who are passionate about our Enterprise-2-Cus

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Seven Strategic Rationales for the Microsoft/Github Acquisition

Tom Tunguz

Last week, Microsoft acquired Github for $7.5B. It’s a massive acquisition at a massive price relative to other software acquisitions. Why is Microsoft willing to pay so much? Developer identity. Identity has been critical to Microsoft success. Active Directory (AD) forms nexus of the Microsoft enterprise ecosystem. AD contains all the users, their roles, and their rights.

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How to Correctly Calculate your SaaS Gross Margin

The SaaS CFO

How to Correctly Calculate your SaaS Gross Margin There are a couple financial metrics that I calculate and review each month and this includes my SaaS gross margin. Of course, it’s not just your overall gross margin, but it’s also your recurring revenue margin and services margin. You may also have hardware margins, but that’s […]. The post How to Correctly Calculate your SaaS Gross Margin appeared first on The SaaS CFO.

SaaS 93
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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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How repositioning a product allows you to 8x its price

A Smart Bear

Pricing is often more about positioning and perceived value than it is about cost-analysis and unconvincing ROI calculators. As a result, repositioning can allow you to charge many times more than you think. Here’s how. You’ve created a marketing tool called DoubleDown that doubles the cost-efficiency of AdWords campaigns. You heard that right folks — as a marketer, you can generate the same impact, the same number of conversions, the same quality of sales leads, but with half

Pricing 92
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Tech Leaders Share Their Best Tips for Successful Ecommerce

FastSpring

There’s no denying the power of ecommerce—it has radically changed the way people buy and consumer forever. With over five billion people around the world expected to be online by 2020, it is time for businesses to take their ecommerce global.

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How to make product improvements

Intercom, Inc.

Kaizen is the philosophy of continuous improvement. Web businesses searching for product market fit think they can follow this philosophy just by shipping code. But shipping code doesn’t mean that you’re making any significant product improvements. Similarly you can make undeniable improvements to parts of your product and get no response or appreciation for it.

Scale 223
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PODCAST 12: Navigating a Career from a Unicorn to a Public Company

Sales Hacker

Why have a career in sales ? Tune in to episode 12 of the Sales Hacker podcast with Jaimie Buss , VP of Sales, North America for Zendesk as she talks about startups careers and transitions! What You’ll Learn. Building your career in startups and managing different career transitions. Working at Andreessen Horowitz and how large VCs support their portfolios.

Scale 85
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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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Why Series As are Much Easier to Raise in 2018 than the Past 5 Years

Tom Tunguz

In the last six years, the median time between seed and Series A has more than tripled from about 200 days to about 750 days. Why? The seed market is in the midst of some secular changes. Seed rounds have declined 63% from their peak. Total dollars invested have fallen by 37%. But the median round size is up 3x in the same time period. In other words, investors are concentrating capital in fewer startups.

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Lessons from Christoph Janz and Nick Franklin at Mogul I/O Berlin

Chart Mogul

Our own Nick Franklin spoke to Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital at the fourth edition of our inaugural event series, held in Berlin at Point Nine's headquarters. Berlin was our biggest Mogul I/O event so far — thanks to everyone who came out to hear the talks, enjoy the discussion and see an excellent fireside chat between Nick Franklin and Christoph Janz.

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Sales Benchmarks: The 30/50 rule for cold emailing & cold calling

CloseSaaS

One of the hardest things about being a sales rep is knowing if you’re doing a good enough job. But what is “good enough?” You might feel like you’re crushing it with your cold email campaigns only to find out your competition is getting double your response rate.

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From First Mile To Nth: Onboarding Beyond User Onboarding

Chargebee

User onboarding is crafting the first mile of a user’s journey with your product. Can you apply everything that works within it to your nth?

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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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Trust your instincts or rely on procedure ? when to design with intuition

Intercom, Inc.

