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We just raised $125M in a round led by Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins. Here’s what we’re going to do with it. 2018 is shaping up to be a massive year for the Intercom platform. Historically, we’ve spent proportionately way more on research and development than other software companies we track, and that won’t stop any time soon. This funding will go straight into building great new software at a pace you’ve yet to see from us.
The Ideal Customer Profile. The perfect customer. Can you describe it for your startup? The more precisely you can describe it, the better. That will simplify disqualification. But articulating the ICP well isn’t enough. Vague ICPs are problematic. The company will focus on too broad a customer base, waste time and effort with unqualified prospects, and blunt their sales pitch with irrelevant value propositions.
I’ve been fortunate to work in a number of SaaS businesses in my career. Some of them, like InVision and SafetyCulture, seemed to just grow naturally without any help. Sure adding sales & marketing help fuel the growth, but these business were growing pretty rapidly before they injected the sales & marketing rocket fuel. In others however, growth has seem like a slog.
Here’s a sorry fact: most of your prospective customers won’t end up buying your software-as-a- service (SaaS) solution. Lots of folks who should buy it, won’t buy it. They have a problem you can solve. But instead of fixing it, they’ll stick with the poor system they already have. Others won’t buy your solution because they’ve never heard of you. Or they’ve found another option that fits their needs, and they feel there’s no need to look any further.
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.
Sales operations has been around for quite some time, but lately the function has been gaining momentum. Instead of behind-the-scenes sales support, sales ops now acts as a strategic partner for sales VPs and leadership. It’s clear that sales ops plays a critical role in any organization, but creating your own sales operations team can be a daunting task.
This is part one of a five-part series to help you develop the sales coaching approach that’s guaranteed to make you an unstoppable sales leader! In the past, all you had to do was chase down your number. Now you must worry about things like % hitting quota, onboarding, cycle time, and turnover, just to name a few. Add the new administrative duties, board reporting, and forecasting responsibilities and you may find yourself scratching your head wondering why you accepted that promotion.
This is part one of a five-part series to help you develop the sales coaching approach that’s guaranteed to make you an unstoppable sales leader! In the past, all you had to do was chase down your number. Now you must worry about things like % hitting quota, onboarding, cycle time, and turnover, just to name a few. Add the new administrative duties, board reporting, and forecasting responsibilities and you may find yourself scratching your head wondering why you accepted that promotion.
Change aversion is a concept well known to designers and product managers. It’s the negative reaction users have to changes in your product, whether that’s functional changes such as updates to product features, or interface changes such as visual redesigns. History is littered with cautionary tales of introducing change. When Twitter changed its “faves” icon from stars to hearts, users threatened a mass exodus.
Recently, I met an exceptional marketer. She described the purpose, strategy and tactics of a marketing department remarkably succinctly. Marketing’s methods can seem intangible. But she explained them simply and elegantly. I drew the chart above based on her vision of marketing’s roadmap. At the highest level, marketing articulates a compelling narrative.
Cloud Service Intelligently Streamlines the Accounts Payable (AP) Workflow Process. THINKstrategies announced today that Yooz has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user
We’ve staked the success of our business, RightMessage , on a big assumption: More relevant, more targeted messaging and call-to-actions make people think “OK, this thing is obviously meant for me” – the tangible side effect being more leads, more conversions, and more sales. So it would be a bit silly for a product that helps companies personalize to not be personalizing our own website.
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
“Closed Reason” is one of the most valuable, yet underutilized, pieces of data that a sales organization can collect about its opportunities. Understanding the reasons why opportunities close, especially when they are lost, allows your sales team to adapt their strategy, provide targeted training, and better communicate with R&D about prospect demands.
This article takes you through 5 crucial tips to efficiently manage your sales pipeline. Before we jump right in, let’s define what a sales pipeline is. A sales pipeline is a systematic and visual representation of your sales process. Based on how your buyer journey looks, example, Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action, your sales pipeline stages may also vary.
No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market. Companies like Amazon understand this well and are rightly famous for their “work backwards” philosophy. You start by writing the press release, to articulate how the world will see your product, and then work backwards until you get to the minimum set of technology requirements to achieve your goals
Yesterday, Salesforce announced it will acquire Mulesoft for $6.5B. A recent addition to the list of public software companies, Mulesoft is a tremendous business. The company generated $297M of revenue in 2017 at a 73% gross margin, and grew by 58%. Salesforce is acquiring the business for an astounding 21x enterprise value to trailing twelve months revenue multiple - nearly 2x the next closest.
