November, 2018

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Defining customer support: why it’s key to your long-term success

Intercom, Inc.

Intercom’s mission is to make internet business personal – in an era of online interactions between businesses and customers, that sense of personal connection can be hard to forge and easily lost. That personal connection is most keenly felt when things go wrong and when customers need support. We have become synonymous with making personal and conversational interactions the bedrock of a great customer support experience.

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Do You Lose Sales Opportunities Because of Sales Execution or Product Insufficiency?

Tom Tunguz

You have a good pipeline of prospective customers. You pitch them but things aren’t working out. You can see it in your low close rates. They are below 15-20% conversion from sales accepted lead to closed customer. You need to answer an important question: are you losing these opportunities because of sales execution or product insufficiency? Those are the two possibilities.

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How to Close More Revenue Today — With The Leads You Already Have. Use The “3 L’s”.

SaaStr

If you’re past $4m-$5m or so in revenue, this post isn’t for you. You’ll have figured this out, at least mostly. But if you are on either side of $1m in ARR, there are 3 things you can almost always do from a pure process standpoint to squeeze materially more revenue out per lead. Do ’em now! ??. First, implement Lead Scoring.

Scale 221
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Founders: Please don’t allow anyone to screw your early backers

The Angel VC

Understanding the mechanics of founder re-ups in financing rounds This post will likely not make me more popular and might offend some people. But if your core beliefs on how business should be done are at stake, you can’t try to win the popularity contest. If you know me a little you’ll probably agree that like everyone at Point Nine, I’m a pretty nice guy.

Finance 169
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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

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.

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Are your partnerships useless?

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

Partnerships can be a good thing for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. They can deliver more value to customers, without requiring lots more work from your internal development team. For marketers, a partner could provide credibility, broaden exposure, find leads, and even win deals. That’s if they’re done well. Too often though, partnerships don’t deliver as promised.

More Trending

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Live chat for business: everything you wanted to know about live chat but were afraid to ask

Intercom, Inc.

A great customer experience today is about meeting people where they already are. And today, there’s one channel where more potential customers are than any place else: messaging and live chat. Think about the way that you talk to people every day. If you’re anything like me, you use iMessage to talk to your family, WhatsApp for your close friends, and you probably spend your entire day on Slack talking to your teammates at work.

Scale 239
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The Four Stages of Sales Compensation Structures in Early Stage Startups

Tom Tunguz

Your startup is just getting off the ground. You might have a few account executives and a sales leader in place; maybe some revenue and a handful of customers. The sales team costs real money, and the question before the company is: how do you know what quota plan to assign to the account executives? I’ve seen four stages in early stage software companies.

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How To Set-up Effective Split Testing For Your SaaS Company

Incredo

SaaS 113
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How Zapier Reached $35M ARR With This SaaS SEO Strategy

Ryan Berg

Want to drive more search traffic to your SaaS? In this case study, we’ll step outside the usual content marketing tactics most SaaS companies use. And look at how Zapier leverages SEO to drive millions of high intent searchers to their product every month. This strategy has nothing to do with blogging (although we’ll take a look at how they added a blog later to enhance this approach).

Strategy 111
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5 Ways to Improve Revenue from Integrated Payments

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.

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The FastSpring Team Meets Up for 2nd Annual Fall Summit

FastSpring

At FastSpring, we take our company mission, vision, and values seriously. They are a big part of what makes FastSpring the leading all-in-one ecommerce platform for digital businesses around the world, and a great place to work. One of the ways we showcase our mission, vision, and values is our annual Fall Summit event. Employees from all over—Nebraska, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, and Amsterdam—came together at the Santa Barbara headquarters this month for three days of learning,

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Converting with Extra Copy: 5 Long-Form Landing Page Examples

Unbounce

We all know how effective a short, concise landing page can be. It’s quick to read and, depending on the offer up for grabs, can convince visitors to purchase or opt-in fast. But there are benefits to building long-form pages too. For starters, longer pages can provide in-depth info visitors need to make informed decisions, helping you attract more qualified leads from the start.

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What is customer acquisition cost and why does it matter?

Intercom, Inc.

Growth is good, but growth at any cost is very, very bad. The best marketers in the world help their companies grow for the long term. However, periodically marketers seem to go through a wave of collective insanity where we forget about the ‘long term’ part of the discussion and start to chase growth at any cost. Whether it’s through inattention, ignorance, or excitement, marketers sometimes make very bad business decisions.

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SAP Buys Qualtrics; 2018 Catapulted to $65B in $1B+ M&A Volume

Tom Tunguz

Another week, another blockbuster software acquisition! This time SAP has agreed to purchase Qualtrics for $8B. Qualtrics is a Utah based provider of experience management software. Qualtrics writes and sells software to ask questions of employees and customers to help businesses improve customer experience, employee satisfaction products, and brand.

Scale 162
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How to Achieve High-Accuracy Results When Using LLMs

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

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How to Use the Right Sales Data to Shorten Your Selling Cycle

Sales Hacker

Like a long and arduous hike that seems to go on and on, a prolonged sales cycle can leave your team feeling drained, exhausted, wondering if they’ll ever reach the summit … and if they do, whether they’ll have the energy to climb the next mountain! We’ve all had at least one instance where we’ve felt overstressed, overworked, and under quota due to a long, drawn-out sales cycle.

Data 101
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How to Build a 100-Day Plan to Grow Revenue

InsightSquared

We recommend that every quarter you pick one thing to improve about your sales process. If you improve the conversion rate during each key moment in your sales process by just a small percentage, you can end up doubling your revenue or more. But how do you know what key moments or metrics to focus on? In the past, we’ve discussed three key measurements: Volume based metrics (the change in amount at any given stage i.e. # of leads).

