Totango Blog: Your Guide to Managing the Customer Journey

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Growth Hacking with User Behavior

The subscription economy has exploded over the last decade. Top SaaS companies with flexible, innovative technologies are in high demand. The lower barrier to entry however, has created a myriad of competitive pressures on SaaS providers. To dominate their markets,…

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Customer Success – The Farming Paradigm (With Gifs!)

So we all know farmers. Source: thehappiestdonut.tumblr.com No, not that type of farmer…. the kind that grows trees. For thousands of years, they have been mastering a very simple, repetitive process – prep the soil, plant the seeds,…

Top Executives Weigh In On Lessons Learned In Customer Success

At Customer Success Summit 2016, executives from Oracle Marketing Cloud, Hubspot, and Eventbrite shared some of the most valuable lessons they learned through the evolution of customer success in their careers and at their companies. Watch the two recorded sessions …

Totango Named a Finalist in Three Categories for 2016 CODiE Awards

The SIIA recently announced that Totango has been named a finalist for the 2016 SIIA CODiE Award in the following categories: Best Customer Success Management Solution, Best Customer Relationship Management Solution, and Best CRM Mobile Application. Totango is incredibly honored …

Boost your company growth rates with complete visibility into your Revenue Stream

For most Enterprise SaaS companies, recurring revenue from existing customers (renewals and upsells) accounts for 50-70% of total revenue. Understanding this segment of the revenue stream is critical for business continuity, objective planning, and getting ahead of adverse situations such …

3rd Annual SaaS Metrics Report: Underscoring the need for Customer Success

As 2013 comes to a close, we wanted to leave you with the results of our 3rd annual SaaS metrics survey on the key performance indicators used by SaaS companies to run their business. This year our survey brought in …

Pro Customer Company is all about value

The SaaS industry is going through a revolution that has to do with placing the customer at the heart of the company. We call it the Pro-Customer revolution. Pro-Customer companies see their customers first and invest a lot of energy …

Value is the currency of customer retention

Are you “locking in” customer retention instead of fueling it with value? I found myself nodding to this article about why customer retention should be about value. You definitely don’t want your customers to “stay” only because they can’t leave …

5 statistics on customer marketing that may surprise you (and infographic)

At the Good to Great Marketing Nation event last week with Marketo, we conducted a survey with 75 marketers regarding their customer marketing initiatives. It was a pretty successful event and marketers were drawn in by our messaging on listening-understanding-engaging.…

Aberdeen Group and Totango present: Customer Growth Lessons for Software and Internet companies

It’s no secret that retaining customers and growing their value is a key differentiator for leading software and internet companies. However, many businesses are inundated with numerous challenges and inefficiencies impacting their ability to better engage their customers. We’re back with …

2nd Annual SaaS Metrics Survey Results

See the full infographic here. Get the 2012 SaaS Metrics report here. Today we are announcing the results of the second annual SaaS metrics survey results. Because it’s the second year that we are doing this survey, we were able to …

Retaining customers in baseball, higher education and secure networking

Across industries attention is shifting from customer acquisition to customer retention. In this blog three stories about how to retain and grow customers: one from baseball, a second from higher education and lastly a story about networking gear that can tell its vendor which customers may not be getting the most out of their purchase.

Amy’s Six Secrets For Customer Success Professionals

Over the past week we released a series of short clips from an interview with Amy Friedman, a four time customer success professional with over fifteen years of experience in the SaaS industry. She has worked in customer success for …

4 ways to calculate customer retention

It’s important to measure what you’re trying to manage. There have been multiple opinions on which SaaS Metrics are important but the bottomline is still the same: revenue – what brings in the recurring profits? One of the biggest challenges …

The only 3 metrics that matter for SaaS (Unsexy Conference)

What’s sexy about being unsexy? All the insights and startup/SaaS lessons shared at yesterday’s Unsexy Conference! One presentation in particular caught my attention and that was by Zuora’s CFO, Tyler Sloat, “The Only Three SaaS Metrics That Matter”. We’ve had …

How customer engagement can predict profits

Loved John Dillon’s (CEO of our partner Engine Yard) blog on customer engagement in Forbes! He says (amongst many other things): Why is doing a better job of customer engagement so crucial? Because it impacts customer loyalty, which directly impacts …

4 Benefits of Keeping Your Customer Engaged

Companies that design and deliver excellent customer experience (CX) have more engaged customers. Customer engagement is not something that happens by chance but rather an outcome of an exceptional and differentiated customer experience. There are a lot of “clone companies”…

The Next Big Thing in Social Enterprise: The Social Product

This is a bit of an oldie as I blogged about the Power of the Customer panel at All About The Cloud before, but a video interview from the conference just became available so I thought to pass it along.…

The Future of Sales: 10 bold predictions

We had a very exciting first Social Sales meetup last Thursday! Some of my favorite people attended including Anneke Seley from Phoneworks, Gerhard Gschwandtner from Sales 2.0, our awesome host, Rob van Es, VP Sales Hearsay Social and our presenter …