Incorporating generative AI (gen AI) into your sales process can speed up your wins through improved efficiency, personalized customer interactions, and better informed decision- making. Gen AI is a game changer for busy salespeople and can reduce time-consuming tasks, such as customer research, note-taking, and writing emails, and provide insightful data analysis and recommendations.
Anyone who has attempted to adopt Salesforce cloud solutions in an enterprise environment knows that it may not be as easy as expected because of the additional effort typically required to integrate various data sources. This is a common problem that has plagued the enterprise application industry since its inception. In fact, it spawned an entire subsegment of data integration solution vendors and systems integration service providers that have prospered by helping organizations overcome their
Many people want to work in product management. One of the most common questions I receive is how to break into product management. It’s a hard question for me to answer, because 1) there is no default path (the same is true for trying to land a business development role), and 2) most of these people really don’t know what they’re asking for.
“Process” is a word that makes a lot of founders freeze. A process feels big. Complex. Overwhelming. It feels like something you document once you’re established. And in the early days, who has time for it?
This article dives into 7 examples of how to offer genuine value in B2B sales prospecting. In the video below, I summarize what these 7 examples of value based selling are, but if you’d rather barrel through, keep scrolling! OK, truth time. If I hear the phrase “ADD VALUE” one more freaking time, I am going to choke someone. I’m talking about that single overused phrase that goes like this, “Just add value.” I was exhausted from hearing the same old spiel.
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.
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? 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.
A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. This statement underpins all of finance. The idea has a fancy name: the Time Value of Money. It applies to all types of investments, including startups. Time Value of Money is the economic argument for startups to raise money when it’s available. If I give you a million dollars today, you can invest it.
Salesforce.com’s definitive agreement to acquire MuleSoft for approximately $6.5 billion represents the company’s biggest acquisition yet and a calculated move to consolidate it’s position as the leading enterprise software company in the Cloud. The move also illustrates that the real power in the market is quickly shifting to those vendors that can facilitate the most cost-effective flow of data across applications in an increasingly connected and complex world.
By Geoff Roberts 5 min read As I’ve been engaging with SaaS start-ups across industries this year, one thing has become certain; real estate tech is hot in 2018. The real estate tech start-ups listed below range from companies that are still developing their products to venture-backed businesses that have already found significant traction and revenue.
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
Every business runs like a B2B sales prospecting operation. You head out to a territory (market) where you can mine (generate) something valuable, then sift (qualify) good finds from the bad. You then focus on refining (nurturing) the good finds and attempt to make a hefty profit by selling value to the best buyers. For B2B organizations, customers now represent the new gold to be desired and the sales team’s pipeline the new gold mine to be developed.
Prior to joining Intercom as a Product Manager, I had never run a structured beta. When it came to finally running my first one, I was surprised to find very little information online that could help me. I’ve run a lot of successful betas now but I learned my craft through tribal Intercom knowledge, built up by other Product Managers over the years.
Recently, people have been asking just where are we in the SaaS valuation cycle. I last updated the chart above more than six months ago. The answer is close to ten year highs. The chart above shows the median enterprise value to forward revenue multiple to multiple. Enterprise value is the market of a publicly traded company minus the available cash the company holds.
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?
Spotify's recent F-1 filing is packed full of metrics and insights into both consumer subscriptions and the streaming music industry. Spotify has revealed its intentions to go public with a novel “direct listing” approach. This means that the company will not embark on the usual roadshow, there will be no pre-defined opening share price and more freedom for existing stakeholders who want to sell their shares.
Marketing automation vendors are being cornered by a monster of their own creation. That’s the conclusion of a new InsightSquared and Heinz Marketing report, titled “ Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) Satisfaction Survey 2018: Are Marketing Automation Vendors Still Meeting the Needs of Today’s Marketer?”. No doubt the marketing industry owes a debt of gratitude to the marketing automation industry.
In my career, I’ve worked in marketing, product, and analytics. While the American Marketing Association defines all of that as marketing , the reality is those are rarely under the scope of one functional team, and the people in those groups see things very differently much of the time. One of the key ways this manifests that creates confusion for the organization is in the creation of personas.
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