Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2018

Salesforce is worth $113 billion. 1% of $113 billion is $1.13 billion. ServiceNow is worth $34B and Workday is worth $33B. 3% of $33-34B is $1B. Atlassian is worth $20.5B. 5% of $20.5B is $1B. Why am I doing all this simple math you might ask? We have reached a point in SaaS where a small fraction of an incumbent is a billion-dollar company. If you start a business tomorrow that is able to cleave 1% of revenue from Salesforce, you will have built a billion-dollar business. 1% is not that much.

Revenue 274

Revenue Blockchain Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 274

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 24, 2018

For all the time and money we spend attracting customers to our website, isn’t it odd how little we spend trying to convert them? These live chat stats will show you the conversion power of messaging. According to an eConsultancy report , for every $92 spent acquiring prospects only $1 is spent converting them. Sure, that dollar could give you returns in spades, but in reality the odds of that are no better than a craps table in Las Vegas.

Advertising 205

Advertising Finance Acquisition Sales 205

Sixteen Ventures

AUGUST 1, 2018

Churn… ya boring. Yawn. Time to move on. I’m so over talking about churn and if you really understand what Customer Success is all about , you should be, too. Churn is so easy to get rid of… you just have to do five simple things. If churn is a problem for you, this post will change that (if you’ll let it) and then you can move onto bigger and better things.

Churn 129

Churn Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Customer Success 129

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

AUGUST 28, 2018

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is around building a sales enablement strategy and what that might look like. While each company, context and industry is different, I believe that there are some fundamentals that should form the blueprint of any sales enablement strategy. At a high level the strategy should convey what your team does, how it does it, goals and main initiatives for the year ahead.

Sales Enablement 122

Sales Enablement Scale Strategy Underperforming Technical Team 122

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Payment Solutions

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

AUGUST 1, 2018

Churn is bad for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Very bad. But knowing there’s a churn problem is one thing; fixing it is something else. To bring down churn, we need to understand what’s behind the numbers. Why are customers leaving? Different causes will point toward different fixes. Poor product performance Sometimes the solution simply doesn’t deliver as advertised.

Churn 122

Churn Metrics Compensation Software Review 122

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 18, 2018

Startups are business machines engineered to grow quickly. The forces of hypergrowth exert enormous strain on every aspect of the company. Internal break all the time as the company moults into a new skin. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when hiring. Every lead hired today, whether marketing , sales, engineering or product, will have a very different job nine months from now, much less two years from now.

Sales Recruiting 267

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Startup Headcount 267

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 14, 2018

The first law of content marketing is that publishing is an expensive business. No matter how hard you try to circumvent it, the first law will always come back and bite you. One common approach is to outsource content production, which can be cheaper in pure monetary terms. But unless someone, preferably an editor or with some editorial skills, is closely managing that process you’ll end up paying more for it in the long run.

Content Marketing 182

Content Marketing Travel Technical Review Software Review 182

The SaaS CFO

AUGUST 27, 2018

How to Calculate the Rule of 40 in SaaS The rule of 40 in SaaS is simple financial framework that balances revenue growth versus margins. It’s a rule of thumb to quickly determine the health and/or attractiveness of a SaaS company. You’ve probably heard of the rule of 40, but the application of the formula […]. The post How to Apply the Rule of 40 for Your SaaS Company appeared first on The SaaS CFO.

SaaS 96

SaaS Revenue 96

Unbounce

AUGUST 28, 2018

If you run paid ads, chances are you have a mobile campaign or two (or two hundred) live right now. Whether we like it or not, most of us live tethered to our smartphones, relying on them to entertain us, keep us connected, and guide us to the nearest bike repair shop. And as such, behavior on mobile is shaping how marketers need to operate. Over the last four years, we were inundated with messages declaring it was finally “the year of mobile”, so much so that it felt like our industry was cryin

Mobile 95

Mobile Underperforming Technical Team Advertising Web Development 95

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Payment Solutions

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 8, 2018

A sales CRM is a foundational tool for modern sales organizations. Here’s a closer a look at the evolution of customer relationship management and where it’s headed. Let’s face it—most B2B tech brands are unsexy. It’s not a bad thing, but you won’t see hundreds of customers lining up outside at 4:00 am to wait for the next big product release from some IT cloud storage company.

Artificial Intelligence 88

Artificial Intelligence Blockchain Machine Learning AI 88

Incredo

AUGUST 21, 2018

Development 108

Development SaaS 108

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 11, 2018

How long should you let a customer use your software before they sign a contract? You could offer them a 7 day free trial. Or 14 or 21 or 30 or 90. Longer trials might be better. The customer could delve deeper into the product, become more committed and sign a larger contract. Shorter trials drive urgency, weed out the uncommitted, and result in shorter sales cycles.

Payment Solutions 193

Payment Solutions Software SaaS Acquisition 193

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 21, 2018

Chatbots push salespeople and marketers past the physical limitations of being human: our need to sleep, our loathe of repetitive tasks, our inability to multitask conversations. Modern-day chatbots, like our recently launched Custom Bots , are completely customizable and can automate all sorts of user journeys, while maintaining a positive consumer experience.

Scale 163

Scale Marketing Sales Enterprise 163

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

Revenue

Groove HQ

AUGUST 1, 2018

Solve complicated scenarios with great communication. There are a few main difficult scenarios you’ll most likely face as a support representative. In customer service, every interaction matters, and there is no 100% right or wrong way to deal with any situation. Even though the ability to think on a case-to-case basis is one of the […]. The post 5 Customer Service Email Templates for Tough Situations appeared first on Groove Blog.

