Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 27, 2018
Over the weekend, IBM announced the largest software acquisition of Red Hat, an open-source software company, for $35B. It is the largest software acquisition in history, and the third largest technology acquisition (Dell/EMC at $67B and JDS/SDL for $41B were both larger hardware mergers). IBM will spend 31% of their current market cap for Red Hat and pay a 70% premium to Red Hat’s closing price on Friday.
Intercom, Inc.
OCTOBER 5, 2018
Customer retention is the silent killer of SaaS businesses today. People get curious, kick the tires, shrug their shoulders and leave without saying goodbye. Even if you are acquiring customers for $10, if they only stick around for a month or two, you won’t build a lasting business. What is customer retention? Customer retention is the rate at which your business can keep its paying customers over a given period of time.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 1, 2018
I get it. You’ve finally built a working product and now you’re ready to get it out into the market. You want to crank out a press release, put up a website, offer a free trial, execute an email campaign, buy adwords, or do whatever else you can think of or afford. Don’t do it. Or at least don’t do it yet. If you rush headlong into programs and deliverables, you’ll end up spending a lot of time and maybe a lot of money… but not necessarily winning a lot of paying customers.
Sales Hacker
OCTOBER 23, 2018
“It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again”. Another quarter sales target just barely made. It was a close call. As you go over the numbers with your team you realize that trying to close a sale with XYZ Industries cost you a ton of time, almost made you missed your quota and almost cost you your job (maybe – you never know, but you suspect it). It’s not that you haven’t been down this path before.
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InsightSquared
OCTOBER 15, 2018
If you’ve ever thought about becoming a lawyer, the path is pretty clear: Get a Bachelor’s degree. Take the LSAT. Earn your JD. Pass the bar. The process may not be easy, but at least it’s laid out. You know exactly what steps to take, including recommended classes and exam prep courses, in order to put yourself on a path to success. When I think about sales operations, there is no defined route to take.
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 3, 2018
Last week, AirBnB proposed granting their most valuable hosts shares in the company , much like employees. This requires a change in securities law. It’s a novel idea that has a history, promise and some risks. In 1998, an online travel agency, TravelZoo, tried this. They granted free shares to 700,000 people who signed up to use the service. Administration of these shares proved a headache for the company.
Intercom, Inc.
OCTOBER 10, 2018
Often in life, it’s not what you say but how you say it that makes all the difference. This is even more true in a customer support conversation, so getting your company’s tone just right is incredibly important. Once you’ve figured out how you speak to your customers , the next challenge is getting your team aligned for a consistent experience. At Intercom we strive to maintain a high caliber of customer support, and we do this with a peer review system, where every member of our Support team c
Sales Hacker
OCTOBER 30, 2018
Welcome to Sales Hacker’s first-ever Influential Women in Sales list! In this exclusive list, we wanted to honor not just female leaders that promote their own sales platform (no shame in that!) but those that take it even a step further by being incredibly intentional about promoting the next generation of female salespeople and making their path a little easier.
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.
FastSpring
OCTOBER 30, 2018
Getting your digital business ready for the holidays is a lot like getting you and your home ready for the holidays. Think about it; you probably started thinking about holiday shopping lists and cards back in September or October, and you’ll start putting up decorations at the end of November and into December. That lines up nicely with when you need to start planning, prepping, and executing your holiday campaigns.
Unbounce
OCTOBER 4, 2018
Over 85% of online consumers these days are engaging with brands locally, whether through local listings, local sites, or search results. So you can’t be blamed for thinking that geo-targeting and running local PPC campaigns in Google Ads make a whole lot of sense. The only problem? If you work at a multi-location franchise or company with multiple offices, local PPC at scale can be very messy.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 8, 2018
I’ve written quite a bit about the public market software multiples. They’ve increased to near historic levels with forward revenue multiples approaching 9x. As the public markets have appreciated, something has happened that I didn’t expect. Some public companies are now fetching the mulitples of the most attractive private companies.
Intercom, Inc.
OCTOBER 22, 2018
Brand new users aren’t committed to your product when they first sign up. They’re just trying it out. A great first use experience has to prove to these new and uncertain customers that your product will actually make their lives better. It’s not surprising that onboarding flows focused on demonstrating all the features of a product become leaky buckets as new customers quickly lose interest.
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
CloudKettle
OCTOBER 29, 2018
This blog post was born out of an off-hand tweet written by our President and Founder. The post Why Excel is a Startup’s Worst Enemy appeared first on CloudKettle.
