March, 2018

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Putting $125M to work for you, our customers

Intercom, Inc.

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.

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An Often Forgotten Characteristic About Your Startup's Ideal Customer Profile

Tom Tunguz

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 214
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How to Define the Go-To Market Strategy for Your B2B SaaS Company

Aaron Beashel

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
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Have your prospects gone missing, or just hibernating?

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

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.

Education 122
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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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How to Build Your Sales Operations Team from Scratch

InsightSquared

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.

More Trending

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Navigating the complexity of change aversion

Intercom, Inc.

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.

Branding 223
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The Clearest Articulation of a Marketing Roadmap

Tom Tunguz

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.

Marketing 200
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Yooz Wins Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award

Think Strategies

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

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5 ways to use personalization to grow your SaaS

Baremetrics

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
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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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Why “Closed Reason” is the Secret Weapon for High Performing Sales Teams

InsightSquared

“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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Value Based Selling: 7 Powerful Actions You Must Take to Offer Genuine Value

Sales Hacker

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.

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Start your marketing with why: Getting your story right

Intercom, Inc.

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
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The Salesforce/Mulesoft Acquisition is a Bellwether for the 2018 M&A Market

Tom Tunguz

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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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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Why Salesforce’s Latest Big Gamble Is On APIs – A Guest Commentary in E-Commerce Times

Think Strategies

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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Product Visionary vs. Product Leader

Casey Accidental

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.

Scaling 84
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Are You Ready to be GPDR Compliant?

FastSpring

Data privacy and security.

Data 82
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How To Approach Sales Coaching Like a Pro {Part 2 of 5} — the Right Use of Sales Data

Sales Hacker

This is part 2 of a 5-part series to help you develop the right approach to sales coaching. While part 1 focused building the right coaching mentality , this article covers how you can take a data driven sales coaching approach. . Using Data to Inspire Commitment. There are dozens of tools to stimulate conversations between salespeople and sales leaders.

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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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Why live chat isn’t just for customer service anymore

Intercom, Inc.

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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The Importance of Time Value of Money for Startups

Tom Tunguz

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.

Startup 188
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Why Salesforce Is Making Its Biggest Bet on APIs and Data Integration

Think Strategies

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
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3 steps to design your first sales process today

CloseSaaS

“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
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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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Ready Player One: A Lesson in Virtual Reality and Digital Commerce

FastSpring

The line between the “real” world and the digital one is becoming more blurred by the day. Virtual reality and augmented reality (also known as mixed reality) are changing the way we experience the world.

Trends 78
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B2B Sales Outsourcing Is Dicey. Here’s How to Do It Right

Sales Hacker

I run a European-based sales agency for software and technology companies. In this article, I will summarize what I’ve learned about B2B sales outsourcing. W hat is Sales Outsourcing? Sales outsourcing gives parts of your own sales process to others (individuals or agencies). Reasons to outsource include: Lack of expertise and experience in some sales functions (e.g.

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How to run a successful beta in 7 steps

Intercom, Inc.

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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Where are We in the SaaS Valuation Cycle?

Tom Tunguz

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.

SaaS 186
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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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12 Real Estate Tech Start-ups Making Waves In 2018

Outseta

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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How to build a great inside sales system (without all the hard work)

CloseSaaS

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
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The metrics behind Spotify’s IPO

Chart Mogul

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.

Metrics 75