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Browse: Home / Customer

Customer

Aligning SaaS Customer Acquisition

Aligning SaaS Customer Acquisition

By Joel York on July 21, 2015

SaaS businesses can be overwhelmingly complex. If the multi-tenant, cloud-based technology isn’t enough, there’s the recurring revenue model which creates all kinds of challenges from accounting to sales compensation to funding. Then, there’s the marketing. Getting noticed on the Internet gets harder every year and almost every SaaS product category has a crowded field of […]

Posted in Business, Featured Posts | Tagged Customer, customer acqusition, CUSTOMER ALIGNMENT, joel york, saas, SaaS Marketing

Just Remember, We Don’t Really Need Any More SaaS Products. Then You’ll Do Far Better.

Just Remember, We Don’t Really Need Any More SaaS Products. Then You’ll Do Far Better.

By Jason M. Lemkin on May 1, 2015

I guess in some ways SaaStr is a digest of mistakes we all make in recurring revenue businesses, how to avoid them, or at least, make fewer. There’s one important mistake folks tend to make consistently in the early days.  It’s the mistake of thinking anyone, any company, actually needs their product. And because they […]

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Featured Posts | Tagged Customer, Getting to Initial Traction, google, google apps, saas-startups

Churn and SaaS

Churn and SaaS

By Ben Kepes on January 29, 2013

SaaS companies are faced with copious amounts of advice about pricing, monetization, funnel management and all the different things used to describe the processes involved in attracting, gaining and maintaining customers. One of the big areas that companies think about is that of churn – or how many customers “drop off” and stop using the […]

Posted in Business, Small business | Tagged Accountancy, Churn rate, Customer, Customer Lifetime Value, software as a service | 1 Response

SAP Business Suite on HANA, Because Big Data is a Stupid Term

SAP Business Suite on HANA, Because Big Data is a Stupid Term

By Ben Kepes on January 22, 2013

I spent a lot of time last year talking with vendors about big data and it’s ramifications for both the tech industry and the economy at large. Often these conversations centered around one or another vendor’s use of the big data term as the buzzword de jour, regardless of whether anything they do even vaguely […]

Posted in Application Software | Tagged big data, Business process, business suite, Customer, HANA, John Deere, sap, SAP AG

Forrester Confuses “Best” with “Most Accessible”

Forrester Confuses “Best” with “Most Accessible”

By Ben Kepes on November 8, 2012

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the traditional analyst firms. Their people are incredibly smart and very thorough, but sometimes in their search for massive levels of details, they miss the very point of technology. A good case in point is the recently released Forrester Enterprise Cloud Database Wave report.

Posted in Featured Posts, Infrastructure | Tagged cloud computing, Customer, database, forrester, larry ellison, Multitenancy, Oracle Corporation, Oracle Database | 1 Response

Xero Rolls Out Some More Network Effects and Faces Some Criticism. Some Lessons on Viral Strategies

Xero Rolls Out Some More Network Effects and Faces Some Criticism. Some Lessons on Viral Strategies

By Ben Kepes on October 1, 2012

Xero rolled out a new update this week which included some interesting and valuable features. The introduction of online invoicing is a bit of a watershed, rather than opening emailed PDF’s, customers whose suppliers use Xero can click on a URL which takes them to an online invoice. SO far so good – saves paper, saves […]

Posted in Application Software | Tagged accounting, Customer, FreshBook, invoice, rod drury, vimeo, xero

Customer Metrics for SaaS Companies

Customer Metrics for SaaS Companies

By Ben Kepes on September 13, 2012

One of the key pieces of advice for SaaS startups (actually all startups really but in this case of particular relevance to SaaS0 is to measure everything. Over the last few years a number of different solutions have been developed which allow companies to measure different parts of their business

Posted in Application Software | Tagged Customer, customer engagement, customer relationship management, sales, Shareware, software as a service, Totango

Moving to the Cloud – External Business Considerations

Moving to the Cloud – External Business Considerations

By Ben Kepes on July 9, 2012

CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU. How-tos, interviews with industry giants and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find. If that’s your cup of tea, you can

Posted in Business, Featured Posts, Infrastructure | Tagged Application programming interface, cloud computing, Customer, e-commerce, Sunk costs, vendor lock-in | 3 Responses

The Futility of Meaningless Business to Business Surveys

The Futility of Meaningless Business to Business Surveys

By Dan Morrill on March 28, 2012

Some of you might know that I run my own company, and we have Amazon.com as an outlet for our awesome products. In 2011 we decided early on that we wanted to use Amazon-New-Detail-Page (Photo credit: kokogiak) FBA, Fulfillment By Amazon for our products that were top selling to help customers who were upset about […]

Posted in Business | Tagged amazon, Amazon FBA, Amazon.com, Customer, FBA, Fulfillment By Amazon, Negative feedback, sales

Not *that* cat. Image by Mastrobiggo via Flickr

On Privacy, and Software Vendor’s Access to Customer Data

By Ben Kepes on January 30, 2012

A mini firestorm broke out recently when 37Signals posted about their 2011 growth statistics. As part of the post, 37Signals told the world that the 100 millionth file to be uploaded to their software was the picture of a cat. Naturally those who subscribe to conspiracy theories got all fired

Posted in Application Software, Featured Posts | Tagged 37signals, Basecamp, CloudComputing, Customer, databases | 2 Responses

Dropping Costs While Still Providing Support–A SmartPayroll Case Study

Dropping Costs While Still Providing Support–A SmartPayroll Case Study

By Ben Kepes on September 29, 2011

Over the past couple of years I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time with Asantha Wijeyratne, CEO of SmartPayroll, a New Zealand Payroll provider. I’ve been interested to talk to him, partly because he’s a lovely guy with an interesting business ethic, but also because his business is growing rapidly,

Posted in Business, Featured Posts | Tagged Customer, customer service, rackspace, smartpayroll, zappos

Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….

Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….

By Ben Kepes on September 9, 2011

Owning and running a bunch of small businesses, I have a real appreciation for just how important it is for SMBs to have a handle on their customers and deal flow – CRM, a concept foreign to many SMBs only a few years ago has become, with the growing importance of social media, a critical […]

Posted in Application Software, Featured Posts, Small business | Tagged CRM, Customer, customer relationship management, integration, intuit, quickbooks, salesforce.com, Small business, smb, sme, software as a service, xero

The Social CRM Oxymoron

The Social CRM Oxymoron

By Martijn Linssen on February 8, 2011

The temptation was great of course, a few years back, to invent Social CRM. There was a lot of buzz about Social, social people, social companies, social employees and social customers. It wasn’t a great step from that last one to Social Customer Relationship Management. Last year I piled all that up on the Social […]

Posted in Business, Featured Posts, Marketing | Tagged 1.0, B2C, Customer, customer relationship management, facebook, integration, Klout, scrm, Social CRM, social media | 1 Response

Getting Past Passive

Getting Past Passive

By Guest Authors on September 23, 2010

Okay, this is a bit of a rant, but here goes… I was reading this article this morning, and one sentence stood out: “Peter Drucker once said that ‘the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.’” The purpose of a business is to *create* a customer. As in actively bring to […]

Posted in Marketing | Tagged Customer, marketing, Peter Drucker, sales

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