This week’s roundup includes prioritizing product announcements, a look at the state of SaaS, an interview with Dropbox’s first employee, Ashton Motes, designing lead nurturing, lead scoring and drip email campaigns, and questions to improve customer onboarding.
Prioritizing product announcements in a SaaS world
Intercom
Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intercom, Matt Hodges, discusses how the proper marketing of product announcements has been a major factor in the companies overall growth. New software releases are nothing new–all users expect them and sometimes anticipate them if they’ve been promised major additions or changes, but using product releases to tell the right stories at the right time and at the right volume is the key to exciting and engaging your audience of users and leads.
“We know instinctively that a major new feature like Smart Campaigns deserves more attention than something like an integration with a third-party service. If we treated everything equally and tried to shout about each and every thing, people would simply stop listening to us. Just like when your smoke alarm won’t stop beeping, and you take the batteries out to make it stop. It’s a bad idea.”
So how do you prioritize the announcements and determine your tactics? [Read more here.]
Is SaaS ready to take off yet?
CIODive.com
To those living in the SaaS world, it may come as a surprise that according to chief analyst and managing director at Synergy Research Group, John Dinsdale, SaaS only accounts for 10% of the total software market.
“Overall, Microsoft and Oracle are the two biggest enterprise software vendors, but in both cases SaaS currently accounts for only about 10% of their total software revenues, according to Dinsdale.”
So is SaaS on the verge of a breakthrough in growth of sorts? [Read more here.]
A conversation with Aston Motes, Dropbox’s first employee
The Macro
This article is a line by line interview with Ashton Motes, the first employee at Dropbox and now a startup advisor and investor. It is a part of the “Employee #1” series by The Macro where they are interviewing the earliest employees of tech companies. Motes talks about his days before Dropbox, how he became involved, the earliest days with the start-up and why he chose to be an employee (not start his own business), early challenges, when he finally left and even how he vets companies as an investor.
“You know, I tell people maybe the worst thing about Dropbox was that it went so well. I didn’t learn many bad things. I learned about things that come with success. And a lot of times with startups it’s more valuable to learn the things that come with failure.” [Read more here.]
How to design lead nurturing, lead scoring, and drip email campaigns
Medium
This lengthy but extremely thorough read dives into not just the importance of lead nurturing, lead scoring and drip email campaigns, but it drives home the WHY in each. While all three things are important, they serve different purposes and are all vital to the growth and success of your SaaS business.
“The primary goal of this article is to help you design or improve your current lead nurturing strategy. But the ultimate goal is to provide marketers and founders with some core principles on the topics of lead nurturing, and lead scoring. My intention isn’t to provide a cookie cutter solution, but instead to stimulate ideas and encourage a new way of thinking around these topics.” [Read more here.]
11 simple questions to improve your SaaS customer’s onboarding
Stamford Advocate
Great! Someone says yes to your product/service! Whether it be a free trial or paid, it’s a win, right? But the real sale does has yet to take place and that is in how you onboard your customers. Have you ever performed an audit of your onboarding process? Is it helping or hurting your retention? Even if it’s just “there” then you have large potential to improve and let it be what drives the sale home in your SaaS business.
“Even if you improve free trial signups, you won’t save them all — and you will waste a lot of time trying. Because the fact is, some things are simply out of your hands, like budgetary issues, or the possibility that your solution doesn’t quite fit the customer’s needs. But, by asking the right questions, there’s still plenty you can do to improve retention. An examination of your onboarding process can reveal a lot of leaks and opportunities to reduce that early churn.”
Sujan Patel’s article discusses 11 questions that can help you rework your onboarding process for the better. [Read more here.]
Video of the Week:
Tweet of the Week:
If you start a $99 per month #SaaS product
And get 150 customers
You can quit your job, achieve your freedom, and likely earn more $.
— Kevin Strasser (@kjstrasser) September 25, 2016