Communication 75

Communication Customer Support 75

Unbounce

AUGUST 15, 2018

You know how word of mouth is like the Holy Grail of marketing? There’s nothing quite as powerful as someone whose opinion you trust simply saying, “hey, check this out.”. Well, the other day my colleagues and I were talking about talks: conference talks, TED Talks, university lectures, a few candid post-dinner nuggets of wisdom from a tipsy aunt. We were recommending ones we’ve found helpful or inspiring as marketers (whether the topics focused on marketing directly, or were more broadly about

Marketing 94

Marketing Interviewing Advertising Retention 94

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 16, 2018

When a high-stress job meets low emotional intelligence (EI), doomsday happens. That’s what research, experience, and common sense will tell you. And that’s why achieving your success potential in sales is directly proportional to your emotional intelligence in sales. Sales is tough, but even that is an understatement. Regardless of role, most sales professionals work well beyond 40 hours per week based on a HubSpot study.

Scale 81

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Social Media 81

GetUplift

AUGUST 5, 2018

How many Facebook ads do you see in your news feed a day? According to Social Media Examiner , 93% of marketers use Facebook advertising regularly. That’s about 3 million businesses using Facebook to market themselves. Every day these brands text, call, email and target us with their Facebook ads, overwhelming us with offers. In fact , we’re so used to being targeted by brands everywhere on the web that our brain automatically tries to block out all the noise and ignore those ads.

Social Media 71

Social Media Software Review Branding Advertising 71

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Enterprise

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 29, 2018

In a post earlier this week, I argued 1% of Salesforce’s revenues creates a unicorn. More broadly, I said that the biggest SaaS companies are so large, that they must have underserved customer segments. And there is an opportunity for a startup to identify that underserved segment, build a product to serve it better, and build a unicorn. I received a lot of comments about this post, but not the kind that I expected.

SaaS 123

SaaS Enterprise Startup Revenue 123

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2018

Growing up, I was surrounded by video games. In my house, we had the NES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy and a bunch of PC games. I would play video games for hours on end, only stopping for the odd toilet break. But as my love of gaming grew, it became obvious that I wasn’t drawn to the typically popular action or racing games. Instead of Half-Life or GoldenEye, I was drawn to simulation games such as SimCity , The Sims and Theme Hospital – titles that rewarded strategy over speed, patience over practic

Strategy 163

Strategy Management Benchmarks Leadership 163

Groove HQ

AUGUST 1, 2018

Every customer service email is an opportunity to build stronger relationships. Any given company probably sends hundreds of customer service emails daily, and it can be easy to lose sight of just how important every single one of them is. But for any given customer, it might be the only interaction with your business that […]. The post 10 Tips for Sending Better Customer Service Emails appeared first on Groove Blog.

Business 75

Business Customer Support 75

Inturact

AUGUST 22, 2018

The SaaS Marketing Journey -- that arduous road that sees newcomers to your business become active promoters of the products you offer -- is a complicated beast, to be sure. However, just because the tasks ahead pose a significant challenge to your SaaS business, it doesn’t mean that success is beyond your reach. In fact, a number of companies have wisely leveraged SaaS content marketing to gain customers and boost awareness.

Content Marketing 70

Content Marketing Marketing SaaS Business 70

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali

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.

Trends

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 6, 2018

Finding the best live chat software in a crowded marketplace can be tricky. Fortunately, this just means there’s bound to be an option that fits perfectly with your business model. If you owned a store, you could directly interact with the customers who come in each day. The same principle doesn’t traditionally work with websites. Sure, you can see the visitors who pop in, thanks to tools that gather data on where they’re coming from.

Sales Hiring 81

Sales Hiring Software Review Technical Review Sales 81

Sixteen Ventures

AUGUST 8, 2018

If you missed it, I’m done talking about churn. If you have a churn problem, read this post and follow my directions. Churn won’t be an issue for you anymore. Now we can move onto GROWTH ! And the first order of business is understanding the difference between Sales and Expansion and why knowing the difference is so important. I’ve said that Sales is part of Customer Success before , and by that I mean Sales – like every other part of the company – should be governe

Sales 69

Sales Government Churn Customer Success 69

Baremetrics

AUGUST 21, 2018

How good are you at converting free trials into paid users? If you’re like most companies, probably not as good as you’d like. According to a recent study , companies end up converting between 1–10% and 40–50% of their free users. Even when you knock it out of the park, you’re leaving a lot of potential revenue on the table. To illustrate: Let’s say you crush it and achieve a 50% conversion rate out of 5,000 free trials this month.

Travel 69

Travel Sales Hiring Social Media Pricing 69

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 20, 2018

The phrase “cross-functional” is most commonly used to describe a team made up of of people with different functions or skills. At Intercom for example, our product teams include designers, programmers and product managers , unique roles working together as one. Or you might hear the term used when teams from different parts of a business work together on a big project, like the launch of a new product or release.

Scale 162

Scale Education Sales Hiring Communication 162

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.

Artificial Intelligence

Chart Mogul

AUGUST 10, 2018

This week: An analysis of Slack's landing page copywriting, why SaaS content marketing sucks and is it time to rethink freemium? In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue.

SaaS 67

SaaS Content Marketing Payment Features Subscription 67

Inturact

AUGUST 8, 2018

Imagine if you could give every visitor to your site an experience targeted particularly to their interests. Doing so might be easier than you think. You don't need to write special content catering to various demographics and interests. And you certainly don't have to write personally tailored posts. All you need is a bit of information about your readers.

Content Marketing 68

Content Marketing Marketing Development SaaS 68

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 28, 2018

This article outlines the results of a B2B Buyer Experience survey by TimeTrade. Make no mistake: we live in a digital world. For many of us, that’s also the primary channel through which we make an increasing number of purchases. Industry research consistently shows that buyers want the same easy experience they now routinely enjoy in their private life.

B2B 80

B2B B2C Banking Engagement 80