Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 27, 2018

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.

Artificial Intelligence 224

Artificial Intelligence Scale Machine Learning Technology 224

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 24, 2018

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.

Scale 199

Scale Startup Scaling Technology 199

Aaron Beashel

MARCH 9, 2018

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.

Scale 192

Scale B2B SaaS Payments Strategy 192

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MARCH 2, 2018

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.

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Education Pricing Communication Customer Success 122

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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.

Payment Solutions

Think Strategies

MARCH 27, 2018

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

SaaS Payments 100

SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services Payments 100

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 12, 2018

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.

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Branding Scaling Management Business 223

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 19, 2018

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.

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Acquisition Marketing Enterprise Revenue 183

Sales Hacker

MARCH 27, 2018

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.

Sales Hiring 101

Sales Hiring B2B Banking Sales 101

Baremetrics

MARCH 21, 2018

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.

Scale 91

Scale Software Review Construction SaaS 91

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ClinicSense is a SaaS platform that supports over 7,000 massage therapists who use it for appointment management, payments, scheduling, marketing activities and more. Despite having a relatively low payment failure rate, the company discovered that the failures disrupted the customer experience. This often led to churn as customers decided to cancel or abandon their account, preventing ClinicSense from realizing the full lifetime value (LTV) of its users.

Payments

Think Strategies

MARCH 26, 2018

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

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Marketplace as a Service Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 100

InsightSquared

MARCH 14, 2018

“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.

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Underperforming Technical Team Sales Systems Review Data Analysis 103

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 21, 2018

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

Marketing 223

Marketing Banking B2B Technology 223

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 1, 2018

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.

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Marketing Education Startup Software 166

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

Sales Hacker

MARCH 1, 2018

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.

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VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Sales 99

CloseSaaS

MARCH 12, 2018

“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?

Sales 81

Sales 81

Think Strategies

MARCH 22, 2018

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.

Data 100

Data Acquisition Cloud Enterprise 100

Casey Accidental

MARCH 13, 2018

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.

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Scaling Engineering Product Marketing Leadership 84

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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?

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Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 13, 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? 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.

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Advertising Finance Acquisition Sales 223

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 31, 2018

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.

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Startup Finance Investment Engineering 160

Sales Hacker

MARCH 6, 2018

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.

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Sales Management Forecasting Software Review 92

InsightSquared

MARCH 29, 2018

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.

Artificial Intelligence 73

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Marketing Leadership 73

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, and Terrence Sheflin

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

Outseta

MARCH 21, 2018

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.

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Outsourcing Services New CTO Outsourced Development CTO 75

Chart Mogul

MARCH 6, 2018

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.

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Metrics Payments EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) SaaS Payments 75

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 14, 2018

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.

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Benchmarks Metrics Management Communication 223

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2018

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.

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SaaS Healthcare SMB Enterprise 153

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

Sales Hacker

MARCH 13, 2018

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not always just about how you say it. . What you say still matters, too. . In fact, the most decisive difference between superstar sales reps and everyone else comes down to what they say during their sales conversations. For the longest time, the dos and don’ts of sales conversations have been passed down from sales team to sales team.

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Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence AI Sales 92

CloseSaaS

MARCH 14, 2018

So you're looking to systematize your inside sales process so it's easier to onboard new talent and give them the steps they need to succeed.

Sales 78

Sales Onboarding 78

Casey Accidental

MARCH 19, 2018

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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Marketing Advertising Education Data 73