Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 16, 2018
Last week, I shared a presentation with an executive team at a large public SaaS company on everything I’ve learned about pricing. Here’s a summary of the frameworks and theory that I’ve aggregated over a decade of investing in startups. Why do we set prices? Setting aside the important reasons of generating revenue and maintaining solvency for a business, there are many other reasons to set price.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JANUARY 6, 2018
For lots of us software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketers, the first thing we want to do with a new prospect is show them a demo. They visit our website: invite them to a demo They walk into our trade show booth: show them a demo They download a white paper, open an email, attend a webinar, whatever: schedule a demo. My advice: Stop doing that. If we rush into a demo before the prospective customer is ready for one, a few bad things may happen: We miss an opportunity to learn more about the prospect
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Intercom, Inc.
JANUARY 30, 2018
In customer engagement, the right context for a message matters just as much as the right time and recipient. Given that content is in itself a tool for engagement, the same principle is in play. Today, we released our second installment in our audiobook series, Intercom on Customer Engagement. Divided into 8 shorter chapters, this compilation is our guide to crafting actionable messaging strategies that will help you grow your business.
Casey Accidental
JANUARY 2, 2018
This blog post was adapted from a presentation I did recently. Hence, slides. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I receive a lot of questions about growth teams. Naturally, there is a lot of confusion. Is this marketing being re-branded? Who does this team report to? What is the goal of it? What do they actually work on? When do I start a growth team for my business?
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
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 8, 2018
What makes a killer sales kickoff meeting? Is the review of numbers? Sort of… Is it the announcement of a new product, service, feature set? Perhaps… Is it the Rah-Rah speech from the CEO? Maybe… Is it the announcement of new marketing initiatives to support lead generation and demand generation efforts? Getting warmer… What really sets the best sales kickoff meetings apart from the mediocre ones is making sure you provide your sales team with something more valuable
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 3, 2018
Below are 7 predictions about the startup software ecosystem. How many of them do you agree with? The tax holiday for repatriation creates one of the most active M&A environments of the past ten years. The repatriation holiday is part of the new tax plan. It permit companies to bring US dollars held abroad (from software sales in other countries) back to the US at a lower tax rate than before.
Brian Balfour
JANUARY 11, 2018
We’ve all heard the rallying cry of the “One Metric That Matters”. Choose your north star and focus. Grow 7% week over week. If you grow daily active users (DAUs), the rest will follow. But blindly buying into the concept of the one metric that matters (OMTM) is a fatal oversimplification. In a recent essay , Casey Winters, formerly Growth at Pinterest, says: “The search for one key metric for a complex ecosystem like Pinterest over-simplifies how the ecosystem works and prevents anyone from foc
Think Strategies
JANUARY 17, 2018
Now that moving to the Cloud has become mainstream, it’s time for organizations to confront their biggest enterprise application challenge in the era of digital disruption – revamping their enterprise resource management (ERP) systems to keep up with the times. A clear indication of the shifting tides in the ERP market is the growing number of organizations that are replacing their installed systems with a new Cloud-based solution.
Totango
JANUARY 22, 2018
Customer Success Summit brings together the best and brightest minds in Customer Success. Our world-class speaker lineup for 2018 Customer Success Summit will share the impressive business results that customer success best practices should deliver. The first wave of speakers has been announced and the experience and CS knowledge they bring to #CSSummit18 is priceless.
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Your payments integration is more powerful than you think. In today’s complex business landscape, treating payments as just a software feature is a missed opportunity for significant growth and customer acquisition. With the right partner, payments can become a strategy that leads to competitive advantages. Designed for software leaders, this playbook outlines how to harness the full power of a payments strategy to drive substantial revenue and enhance the overall customer experience.
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 23, 2018
Before we get into our 2017 recap and 2018 road map, I wanted to provide some quick background on how Sales Hacker came to be. How It All Began: The Story of Sales Hacker. I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since we threw our first Sales Hacker Conference in September of 2013. 300 people showed up to learn about all the new advancements in Sales Technology.
InsightSquared
JANUARY 8, 2018
There’s an African proverb that goes something like this: “When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” This scenario is beginning to play out in marketing. The big players — native reporting in marketing automation and cloud-based sales- and business intelligence (BI) vendors — have caused the ground beneath specialty marketing analytics vendors to shake.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 25, 2018
In SaaS, machine learning has become an essential component to many different products. Whether it’s automating responses to inbound sales queries, identifying expense reports for audit, or surfacing anomalies in data, machine learning improves workflow software. To date, most software imbued with machine learning reduces costs rather than increase revenues.
FastSpring
JANUARY 31, 2018
There are two things most businesses can never get enough of: time and money. You’re constantly racing against the clock to get your product off the ground and generating revenues. One of the best ways to reduce costs and decrease time-to-market is to use a SaaS-friendly billing system. SaaS-friendly billing systems are designed specifically for companies who sell online services under a subscription model.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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.
