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?
Increases in your average revenue per user can stem from many places. You can raise your price, get higher end customers, or coax more upgrades from your current customer base. Regardless of where expansion revenue comes from, it’s absolutely crucial to your success, especially in the world of subscriptions.
The Sales Team Lifecycle is a roadmap companies can follow to effectively put in place the right salespeople, processes, technology, and metrics as they grow from seed to Series C. This roadmap provides a proven approach to aligning the sales team with the company’s size and growth, and setting expectations for what is required at each stage.
When you think of the role and responsibilities of a product manager, two things probably come to mind – prioritization and roadmaps. But should prioritization and roadmaps be the responsibility of product managers alone? I don’t think so.
[Webinar] Is sending “boilerplate” templates getting me the results that I want? Do I typically respond to emails with no personalization? Do I think my prospects are different than me? Is 100% tailored messaging scalable? Isn’t it dangerous to let SDRs who are junior to their career go ‘off-script’?
This essay is a recap of 3 years of product management experience (After 10 years of being software developer). I worked on projects that had direct business impact - fun, stressful, and intense experience. I sorted my observations and learnings by their subjective importance.
Churn is part and parcel of running a SaaS company. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also inevitable. However, you should do your best to keep churn as low as possible, because otherwise, it can do serious damage to your business. So, how can you prevent churn from cutting the customer lifecycle short?
Effective customer acquisition tactics for B2B SaaS marketing are based in understanding the customer, their jobs-to-be-done, and making your value proposition crystal clear. That hasn’t changed. What has changed: Business audiences are getting harder to impress.
A paradoxical truth in business is that many companies spend little time focused on their customers. The irony of course is it’s customers, not shareholders or employees, who keep the lights on — holding power of life and death by pumping their hard-earned dollars into a business’s bloodstream. Why have companies lost focus on customers?