Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
When a startup takes form, the first weeks and months and years are spent furiously. The team assembles itself. The lightbulb illuminates. It is formed and reformed again and again as customers supply feedback. Eventually the team hews the right product. The startup raises capital. Then the team returns focus to hiring, evolving the product, and closing customers.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 26, 2018
by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. It’s hard to win a battle you don’t realise you’re in. It’s even harder if you don’t know all of the armies on the field, their strategies and weapons, or even who’s a friend and who’s a foe. The same is true in software. We are all in a battle, multiple battles in fact, with a lot at stake: whether it’s the fate of the company we work for or for the product that we build.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
FEBRUARY 3, 2018
Lots of people who you think should be interested in your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, couldn’t care less. It doesn’t matter that they perfectly fit your “ideal customer” persona. It doesn’t matter that your solution is full of features built especially for them. It doesn’t even matter that you’re sure it’ll be a huge help to their business.
Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
To me, there’s never been a better time to be a sales enablement professional. It’s a rapidly growing area and while there’s a lack of publicly available sales enablement statistics or indeed, widely adopted best practices and standards, this is due, largely to the fact, that many of us are figuring out exactly what sales enablement is, means and does.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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.
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 13, 2018
In this article, you’ll learn how to structure your sales development (SDR) team for maximum efficiency and scalability. Sales leaders, read on! “The only easy day was yesterday.”. -U.S. Navy SEALs. This is one of the most famous principles of the U.S. Navy SEALs. From a business perspective, to me, this means you have to constantly improve your game.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 23, 2018
Founded in 2007, Dropbox epitomizes the freemium go-to-market. Dropbox has grown from 0 to 500 million users over that time period. 2% of those users convert to paid and pay an average of $9.33 per month. 90% of revenue originates through self serve channels - an astounding figure for company that generated more than $1B in revenue last year. Dropbox’s revenue grew from $604M to $1.1B from 2015 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 35%.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
A few years ago I came out of a meeting with my product manager where we talked about the next feature we should build. At the time there was a lot of hype around Foursquare-like location sharing apps. We worked for a social network so we had to build something like that as well. Needless to say, we didn’t have a clear product strategy. To take my mind off things I opened my RSS reader and a post called “ Product strategy means saying no ” caught my eye.
Think Strategies
FEBRUARY 12, 2018
All you have to do to recognize the changing face of the consumer retail market is pay attention to the growing number of packages piling up on your neighbor’s front step. The explosive growth of the home delivery business also has been influencing the industrial, business-to-business world. As Amazon sets consumer expectations for rapid delivery to the home, companies in nearly every industry have been recognizing that they must move to the Cloud to keep pace.
ITPro
FEBRUARY 12, 2018
In-depth. The way we work is changing, and the way we manage our IT tools needs to change with it.
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 Hacker
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
In this blueprint, we provide insight into where growth comes from and how to structure your sales approach to capture that growth. The Winning By Design Blueprint Series provides practical advice for every part of a SaaS sales organization. Traditional Sales Growth vs SaaS Sales Growth. Historically, growth of a sales team was based on the revenue starting with $0M on day 1 of the year.
yoursales
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
SALES STACK 2018 SALES TOOLS FOR. PROFESSIONAL SALES SALES STACK 2018: THE TOOLS SALES STACK 2018: THE TOOLS. Want the 2019 list instead? Then click here! I n an ever evolving world, we in the business of selling SaaS have to embrace and stay ahead with the latest sales tools that are emerging in the market. These tools are what we use to deliver elite services to our clients and strengthen our B2B sales processes.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 1, 2018
This is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve collected about writing. Put each sentence on a separate line when you write. When we read, we hear a rhythm. There is a rhythm to the words. And when we read, we look to find that rhythm, which pushes us through the end of a sentence, so if I write a really long sentence, and the reader isn’t expecting it – like this one – the reader will find it really hard to follow and understand where I am going.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 19, 2018
As a student of engineering you’re incentivised to write a lot and to read a lot. You’re expected to solve many well understood, discreet, simple problems, on paper, on sunny afternoons in late May and early June. This kind of learning has its place – it encourages discipline of thought and allows you to develop certain important muscles that will be useful for later – but to be successful as product engineer , you’ll also need to master a bunch of different skills.
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
InsightSquared
FEBRUARY 22, 2018
Boston’s Trident Booksellers and Cafe thrums on a Saturday morning. The place is packed — Busboys bustle past waiting patrons to drop off clean glasses for the bartenders, only to be coaxed out of the way by a waiter looking for their next order, or a host seating a table. The kitchen rages, tossed about under the weight of tickets from the two dining rooms.
Baremetrics
FEBRUARY 19, 2018
Given you probably just finished closing your books for 2017, it’s a good time to introduce changes to plan for the coming year. Proper expense categorization improves your visibility into your company’s spending while enabling more accurate metrics and forecasting. After all, as a startup founder, you want to have a solid idea of what your true gross margins are and what it actually costs to acquire a customer!