Sales Hacker
OCTOBER 22, 2018
I read a quote the other day that immediately resonated with me: “Memorizing a playbook is like memorizing a script. When they change the script at the last minute, it’s like changing a play in the game.”. Never has this been more true than in the art of selling. No two deals are the same, though they likely share common DNA. In fact, with so many variables involved in a deal—from unique buyer objectives, to your timing in a deal relative to your competitors— building playbooks for your sales te
Upscope
OCTOBER 30, 2018
This is a guest post by UpLead who use Intercom extensively. UpLead is a B2B contact database for gathering sales leads. If you don’t engage your users, they won’t stay Imagine you're out with friends and you stop by a hip new restaurant. You step inside and immediately notice the artwork, decorations and colourful furniture. There’s nothing not to like about this place, but it’s silent.
FastSpring
OCTOBER 16, 2018
FastSpring’s Employee Spotlight is a Q&A series that features the hardworking, intelligent, and fun people that make FastSpring great. Get to know the fantastic team behind the ecommerce platform. Q: What is your role at FastSpring? A: I serve as the Chief Financial Officer where I’m responsible for budgeting, forecasting, and strategic planning.
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Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 13, 2018
Earlier this year, I wrote about MadKudu’s analysis of free trials and asked if readers were interested in another benchmarking survey on the topic, and the response was overwhelming. Over the last few weeks, my colleague Patrick Chase , and I (along with help from many people in the community) have been busy putting the survey together. I’d like to thank Ryan Janssen for lending a hand.
Intercom, Inc.
OCTOBER 24, 2018
How do you scale a support organization without breaking the budget or killing the quality of the customer experience? It’s an age old question for anyone leading a customer support organization, the sort of challenge that requires continuous innovation as a company and its customer base expands. With more than 30,000 customers and 100 people on the Customer Support team, we’ve come a long way from the team of just nine when we first shared a blog post on using Intercom to support our customers.
InsightSquared
OCTOBER 22, 2018
One of the key elements of any successful relationship is communication — and that happens to be a huge factor in successful sales and marketing interactions, too. Though you’d think that the benefits of cross-team collaboration would be obvious, sales reps and marketers can easily fall out of alignment, leading to clashes that undermine collaboration and impact both teams’ success.
Sales Hacker
OCTOBER 10, 2018
They say the average human attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s. Yet, a new study just came out saying that the average person watches 18 days worth of Netflix a year. The math doesn’t exactly add up. But what’s the difference? How do you get your viewers to figuratively “hit full screen” and give you their complete attention, instead of Amazon Prime shopping in the background?
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Unbounce
OCTOBER 11, 2018
Ever heard the saying “Cart before the horse”? Or “You have to crawl before you can walk”? Or “You can’t put lipstick on a landing page with 27 links”? That last one may be exclusive to landing page software employees, but the sentiment is the same. Unless the foundation of your landing page is strong, any optimization beyond that will be a waste of your time—and ad spend.
FastSpring
OCTOBER 31, 2018
When you think of the word “scary,” what usually comes to mind? Bats? Ghosts? Frankenstein’s monster? For many people, the first thought usually isn’t of their online store. But what you and many others may quickly realize is that setting up your digital business and accepting online payments is often a lot spookier than expected. From the jumble of technical jargon surrounding online payment processing to the complexities of navigating global taxes, selling digital products or software on
The SaaS CFO
OCTOBER 25, 2018
I have spent years forecasting software and SaaS company financials. One area of the P&L that receives extra scrutiny from leadership and investors is the sales and marketing area. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of SaaS metrics, but in this post, I’ll focus on a couple easy and popular (meaning important) SaaS […]. The post Simple Sales Efficiency Metrics for SaaS Leaders appeared first on The SaaS CFO.
Intercom, Inc.
OCTOBER 16, 2018
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” as Peter Drucker put it. But that approach doesn’t just apply to your supply chain management, revenue or churn rates – most fundamentally, it also applies to people and our performance. People are all unique, and our performance can vary from hour to hour, never mind from day to day. Measuring that is inherently messy and difficult, which is why crafting effective KPIs for people’s performance is so challenging.
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
Net-Results
OCTOBER 15, 2018
Having operated as a consultant in the B2B marketing automation space and having worked behind the scenes at a major marketing automation vendor, I can perhaps shed some light on this topic. Adoption One of the biggest problems I kept running into as a consultant was adoption. And that simply means that customers actually use the product on a […].
Sales Hacker
OCTOBER 5, 2018
The Cautionary Tale of James and Kim. The call came in. It was like so many calls I had received before. Kim* was fed up because James,* the star salesperson her organization promoted, wasn’t making it as a sales manager. James had been killing it at sales. It was clear he knew the industry and how to convert leads into sales. When James’ supervisor left he made it clear he wanted to move up in the organization and Kim and the other members of management thought it was clearly the right thing to
Chart Mogul
OCTOBER 25, 2018
Welcome to this week's instalment of SaaS Metrics Refresher. This week: the most controversial metric in SaaS, LTV promises so much. But can it be truly useful? Imagine being able to know the total revenue you’ll receive from a single customer on average — that’s the promise of customer lifetime value (LTV). It’s a valuable metric for assessing the health of a subscription business and making informed decisions about customer acquisition.
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