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To build a great product, you have to intimately understand the problem it’s built to solve. To build a great business, as Steli Efti has learned, your customers must feel the pain of that problem too. Steli is the CEO of Close.io , an inside sales CRM that helps startups and SMBs generate high-quality leads and close more deals. When he’s not building software, Steli’s sharing content with the wider sales community through the Close.io blog , books on everything from product demos t
Imagine you came across this ad. Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes.
If you’ve ever sat through a marketing agency’s pitch or seen an episode of Mad Men, you’d think that marketing is all about talking – pushing out clever messages so that people will buy whatever it is that you’re selling. Not exactly. You’re right that there’s plenty of delivering messages through email, blog posts, paid adwords, Twitter, TV, radio, or print ads or whatever media reaches the buyer.
When you hear the words “site architecture,” the first thing that comes to mind is probably SEO. It doesn’t take much digging into SEO best practice to learn that Google loves a site with clearly defined architecture that’s easy to crawl and index. But if you stopped your site architecture planning with just your SEO, then you’ve missed out on the greater picture.
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.
The EU was kind enough to provide a stress test for our email delivery pipeline during the GDPR surge on a scale that I doubt our engineering team as a whole would have agreed to, and we passed. You’ve all heard about GDPR, as it ironically swamped your inboxes in the process of protecting you from unwanted emails. For our engineering teams at Intercom, there was a much more short term impact last week, which we think is interesting enough to share more widely.
Many people are familiar with Dan Pink’s work in Drive that to be the most productive, happy at work, etc., you need to have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. While a lot has been written about how to create purpose inside companies and crafting compelling missions, I would like to spend some time to dig into the details on autonomy. As founders and senior leaders of companies, it can be tough to understand how to give autonomy to employees and also drive toward a singular vision and commit to thi
Many people are familiar with Dan Pink’s work in Drive that to be the most productive, happy at work, etc., you need to have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. While a lot has been written about how to create purpose inside companies and crafting compelling missions, I would like to spend some time to dig into the details on autonomy. As founders and senior leaders of companies, it can be tough to understand how to give autonomy to employees and also drive toward a singular vision and commit to thi
The business case for sales development is built on flawless logic and verified by market data. It’s a lot better to sell to qualified prospects than to try your luck on a complete stranger. The more time your closers spend taking moonshots, the less sales they actually make. Smart business organizations have long experienced and embraced this principle.
You can attribute a lot of great relationships to perfect timing. When you connect with the right person at the right time, everything seems to just fit. This is especially true for sales. Connecting with your lead too early means they won’t be ready to buy. But if you wait too long, they may have moved on to a competitor. Unfortunately, finding the perfect time to connect with a customer is complicated.
The most important tasks for any early stage startup are to write code and talk to users. When we started Intercom the latter was my job. About 50 percent of my time was spent communicating with potential users, whether that was asking them to try Intercom over email, meeting them at conferences, responding to them in blog comments or talking to them on Hacker News.
Should I swing by my colleague's desk, or just send a Slack DM? Does this require a meeting? Should I document the outcome of this meeting? Well, it depends. Communicating wasn’t always this hard. Most of the time when we communicate in business, we don’t plan how we’re going to make that communication, or what we’re trying to get from it. It’s really not our fault — human-to-human communication is so deeply ingrained into our being.
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.
Hoping to provide a little more clarity around some of the best tools for your sales stack, we’ll be discussing the different types of tools that I like to incorporate into our customers’ sales processes. Because every sales organization has different needs and uses different tools, we’re going to focus more on the functionality. I’ll also highlight some of the favorites out there that encompass many of the features we’ll be discussing.
As the rise of bots and automation continues apace, a lot of people are wondering how the sales process and lead qualification will be affected by this fast-evolving technology. Some are even asking if salespeople are at risk of being eclipsed by chatbots altogether. But a fairly simple example of how the Intercom bot, Operator , helped our sales conversations illuminates what we think that future might look like in practice.
We're still buzzing from our Mogul I/O London event this week! Here's a rundown of highlights and lessons from the panel session with Marvel, Receptive and ProdPad. Thanks to everyone who came out to see us in London at our third Mogul I/O event. The presentations and discussion was packed full of lessons and insights, as you’d expect from such a selection of seasoned SaaS leaders.
