Tom Tunguz
JUNE 6, 2018
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.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 22, 2018
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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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 1, 2018
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.
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
JUNE 26, 2018
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.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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.
Think Strategies
JUNE 11, 2018
In the old information technology (IT) world, systems integration and consulting companies flourished, helping enterprises of all sizes across nearly every industry pull together a plethora of proprietary systems from a wide array of software and technology vendors. Despite the promises of the cloud, not much has changed. While there may be fewer pure-play proprietary systems and applications, the need to customize software solutions and integrate disparate databases has continued to grow.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 9, 2018
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.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 15, 2018
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.
Sales Hacker
JUNE 20, 2018
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.
The SaaS CFO
JUNE 14, 2018
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.
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.
A Smart Bear
JUNE 5, 2018
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
FastSpring
JUNE 26, 2018
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 23, 2018
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.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 8, 2018
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.
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
Sales Hacker
JUNE 28, 2018
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.
Chargebee
JUNE 7, 2018
Lessons from Michelin, Google, and certain other SaaS companies that got their pricing right.
Chart Mogul
JUNE 8, 2018
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.
FastSpring
JUNE 21, 2018
The ecommerce industry is about to experience a major shift in the way they do business in the United States.
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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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 2, 2018
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.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 18, 2018
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.
Sales Hacker
JUNE 5, 2018
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.
Chargebee
JUNE 14, 2018
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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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.
Chart Mogul
JUNE 29, 2018
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.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 20, 2018
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 17, 2018
Imagine you come across three builders working on the same project. You ask each the same question: what are you working on? The first says, “I lay one brick after the other.” The second says, “I’m building a wall.” The third, “I’m erecting a cathedral.” What is the moral of this aphorism? I see two. The first is to keep the greater vision of our work in mind.
Intercom, Inc.
JUNE 4, 2018
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.
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
Sales Hacker
JUNE 13, 2018
It might be scary to think that closing calls are out of your control, but it is and we have the data to prove it. Below are our top phone sales closing tips from 1M sales calls. . “Always be closing.” The phrase is so popular in sales that it’s practically the industry’s unofficial motto. But what if everything you know about closing is all wrong? What if by the time your deal is “late stage,” its fate has already been sealed?
ITPro
JUNE 5, 2018
Tutorials. Learn why cloud-managed networking is growing in popularity with businesses.
Chart Mogul
JUNE 21, 2018
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.
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