A few years ago, we had a seemingly simple problem to solve: our customers needed an easy way to set realistic expectations around their response times to conversations in our Messenger. Did this prove that we should have trusted our intuition all along? When we first considered the problem that businesses were facing, we instantly thought of implementing something like an “office hours” setting, so businesses could easily alert people to when they were likely to respond.

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A Sales Coach’s Tactical Guide on Setting the Right Goals for Sales Reps

Sales Hacker

Part 4 of this sales coaching series focuses on the right coaching goals for sales reps. Article overview: 1) Sales coaching is not a beat-down. 2) Sales Coaching: What salespeople say versus managers/leaders. 3) Don’t mistake a conversation for sales coaching commitment. 4) How to make your 1:1s count. 5) Stay in the inspiration business: Read the full coaching series.

Scale 77
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The 5 Forces Driving Startup Valuations Today

Tom Tunguz

There are five forces driving the startup ecosystem today. They are working together to reinforce a high valuation environment. These forces are: An infusion of capital into Startupland. There are many reasons for this. The money supply in the US has doubled in the last 10 years. A low interest rate environment means a low cost of capital, which means yield is hard to find for cash.

Startup 172
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What it takes to be a category king

Chart Mogul

In SaaS, everyone wants to rule over a kingdom. But instead of fighting to topple category leaders, startups today prefer to build their own kingdom from scratch. Let's look at how and why that's happening. It’s a ruler-takes-all game. In the world of SaaS, there’s a never-ending game of thrones. Ruling over an entire category is the ultimate goal, but getting there is a grueling journey that requires killing your competitors and uncompromising focus.

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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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The keys to maintaining a great culture within a remote sales team

CloseSaaS

If you’re not restricting your potential employee pool to one location, you’re able to hire the best of the best no matter where they live.

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Dear SaaS Peers, Scale Value, Not Usage (It’s Not as Simple as You Think)

Chargebee

Lessons from Michelin, Google, and certain other SaaS companies that got their pricing right.

Scaling 85
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From first touch to qualified lead: building a sales funnel for live chat

Intercom, Inc.

The promise of live chat for sales teams is being able to connect faster with high-quality leads. But for someone in Sales Operations, the first thing we think is: how well does live chat convert? As Intercom’s VP of Sales Operations, my job is to obsess over how we can optimize our supply chain to deliver against our pipeline and revenue targets; in other words, figuring out how to make our sales organization run better and faster.

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How to Personalize Your Outbound Approach According to Your Market and Persona

Sales Hacker

Customers want to be recognized as people, not account numbers or dollar signs. If you want to create sales emails that get responses, it’s this one fact that you need to focus on. No matter your industry, niche, product, or service, the ideal is to communicate with prospects and customers as individuals. How do you do that? With personalization. They want it, need it, and expect it.

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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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A Deeper Dive into the Dynamics of the Seed Market

Tom Tunguz

Earlier this week, I wrote about the collapse in the number of seed investments. I received many questions about the data, all the same. Why is this happening? This is a deeper dive into the data. First, there are fewer seed investors participating in the market than in 2015, about 40% fewer. Second, many of the most active seed investors and institutional seed funds are investing in fewer companies.

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Growth lessons from David Skok at SaaStock On Tour NYC

Chart Mogul

Thanks to the SaaStock team for an excellent event in New York! Here are six key topics covered in David Skok's excellent presentation which kicked off the day. I just returned from an excellent day at SaaStock On Tour in New York yesterday. The day was packed full of great speakers and topics, but judging by my notes, David Skok’s presentation on growing a SaaS business left the biggest impression on me.

Scale 60
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Introducing the BEAST Message Framework for Customer Engagement

Sixteen Ventures

Let’s talk about Customer Engagement, specifically one part of the Communication Model, which is my BEAST Message Framework for creating messages that actually engage customers. It’s really interesting that we communicate all day long – with our friends, with our peers, with our customers – but when was the last time you actually thought about what goes into communication?