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
On this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast, we talk with Todd Caponi , former CRO of PowerReviews about how to sell enterprise software solutions with increased transparency in the sales process. What You’ll Learn. How to use transparency concepts to increase win rates. How to evolve your sales posture given the changes in sales conversations over the last 20 years.
“Sorry. What was that?” It’s every salesperson’s worst nightmare. You’re deep in your pitch. Your prospect is hanging onto every single word you say. And then wham! It turns out their silence wasn’t because they were so blown away, but because they didn’t understand a word you were saying.
We all like to think we’re the drivers of our own life. We intuitively feel that we are choosing the route, direction and speed of our journey, and even the type of car we’re traveling in. We have an inbuilt tendency to believe we are deciding our destination, that we are actively mapping out our career direction and our life story. The truth is, however, that most of us are mere passengers in our own life journey.
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 happens at management presentations and how you can prepare your company and leadership team.
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.
This week: How successful companies approach communication, product managers explain product management and more. In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue.
I always strive for zero churn. Of course, I too have customers who are leaving, but the only times I accept churn without putting up a fight is when companies are closing down, people are leaving companies or budgets are being cut. I just can’t accept it when people are leaving because of my product, well, at least after they find value in it. In the following lines I’m going to share the questions I am expecting my data to answer when it comes down to understanding and optimizing retention.
Those unfamiliar with what product engineers do could be forgiven for assuming that it’s all broadly the same job. After all, we all tend to work in code, use black text editors with luminous text, and stare at console windows with endlessly scrolling symbols. But making the transition from consultant engineer to a product engineer was a revelation – I realized that working as an engineer in client services and working as a product engineer are essentially two completely different jobs, br
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 happens at management presentations and how you can prepare your company and leadership team.
ZoomInfo customers aren’t just selling — they’re winning. Revenue teams using our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform grew pipeline by 32%, increased deal sizes by 40%, and booked 55% more meetings. Download this report to see what 11,000+ customers say about our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform and how it impacts their bottom line. The data speaks for itself!
Every company in the European Union and around the globe has been preparing for the big day. Yes, GDPR! The General Data Protection Regulation has been in effect since 25 May 2018 and naturally, there are tons of questions in the air. What’s the fuss all about, you ask? How does it affect my business? How do I track my prospects / customers? How do I keep them engaged?
Content. All SaaS companies know they need it — they are particularly well-placed to benefit from the magic of content. Publishing skyscraper content means you will stand out. But did you know that it can also improve your standing in search engine results pages (SERPs), drive more traffic to your site and attract more qualified leads ? Read on to learn which strategies will increase your visibility in SERPs and attract more qualified leads.
A lot has happened in the s ales tech space since I introduced my first sales tech landscape last summer. I’m now counting over 830 vendors, a 15% surge. The 38 categories illustrate the extreme fragmentation of the market. Both sales and sales operations are sharing an increased frustration with the number of applications they have in their stack.
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 happens at management presentations and how you can prepare your company and leadership team.
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.
QuickBooks is an easy decision for a SaaS startup or SMB. However, subscription-based businesses quickly run into challenges. QuickBooks does many things well, but it doesn’t efficiently manage subscription revenue recognition or subscription billing, especially if you have sales-negotiated behavior in your contracts, which is the heart of financial operations for a SaaS business and is required by ASC 606 and GAAP compliance.
Are your spreadsheets hurting your SaaS business? There are times in life when making ends meet is the only option. We’ve all faced situations where the only option is to take the path of least resistance or do what is “good enough for now.” Managing the financial operations of a recurring revenue or SaaS businesses is not one of those times. In their early days, most recurring revenue businesses manage financial operations with spreadsheets , which are cobbled together with a number of differen
When it comes to forecasting for a SaaS business, traditional financial metrics won’t get the job done. The lack of good financial data and metrics remains a big problem for most early stage subscription businesses, and even many established SaaS companies. Chances are, your business relies on outside funding or is subject to board oversight—or both.
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