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 14, 2018
In this article, you’ll learn how to align your event sales strategy to your marketing team’s activities to maximize your event success. At Bizzabo we have a motto, sales is a team sport. Never is that more true than when attending a professional sales conference , trade show or networking event. And, if your team does not include the Marketing team, you’re likely making a huge mistake!
Chargify
FEBRUARY 1, 2018
Over the last decade, recurring revenue has emerged as the preferred model for businesses moving beyond transactional commerce. While the first generation of recurring revenue was defined by simple subscriptions—think Netflix’s original “one-size-fits-all” $7.99 pricing or the traditional “Good, Better, Best” plans—many businesses have found static subscription offers don’t always align with customers’ needs and limit growth potential.
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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.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 26, 2018
At Saastr, Jason and I discussed the role of private equity in SaaS on stage as a potential acquisition path for SaaS startups. Private equity hasn’t been a common exit route for venture backed startups in the past. But that’s changing. The chart above depicts the total disclosed value of US venture-backed SaaS startups which have been acquired by PE firms since 2010.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 27, 2018
In a relay race, the most exciting moments often come not at the finish line, but when the baton gets passed from one runner to the next. There is an exhilarating tension because, while the best runners can make it look so effortless, barely breaking stride, it is fraught with risk. Those same runners, with all of their training and talent, can sometimes still fumble the pass, drop the baton and lose the race in a moment.
Adhere Creative
FEBRUARY 21, 2018
W hen your company is on the market for a new website, one of the first things you’ll have to decide is whether or not to build a custom site, or use a premade template. Both choices rely on a CMS (Content Management System) to get the job done. Companies like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Joomla, facilitate website building by offering powerful website construction platforms.
FastSpring
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Research shows that we judge websites just as we judge people: harshly and quickly. We all make snap judgments. It takes about 1/10th of a second to cobble together a first impression about a person, and home pages are no different. It takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion of your site. That’s 0.05 seconds. The blink of an eye, a snap of the fingers.
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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.
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
In this article, I will breakdown how to run effective discovery calls within the sales process, in just 7 easy steps. It’s no secret that discovery is one of the most crucial parts of any sales opportunity, and ultimately – delivering demos without this vital component is likely to be a wasted activity. When I posed to my LinkedIn network a couple of months back the question as to the importance of discovery, the response was overwhelmingly aligned.
InsightSquared
FEBRUARY 13, 2018
Guest blog by Ashley Coleman, Director of Marketing Operations at UserIQ. The concept of the customer journey is all the rage these days. It seems like every SaaS business wants to structure their sales, marketing and customer success team around a “customer journey framework” as the ultimate display of alignment. But for the most part, sales and marketing operations professionals have been busy working to unite sales and marketing around a spiraling technology stack, causing us to neglect a fu
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 19, 2018
What should be the return on investment of a startup’s cash burn? Fred Wilson posed this question last year in his post Some Thoughts on Burn Rates. In that post, he suggests, and I agree, that a 5x ROI on cash burn is a good target. How does one calculate ROI? It’s a simple formula: Cash_Burn_ROI = Revenue_Multiple/Revenue_Pay_Back_in_Years 1.
Intercom, Inc.
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Onboarding new employees is a hard process to do well. You might think of onboarding as something you just have to check off your list, but it’s easy to forget that things which are second nature to you are totally new and unknown to someone that’s just started. I joined Intercom a few months ago as an engineering manager and onboarding for the first time in a while made me realize some things I hadn’t before.
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
Casey Accidental
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Andrew Chen recently wrote a blog post about how growth is getting harder. I invited Andrew to the Greymatter podcast to chat more about why growth is getting harder, and more importantly, what to do about it. We talk about how viral growth is on the decline in consumer, but not in B2B, and how to leverage paid referrals effectively. We also walk through trends in paid acquisition, how to find your first channel of growth, and much more.
Chart Mogul
FEBRUARY 27, 2018
Welcome back to this new season of SaaS Open Mic! In this first episode I'm talking to Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi of Forget The Funnel -- both strong proponents of a more holistic approach to modern SaaS marketing. According to Gia and Claire of Forget The Funnel : “The vast majority of early- and growth-stage tech companies undervalue marketing — that is, until marketing becomes an emergency.” Sound familiar?!
Sales Hacker
FEBRUARY 27, 2018
As a VP of Sales, you’re probably not too familiar with SaaS metrics or costs — that’s the CFO’s job, right? Well today, we’ll breakdown how to understand SaaS costs basics, and then explain how to accurately set sales goals and metrics that drive success. We’ll also review how to determine if your team structure is working or not, as this is a crucial factor that impacts revenue goals.
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