Sat.Nov 03, 2018 - Fri.Nov 09, 2018

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Live chat for business: everything you wanted to know about live chat but were afraid to ask

Intercom, Inc.

A great customer experience today is about meeting people where they already are. And today, there’s one channel where more potential customers are than any place else: messaging and live chat. Think about the way that you talk to people every day. If you’re anything like me, you use iMessage to talk to your family, WhatsApp for your close friends, and you probably spend your entire day on Slack talking to your teammates at work.

Scale 239
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7 Of The Most Common Mistakes Made Building Your First Sales Team

SaaStr

Building your first sales team will be an endless series of mistakes. It’s OK. Plan for me. But there are a few avoidable , key mistakes I see start-ups making > 50% of the time. Just make a few less of these mistakes, and you’ll scale faster, and just as importantly, with less turnover and more stress: Hiring Early Reps (#1 – #3) That You Personally Wouldn’t Buy From.

Scale 234
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Do You Lose Sales Opportunities Because of Sales Execution or Product Insufficiency?

Tom Tunguz

You have a good pipeline of prospective customers. You pitch them but things aren’t working out. You can see it in your low close rates. They are below 15-20% conversion from sales accepted lead to closed customer. You need to answer an important question: are you losing these opportunities because of sales execution or product insufficiency? Those are the two possibilities.

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Founders: Please don’t allow anyone to screw your early backers

The Angel VC

Understanding the mechanics of founder re-ups in financing rounds This post will likely not make me more popular and might offend some people. But if your core beliefs on how business should be done are at stake, you can’t try to win the popularity contest. If you know me a little you’ll probably agree that like everyone at Point Nine, I’m a pretty nice guy.

Finance 169
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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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What is customer acquisition cost and why does it matter?

Intercom, Inc.

Growth is good, but growth at any cost is very, very bad. The best marketers in the world help their companies grow for the long term. However, periodically marketers seem to go through a wave of collective insanity where we forget about the ‘long term’ part of the discussion and start to chase growth at any cost. Whether it’s through inattention, ignorance, or excitement, marketers sometimes make very bad business decisions.

More Trending

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How Zapier Reached $35M ARR With This SaaS SEO Strategy

Ryan Berg

Want to drive more search traffic to your SaaS? In this case study, we’ll step outside the usual content marketing tactics most SaaS companies use. And look at how Zapier leverages SEO to drive millions of high intent searchers to their product every month. This strategy has nothing to do with blogging (although we’ll take a look at how they added a blog later to enhance this approach).

Strategy 111
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The FastSpring Team Meets Up for 2nd Annual Fall Summit

FastSpring

At FastSpring, we take our company mission, vision, and values seriously. They are a big part of what makes FastSpring the leading all-in-one ecommerce platform for digital businesses around the world, and a great place to work. One of the ways we showcase our mission, vision, and values is our annual Fall Summit event. Employees from all over—Nebraska, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, and Amsterdam—came together at the Santa Barbara headquarters this month for three days of learning,

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Build a growth stack, not a tech stack

Intercom, Inc.

Tech stacks are the backbone of modern sales and marketing operations. When set up right, they provide a clarifying view of your most valuable prospects and customers — and the next steps that your team needs to take to efficiently nurture a lead, close the deal or grow the account. But, too often sales and marketing tech stacks are cobbled together from existing tools and workflows that have organically developed over time.

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How to Build a 100-Day Plan to Grow Revenue

InsightSquared

We recommend that every quarter you pick one thing to improve about your sales process. If you improve the conversion rate during each key moment in your sales process by just a small percentage, you can end up doubling your revenue or more. But how do you know what key moments or metrics to focus on? In the past, we’ve discussed three key measurements: Volume based metrics (the change in amount at any given stage i.e. # of leads).

Revenue 94
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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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The Ultimate Guide to Outsourcing Sales Development and Lead Generation

Sales Hacker

When it comes to business outsourcing, I have been on both sides of the table. I have, since 2009, hired 20+ outsourced resources from all over the world for tasks such as data research, web design, translations, voiceover talent and more. I have learned quite a bit about it. I also run a Consulting company, AltiSales , which has a Business Process Outsourcing component, think Accenture, but purely for SDRs.

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Are you ready for Singles’ Day?

FastSpring

Nope, we’re not talking about Singles’ Awareness Day (a.k.a. Valentine’s Day), although it does share the same sentiments. We’re talking about Singles’ Day—the biggest online shopping event in the world. Yep, it’s even bigger than Black Friday. In fact, it’s bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined! The big question is, “If Singles’ Day is such a big deal, why don’t we talk about it the United States?

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Sales velocity: the simple equation that will help you hit your number

Intercom, Inc.

When making a plan to hit their quota, most sales reps look at how much potential revenue they have in their pipeline. The larger your pipeline, the more revenue you’ll bring in. Right? Not so fast. Although focusing on the size of your pipeline is a good starting point, it ignores a whole host of other factors that are equally important, including the average value of the deals and how many of them will actually be won.

Sales 120
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CRM Goes Mobile – Teamgate CRM on the Go

Teamgate

If your sales aren’t mobile, they’re static. Modern sales professionals need to be both mobile and connected at all times. That’s where the Teamgate mobile CRM – for both Android and iOS – comes into play. Sales professionals need a fully mobile sales CRM to keep them in-touch and connected with their entire sales process. If something changes, anywhere in the sales pipeline, your sales team need to have access to that information, office-bound or not.