Revenue 94
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FastSpring Visits Innovative Cleantech Incubator

FastSpring

FastSpring finds inspiration in a cutting-edge incubator for cleantech startups — also known as the LACI. One of the things that truly sets FastSpring apart as a business is our values. We are constantly pursuing new ideas that not only help businesses selling software, SaaS, or digital goods but also shape the evolving tech landscape at large. Our exploration of innovative tech often pushes us beyond the beautiful coastline of Santa Barbara.

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Getting Software as a Service (SaaS) Accounting and Financial Operations Right from the Start

SaaSOptics

By 2020, more than 80 percent of software providers will change their business models from “traditional” perpetual license and maintenance to subscription-based models. A perpetual model requires customers to pay a fee upfront to purchase a license for the system or application, whereas a SaaS model requires a monthly subscription fee. While some providers, such as Dropbox, were created “as a service,” thousands of other software vendors that started out with traditional licensing models are rea

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SaaS Essentials: Failed Payment Solution Guide

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.

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Assembly required – 45 sales tools to build the ultimate tech stack

Intercom, Inc.

As your sales organization grows, your tech stack almost always does too. But figuring out which sales tools you should buy and invest in – let alone what each tool even does – can be a daunting task. This is especially true when you consider the seemingly endless list of sales tools to choose from. With at least 830 vendors in the space and more being added daily, building your tech stack can quickly become an overwhelming exercise, even for the most experienced of us in sales operations.

Scale 192
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The Best Analytics Tool for SaaS Content Marketing? I finally found it.

Upscope

Google analytics is free but it's not giving me the answers I want quickly and cleanly. By chance, I came across Oribi. They got it right guys. THEY GOT IT RIGHT. Each day, I need to know what blog posts are working well, what specific part of the post is working well, what brings in real leads. Oribi tells me this because they finally figured out the whole 'events' thing.

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Should Your SDR Team Be Outsourced?

Sales Hacker

Growth is good. When growth occurs, so does the expansion. But growth brings new challenges. As leads pour in, it becomes challenging for your current sales reps to manage their book of business and properly prospect. As a sales manager, you have to ask yourself “Do I simply hire more salespeople, or is it time to implement an SDR program?”. Driving sales is such a vital component of every company’s strategy, so it may seem illogical to even consider outsourcing any part of your sales process.

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Your Sales Year is Coming to an End. Are you ready?

InsightSquared

It’s two weeks until December. Holiday music is already playing in every store you set foot into, your weekends are starting to fill with egg-nog and apple pie induced festivities and every morning you find yourself layering up with an extra hat or scarf before you step outside. Tis’ the season! December around the corner also means your sales year is coming to an end.

Sales 78
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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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Partners in Growth: Danfoss & FastSpring

FastSpring

Cisco Systems estimated that IoT was “born” between 2008 and 2009, but it’s just in the last couple years we’ve seen an explosion of IoT solutions for both commercial and domestic use. The Internet of Things is a network of interconnected physical devices that collect and share data with each other. You’re probably already familiar with IoT associated features like automatic climate control for Smart Homes or the daily holistic health reports generated by aggregating data from your w

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Digital Skills for Women

CloudKettle

Applications for the Digital Skills for Women Winter 2019 cohort are now open! Digital Skills for. The post Digital Skills for Women appeared first on CloudKettle.

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Data-driven sales: 18 sales KPIs and metrics to grow your revenue faster

Intercom, Inc.

There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization – the right people, processes and strategy, to start. But today, the underlying backbone of all of it is the right data. That’s not to say there’s no art to practicing sales. Much of what defines our most outstanding sales reps is their ability to deeply understand our prospects’ and customers’ business needs and speak directly to them.

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What Is Product Analytics And Why Do You Need It?

Rakam

Today the term Product Analytics is not a well known word in the industry. When I talk about Rakam, a product analytics tool, I can see the confused faces in front of me. Let me enlighten you in this subject and also to save myself from seeing the confused faces. Also,I will try to give you a better insight on product analytics. Product Analytics In simple words, analytics that allow you to understand how your users behave while using your product is Product Analytics.

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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 Have Your Fellow Woman’s Back in the Cutthroat Sales World

Sales Hacker

There’s an unwritten rule that women need to support other women at work. Countless articles are detailing how we are supposed to be each other’s champion, encourager, and referrer. Some have even gone so far as to say that achieving equal rights starts with treating one another as equals. The ideas of how to receive equal pay, equal treatment, and equal status to our male counterparts have been on the minds of millions of women for decades and remain hot topics even today.

Sales 99
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B2B Sales Dev: Interview with Digital Go-To-Market Strategist Andrejs Juš?enko

Teamgate

Andrejs Juš?enko is a vastly experienced professional with over 20 years marketing, sales, and business development practice in leading IT and Telco companies, such as; Microsoft; Nokia; and Lattelecom, transforming business in 24 countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Regarded as a thought leader with a vast knowledge of modern business practices; from change management experience, Go-To-Market strategies, channel development, and digital marketing, to marketing governance and execution in cr

Scale 68
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Why Your SaaS Business Needs an Affiliate Program

FastSpring

Starting, or investing in, an affiliate program is a great idea for just about any ecommerce company. This is even more important for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. Here are seven reasons why every SaaS company should start—or invest in an affiliate program. 1. Loyal Customers Can Help Drive Revenue as Affiliates. A SaaS affiliate program makes it possible for a customer to sell and market the product they already use to others.