You probably have some kind of sales cycle for your product that every new customer goes through. A process with well-defined stages, aimed at turning prospects into leads, leads into opportunities, and opportunities into customers. Having a process in place is great, but do your customers follow that process too?
Zoho has quietly become one of the biggest SaaS companies in the world: they have roughly 7,000 employees and an estimated $500M in annual revenue as I write this in June 2019. We’ll explore Zoho’s strategy — to understand how they got to where they are today, and what Zoho’s place in the market may look like in the coming years.
We spoke with Wes Bush recently to learn whether a company can ever be truly product-led, the positioning implications of free software, why we don’t need a white paper to learn how to make a poster, the learning costs of starting out with the freemium model, why companies treat onboarding as a one-trick pony, and more.
Coming up with a product roadmap is critical for any business, irrespective of which stage the company is in. How does one go about charting out a product roadmap? How do you work around varied requirements and handle inputs or demands from multiple stakeholders? We sat down with Hiten Shah to talk about this.
In 2008, I founded TaskRabbit. In 2014, we threw away the entire code base and started from scratch. If you’re thinking about products and how the consumer might change as those products hit market, hopefully you can take some of these lessons learned as well and apply them to whatever you’re building.
For many years, we have heard about the importance of marketing and sales alignment – yet in many cases this essential relationship doesn’t seem to have improved much. It is critical to agree on goals at a high level but creating a valuable day to day working relationship is what teams should strive for. But how?
Onboarding is perhaps the most critical phase in the customer journey. It sets the tone for the relationship, and is too important to just slap together and hope it works. What does “onboarded” mean in the context of your customers? Is it the same for each customer segment? At what point is your customer onboard?