Totango Blog: Your Guide to Managing the Customer Journey

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When Is The Right Time For a Customer Success Solution?

You know the fastest growing SaaS companies have the best record on churn and upsell. You’ve heard the success stories. You attended the Customer Success Summit. You’ve even heard how customer success solutions have evolved to manage complex hierarchies and …

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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 …

Customer Success: Play to Win

Part of the Customer Success Summit On-Demand Series Customer Success is taking off and has grown beyond being just a function within many organizations. For the last couple of years the industry has gone through several phases of understanding. First looking at why …

Customer Success the Next Generation: What is the Final Frontier?

Part of the Customer Success Summit On-Demand Series Over the past 5 years, Customer Success has become a recognized philosophy in almost all SaaS and subscription businesses today. Now that we’ve moved from infancy towards maturity, how will the industry …

Customer Success Predictions for 2015

2014 has come to an end and it’s amazing to look back and see the phenomenal growth we experienced in the customer success industry last year. Working with hundreds of SaaS companies, I personally saw customer success elevated as a …

4th Annual SaaS Metrics Report: Disconnect between intentions and reality?

We’re happy to release the results of our annual SaaS Metrics Survey. This year we received over 500 responses, a 100% increase from last year – in itself a sign that the topic of metrics and key performance indicators is …

Customer Success Summit 2015 is here!

Customer Success Summit is returning to San Francisco on March 21-22, 2016. Register today! For the last two years, the Customer Success Summit has been a sold-out show, bringing together executives, thought-leaders, and practitioners of Customer Success. Today I am …

It’s Time for the 4th Annual SaaS Metrics Survey

That’s right, as 2014 comes to a close it’s time to look back at the state of the SaaS market and see what metrics have become top of mind for the industry. We’ve just released our 4th Annual Saas Metrics …

Customer Success and the SaaS Time Warp

Last month, I presented in a webinar hosted by CMSWire titled “Making the Customer Journey Work.” You can view the replay here. During Q&A, one participant asked a simple, yet thought-provoking, question that I think everyone in the Customer Success profession …

Box’s S-1: The Customer Success Perspective

Since Box filed its S-1, there has been a lot of debate online about the health and viability of its business. Last week, Tien Tzuo of Zuora penned a strong defense of Box’s founder Aaron Levie, which I think is …

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 …

SEOmoz conversion isn’t as great as it seems

At first glance the SEOmoz conversion numbers look amazing. Mammoth traffic and 63% trial to paid conversion. The numbers are not as great as they seem. Here is what I would do differently and what we can all learn from …

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 …

Freemium Friday: Roundup of B2B Freemium News

I plan to post every Friday on interesting developments and articles on Freemium in B2B land, but we will see how long I actually keep this up 🙂 This week is a good week to start as we just signed …

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 …

6 Social Selling Tips to Implement Today (from Sales 2.0 San Francisco)

The hot topic at Sales 2.0 Conference today in San Francisco remains (surprise, surprise) social selling (for B2B companies). Lots of speakers and lots of wisdom but also became abundantly clear to me that for most B2B organizations it is …

Totango Featured in WSJ …

Totango was quoted today in the Wall Street Journal in an article about Steve Jobs: “It’s not to that point of being annoying yet, but it might get there,” says Dominique Levin, vice president of marketing at Totango Inc., a …

Top 10 Sales 2.0 Leaders I Want to Meet

I am much looking forward to the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week. Here are 10 Sales 2.0 Leaders I hope to meet at the conference and why: 1. Jim Cyb, Vice President, Sales, Americas, ZenDesk 2. Pete …

Drive Adoption with Billing

Promotional discounts, credits or value-add offers can be an important part of a product launch strategy. A properly timed discount, upsell or cross-sell or “bundling” can positively change the perceived product value and dramatically impact adoption of SaaS applications. But,…

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 …

Top 6 Quotes on Software-as-a-Service Sales and Marketing

I was at the SaaS University conference in Austin this week organized by Rick Chapman from Softletter. This is really one of the only conferences in the United States that focus on the business side of running Software-as-a-Service and cloud …

2 Important SaaS Businesses Studies

We’ve just uploaded two of our past studies for public access on slideshare – check it out: A study of 500+ SaaS executives into the metrics they use to run their business Analysis of the customer engagement of over one million …

The State of Customer Success Management 2012

A White Paper / Report of the Customer Success Management Initiative Webinar: Thursday; February 23rd 2012 10: AM PST Over the past couple of years, a new position has been showing up in the open job listings throughout the …

Learn about user engagement from one million businesses

Today, I’m happy to announce that Totango has analyzed the customer engagement and optimized the sales and customer success interaction with more than one million prospects! We sure learned a lot from our beta stage and this is the place …

What Do Customer Success Managers Need?

The research of The Customer Success Management Initiative is revealing that while many SaaS/Cloud companies are hiring individual Customer Success Managers, or even establishing entire teams of them, there is a wide range in the understanding the role. Given the …

Trial Conversion “The Early Days” – Lean Startup Presentation

We’ve held yet another very interesting lean-startup meetup on Thursday to discuss free to paid conversion best practices for cloud applications. First, please find within the presentation I’ve used. It’s a collection of many ideas we’ve been working on at …

When Not to Waste Your Time on a SaaS Sales Prospect

Anthony Iannarino’s sales blog on “All Opportunities Aren’t Created Equal” got me thinking about prioritizing your time, given limited sales and marketing resources. This is especially important for lean startups and high velocity sales businesses, where there are a relatively high number of …

3 Recommendations for Sales Compensation for SaaS

I am at the Cloud Channel Summit today. A topic that seems to be coming up over and over again today is the need to come up with innovative sales compensation (commission) models that align with the subscription business model …

Joel York: Why to Measure Customer Engagement in SaaS?

Joel York has written extensively about the new breed of B2B buyer and the changes to the B2B sales process, especially for SaaS products. A quick recap … The good old sales process according to Joel “The process went something …

Does your SaaS Business have a VP Customer Success?

Earlier this week, I spoke to Dave Rosenberg for his CNET Blog ‘Customer success’ VP role: To reduce SaaS churn. At Totango, we care deeply about customer engagement and customer success. We agree with Dave that with SaaS “it might …

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 …

4 Tips to Increase B2B SaaS Sales

B2B SaaS companies increasingly rely on inside sales teams to drive growth. The model is often referred to as “Low Touch Sales” and follows this formula: Use Inbound marketing to drive Internet traffic to the site and create new leads …

Tools to Manage a Successful SaaS Business

Managing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business isn’t trivial. Successful SaaS companies are able to deal with a high volume of leads and turn those into a high volume of loyal customers with fast response and turnaround time. This is often referred …

Making the Most of Your Metrics – Part 2

Understanding data to increase conversion rates and key business processes Last week, we established the need to measure the “right things” constantly in order to improve trial conversion. This week, we’ll discuss how those metrics can be used to …

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 …

Totango: We’re Launching!

Today we’re announcing our $3.8 million Series A financing as well as opening our service to the public with a free beta offering. I wanted to give a bit of a personal perspective to what is being announced today and …