Mobile 68
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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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Intent Data Turns a Buyer-Centric World From a Curse into a Blessing

Sales Hacker

Intent data has become one of the hottest topics in the B2B sales and marketing space. However, it remains under-utilized by many sales practitioners. A 2018 ABM Benchmark Report found only 25% of companies were using it. Let’s explore what it is, why it matters, and how to make the most of it. What the heck is intent data? Intent data is a relatively new term our industry has adopted to encompass signals and data about prospective buyers or businesses actively researching products or serv

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5 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Tips for Software and SaaS Businesses

FastSpring

As software or SaaS businesses, you don’t have to worry about crazy shoppers camping outside your store or rioting in your aisles. But you do have some other things to worry about on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Your site and app will probably experience traffic spikes that you will only see during BFCM. With increased traffic, comes increased sales—something every business owner wants.

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What we shipped: 7 new features to deliver personalized experiences at scale

Intercom, Inc.

While a personalized approach is key to delivering engaging and positive customer experiences, it can be challenging to maintain the personal touch at scale. At Intercom, we know it’s important to find the right balance and we’re working hard to help our customers do just that. In the past month, we have released seven new features to help you deliver more personal experiences at scale through both intelligent automation and a data-driven understanding of your customers.

Scale 120
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4 Things You Should Do To Develop a Proactive, Confident CS Team

TriTuns

4 Things You Should Do To Develop a Proactive, Confident CS Team. When we ask clients what they most want to have as an outcome from Customer Success (CS) training, they often indicate that they want their CS team to be more confident when working with customers. They want customer success staff to be more proactive, deliver a great experience, and make sure the client achieves their goals.

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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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PODCAST 32: Why Curiosity and Passion are Superpowers For Sales Leaders w/ Scott Schnaars

Sales Hacker

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast , we speak to sales veteran, executive, and leader, Scott Schnaars. Scott has a long background in sales and has experienced the highs and lows of a long career selling different products. Scott has a great attitude on success and is one of the top leaders in SaaS, now overseeing global sales at Dynamic Signal. If you missed episode 31, check it out here: PODCAST 31: How a World Series of Poker Winner Uses ‘Bets’ in Decision Making to Improve Outcomes w/ Ann

Scale 79
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Customer Growth: Upselling Hurts Trust (When You Do It Wrong)

Sixteen Ventures

When it comes to Customer Growth or Account Expansion (upselling & cross-selling), I assumed people knew that… …you don’t have to hurt the relationship with your customer to hit your numbers. …it doesn’t have to be a difficult slog that you struggle through to barely hit your numbers. …giving CSMs or other non-sales people a sales quota is fraught with danger (on so many levels). …expansion quotas – and, frankly, most expansion strategies ̵

Churn 66
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How to Build a 100-Day Play to Grow Revenue

InsightSquared

We recommend that every quarter you pick one thing to improve about your sales process. If you improve the conversion rate during each key moment in your sales process by just a small percentage, you can end up doubling your revenue or more. But how do you know what key moments or metrics to focus on? In the past, we’ve discussed three key measurements: Volume based metrics (the change in amount at any given stage i.e. # of leads).

Revenue 59
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Make your Close account more secure with two-factor authentication (2FA)

CloseSaaS

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is now available to all Close accounts. This adds an extra layer of security ensuring your customer and business data is well-protected.

Data 52
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The GTM Intelligence Era: ZoomInfo 2025 Customer Impact Report

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!

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How Customer Success Differs from Customer Service, Experience & Everything Else!

ChurnZero

The following is a guest blog post by Kayleigh Alexandra content writer for Micro Startups. . How Customer Success Differs from Customer Service, Experience & Everything Else! There’s customer service, customer success, customer experience, customer happiness, customer loyalty, customer retention… and a lot of customer confusion. Industry terminology can be useful, but it can also prove wildly disruptive when it comes to actually agreeing on strategies for getting things done — it isn’t enou

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Customer Growth: Why Lack Of Expansion Is A Really Bad Sign

Sixteen Ventures

Customers buying more from you is awesome. I mean, you’re in business here and getting customers you’ve already acquired to expand their relationship with you just seems like a super-efficient way to grow. And it is. So when you have customers that don’t expand their relationship with you, it’s obvious that this is less-than-ideal revenue-wise.

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VMworld Europe 2018: VMware’s on-premise software-defined data centre hits beta

ITPro

News. The company will also be trialling its inaugural blockchain offering.

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Key Bank SaaS Survey: Four Takeaways for Finance Teams

Sage Intacct

At fast-growing SaaS companies, CFOs and finance leaders are increasingly viewed as the business-model architects who analyze and guide the organization to successful outcomes. While product teams determine product/market fit, sales leaders maximize high-margin revenue, and customer success teams deliver meaningful and measurable value for clients, it’s finance that leads the way in crafting the successful subscription economics, capital efficiency, and cash flow that drive the business forward.

Finance 40
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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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4 Things You Should Do To Develop a Proactive, Confident CS Team

TriTuns

When we ask clients what they most want to have as an outcome from Customer Success (CS) training , they often indicate that they want their CS team to be more confident when working with customers. They want customer success staff to be more proactive, deliver a great experience, and make sure the client achieves their goals. What is interesting is that when we ask them about what their staff is like now, they are often far from this mark.

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Account Expansion: If You Want To Grow Fast, Do This…

Sixteen Ventures

If you want to grow fast, don’t do what most companies do! When most companies want to eke out some quick incremental growth, they’ll often have their sales people turn to their existing customer base to make some sales. After all, you have a captive audience that you can sell to with little to no real effort, right? Yeah… and you’ll get little to no real results, too.

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Why is it important to have a Customer Onboarding Checklist?

CustomerSuccessBox

As the world is moving towards a subscription economy, all the post sales functions (customer onboarding, customer success, customer support, renewals etc) are increasing in importance. Out of all the post-sales functions, customer onboarding is one of the critical functions that decides how fast your company will grow. No matter how good your product or your sales team is, if the customer is unable to gain value during onboarding, s/he is likely to churn.