Think Strategies
JANUARY 12, 2018
One of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes trying to move to the cloud is finding and retaining the skilled workers necessary to implement today’s rapidly expanding assortment of on-demand services. This skills gap cost companies more than $250 million in lost business opportunities in just one year, according to a recent survey conducted by the London School of Economics and sponsored by Rackspace.
A Smart Bear
JANUARY 4, 2018
People said there’s no money in hosting. WordPress is just a toy. After the success of Smart Bear, I should be setting my sights on something big, not this. I’m sure people said similar things to Heather when she joined as our CEO. The Silicon Valley-oriented technology press outlets don’t cover us because we’re not in San Francisco, even though we’re more successful than most of the startups they cover.
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 11, 2018
At first glance, project managers and sales professionals don’t seem to have much in common. They inhabit different worlds and generally aim for different goals. Budget-conscious, time-crazed and snoopier-than-normal, the stereotypical project manager seems, at most, a very distant cousin of the freewheeling, outgoing and glib sales practitioner.
InsightSquared
JANUARY 12, 2018
Guest blog by Joe Rodden, Sales Systems Manager at Catalant Technologies. As a strategic member of the sales team, ops plays a critical role in owning the sales tech stack. While sales leadership may sign on the dotted line for new vendor contracts, the responsibility of onboarding, implementation and training falls on the sales ops team. It’s important to be involved in every step of the process so you can effectively manage your organization’s sales technology.
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A failed payment isn't just a lost transaction - it could mean a customer churning for good. But not all payment declines are the same. For SaaS businesses, decline reasons vary, shaped by customer demographics and the nature of your service. Understanding your decline reason make up can be a game changer when it comes to improving retention and revenue.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 30, 2018
Recently, I wrote about customer/revenue operations , an idea that seems to be taking hold at many different SaaS companies. Instead of optimizing the performance of each individual step of the customer lifecycle, customer operations optimizes it over the entire journey. This is a fundamental change in the way a business manages its customers, and it’s now starting to be reflected in the organizational structure of SaaS startups.
FastSpring
JANUARY 12, 2018
The Digital Software Industry is a booming business. The audio market is growing exponentially but one of the key challenges with selling online is how to ensure your customers receive the best buying experience possible. Not only do you need the ability to agility add or modify products in your shopping cart platform, you need to ensure your huge digital files reach your new buyers as intended.
Chart Mogul
JANUARY 2, 2018
There are many ways to get customers to stick around, but they're not all equal. Let's take a look at the fine balance between holding users captive and making them want to stay. Stickiness is a term usually used with a positive sentiment in the tech industry — everyone wants a sticky product. However, the term lock-in is normally used negatively, describing products making it difficult for users to leave — even if they want to.
The SaaS CFO
JANUARY 26, 2018
Management Presentations in M&A Due Diligence The banker said to block my calendar for management presentations. Excuse me, what are management presentations? And for two weeks? Yes, and this is only the halfway point. The real “fun” in due diligence comes after the management presentations. However, before we get too far, let’s break down what […].
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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?
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 23, 2018
Mistakes during your sales conversations cost you deals. Buyers have dozens of options and more power than ever before. That means you can’t afford to slip up during sales conversations. Your buyers won’t have it. They’ll move to another vendor faster than you can blink, leaving your pockets empty. Knowing the most common mistakes will help you avoid them.
InsightSquared
JANUARY 25, 2018
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 10, 2018
In December 2017, the amount raised in ICOs nearly equaled the amount raised by Series A investments globally. The technology innovation catalyzed by Bitcoin and Blockchain is creating many multibillion dollar economies quickly. The ICO market today bears many similarities to the dotcom era. Startups can raise hundreds of millions of dollars on an idea.
FastSpring
JANUARY 24, 2018
Facebook recently announced a plan to test a shopping feed within its app that is designed to help users discover new products and buy them seamlessly. Welcome to the brave new world of social commerce.
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Uncover the secrets driving the future of the Subscription Economy. Zuora and BCG’s latest report uncovers how hybrid pricing models—combining subscription and consumption (usage)—are fueling faster growth, especially in AI-driven sectors. Discover how industry leaders are outperforming their competition by diversifying revenue streams and adopting cutting-edge infrastructure and billing systems.
Chart Mogul
JANUARY 4, 2018
As any SaaS business grows, customer churn has the potential to turn from a minor issue to an all-out growth killer. Calculating your growth ceiling can be a useful tool to illustrate the limits of your growth, highlighting the profound effect of churn. What is the SaaS growth ceiling? Many SaaS businesses overlook the multiplicative effect that churn can have on their business, especially if new customer acquisition grows linearly.
ITPro
JANUARY 23, 2018
Case Studies. The force has teamed up with Accenture and Oracle to implement a fully-integrated SaaS strategy.
Sales Hacker
JANUARY 16, 2018
A proper outbound sales strategy has real science behind it. You can’t just start pounding the pavement with no direction and expect to achieve growth. Wanna know the secret sauce behind a scalable outbound process that leads to significant growth? Market Segmentation combined with tailored messaging. The key to achieving explosive growth is to start by identifying your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) via segmentation, reaching out to them with personalized targeted messaging while building
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