Customer Success: 3 Goals For A Top Strategic Priority

According to a recent Forrester report (“The State of Customer Experience, 2012” by Megan Burns, April 24, 2012), more than 90% of companies are making customer experience a top strategic priority, with 75% aiming to differentiate from their competitors (and …

Customer Success Managers: At The Frontline Of Lifecycle Marketing

In the days of the enterprise era, the burden of getting value from a purchase was totally on the customer. After purchasing a service, they would probably not be contacted again until it was time for a renewal. Data collected …

Software Is Changing The World And Customer Success Processes

A new generation of companies is emerging to power The Customer Era. What is the customer era? An era where the customer is in charge and can access business and consumer services on demand, self-service without talking to a sales …

Keeping Customers Happy Increases Customer Lifetime Value

“Keeping customers happy is key to keeping your business alive and profitable” and we couldn’t agree more! The best type of customer service is attentive, responsive and proactive. This is why we advocate customer success and the value it offers …

Top 6 Takeaways on Revenue Performance Management (Marketo Summit Day 1)

I am a data junkie so my favorite presentations today were the ones presenting the hard facts in numbers. Here are my top 6 takeaways from my 2 favorite presentations on Day 1 of the Marketo User Summit: Lori Wizdo,…

Defining Customer Lifetime Value and a recipe for Customer Retention

Yesterday I attended the second Customer Success Forum meeting which we helped to create with Mikael Blaisdell. Our friends from Zuora provided the space and snacks! The customer success team of our customers, Clarizen, was out in full force. It …

3 Big Ideas for Software-as-a-Service Customer Success

I was on a super exciting panel at the All About The Cloud conference in San Francisco this week: “the Power of the Customer”. Here are 3 predictions for the future that were discussed on the panel: 1. All SaaS …

Chief Customer Officers Boost Customer Engagement

I am excited to see so many talk about the importance of the Chief Customer Officer. Dedicating an executive on your team to customer success can significantly boost customer engagement, increase customer retention and ultimately grow customer lifetime value. We …

Totango Accelerates Revenues for Engine Yard Customers

The Totango team is excited to announce its participating in the Engine Yard’s add-ons program. Engine Yard is the leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider. Totango provides Engine Yard’s clients a way to better monetize their applications by driving customer engagement and …

The Power of Measuring Customer Engagement

Talking about Customer Engagement, there are many metrics that could show a user engagement level, i.e. user are considered to be higher engaged if they refer your app to other potential user. Another example would be for returning users – users are …

6 Sure Fire Tips to Retain and Grow Customers

In the week that we also announced integration with Zendesk (see below), I wanted to remind you of the “6 Sure Fire Tips to Retain and Grow Customers” webinar where Totango will be co-presenting with Zendesk. The webinar will take place Tomorrow,…

How Zendesk and CloudBees Increase their User Engagement

Yesterday, the SandHill Magazine have published an article about Managing Challenges of Onboarding SaaS Customers and Converting from Free Software Trials where 2 of the very popular app services providers – Zendesk and CloudBees, were quoted about their success in …

Presenting – the SaaS Resource Center

This week we’ve added a section into our website which I believe would add value to the SaaS Community – I present our SaaS Resource Center! The Resource Center is a place where we update the most important/informative/valuable articles on …

Customer Success How to: Learning from Customers Who Churn

Nobody likes it when a customer cancels their subscription. In SaaS companies where the bottom-line is so heavily dependent on Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), churn is particularly troubling. As Joel York explained in SaaS Churn kills SaaS Growth, unless you …

Best of 2011: Top Videos and Blogs on Customer Engagement

2011 was a busy year! We’ve discussed a lot of important themes which are the hottest topics for any SaaS business such as Customer Engagement, Customer Success, Customer Lifetime Value, SaaS Best Practices, Low Touch and Zero Touch Sales Models,…

What is the Best Sales Model for You?

So how do you know which sales model is best for you – zero touch vs. low touch vs. high touch vs. field? In his last tip from the Sales 2.0 Convention, Mark Roberge, VP Sales at Hubspot explains that …

3 Outright Strategies to Improve SaaS Customer Success

Totango is now (also) located in Mountain View, CA! Having a new Totango home in California is great and allows me to meet many cutting edge businesses with free trial or freemium business models while here. Today I caught up …

Survey Results: Which Metrics are Key to SaaS Executives?

As part of my effort to create the SaaS Executive Dashboard, which helps executives to put together their business metrics for SaaS on a single page and track them, I’ve online surveyed 522 executives at SaaS companies. The survey compiles …

Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Experience

Lately, I’ve started building a SaaS Dashboard for my own usage (which I’ll be happy to share with others as well) and I have put together a short survey in order to learn what are the key metrics to measure …

Free Trial Average Conversion Rate and Other Metrics

Following Lincoln Murphy’s post on SixteenVentures.com (talking about conversion average rate for free trials, pricing pages or Freemium for SaaS or Web Apps), conversion rate average figures will do no good, as it doesn’t reflect the whole picture and usually …

SaaS Best Practices: Measuring Trial Conversion Rates – Part 1

Defining an active user and setting a baseline Over the next few weeks, Totango will be posting a blog series on best practices for measuring conversion rates of trial usage for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Trial conversion is arguably the single …