At the SaaSBooMi session this afternoon Vinod Muthukrishnan the Co-Founder and CEO of Cloud Cherry a customer analytics company – gave a ring side view of the learnings, difficult path to growth and rise, and the eventual acquisition by Cisco.
Pendo.io and Product Collective released their 3rd Annual The State of Product Leadership Report was based on a Survey of over 600 companies with 69% being in the B2B space, of which 33% are SaaS and 27% Hybrid SaaS provider. Here are some of the highlights:
Strangely this motto of PitchLink – our buyer seller engagement platform, jumps right out of the new Gartner CSO Update on the new B2B buying journey. Gartner is calling it ‘Buyer Enablement’ – a term that is gaining traction over the past couple of years. So what do you enable? According to Brent Adamson (check out his entertaining and educative video in the link below) the buyer needs to complete 6 jobs and selling organisations need to focus on information excellence at each stage to assist the buyer ‘complete’ her jobs at each stage to be able to complete the sales process.
Last week I promised to write about this article by Ivan Mir, a former game designer and indie software creator on his personal quest and thus the formula he arrived at to get work done.
David Skok in this lecture at the Web Summit, summarizes the key metrics that you need to track to ensure success and growth of your Saas business. This is hands down one of the simplest presentations you will find on the topic.
Girish Mathrubootham is the Poster Child of VC funded Indian SaaS industry. He raised $400m from marque investors like Sequoia, Accel, Google and Tiger Global. SaaSBooMi, the Asian Saas meet for founders is, well, booming. This year it is slated for 24 & 25 Jan and yours truly will be there (thanks to Suresh Sambandam, CEO Kissflow).
It is important to understand Who and How they are profiting from our personal data. Gregory Barber a staff writer of Wired tried to sell his own data through sites like Datum, Doc.ai and Wibson amongst others. He made precisely 0.3 cents.
Well a lot of diverse stuff. I found this interesting list by Amr Kafina a indie web developer who sourced the list from mostly public domain and aggregated the public recommendations from founders. Then he built a site where you can search these by Title, Author or the Founder who recommended that book and a link to the Amazon page for the book.
Is there a method in the sky high ambition of Jeff Bezos? Apparently yes. It’s called ‘Working Backwards’ writes Justin Bariso in Inc. citing Ian McAllister on Quora detailing ‘Amazon’s approach for product development’.
We all know it. Building a product is relatively easier than selling it. One of the reasons founders keep pushing, first – the face to face with customers and after that asking for money from them – is because we want to keep the fantasy rolling. In many guises – the product is not ready, we need to add those two features, our market it elsewhere and so on.
Well let’s get real. Thanks to Tracey Ruff‘s list of 10 must watch videos for SaaS Growth, I found this great talk by Mark Roberge (MD, Stage 2 Capital, Prof, HarvardHBS and former CRO at Hubspot) and Michele Law (former CRO at Castlight Health and former COO at OpenDNS). And they list these four core issues failing SaaS sales, ergo – what not do to.
1. Pre-mature focus on growth/ Going into growth mode too early 2. The first sales hire 3. Ignoring sales impact on customer success 4. Aligning GTM by function rather than buyer
There is more advice on what To Do. It’s a 20 min listen. Go for it. hashtag