The Business of SaaS
How to Better Educate Your Staff About Business Intelligence
Self-service analytics garners praise as a hallmark of modern business intelligence (BI), but some still consider it to be a contradiction in terms. How can something as intricate as BI be self-service? Aren’t there whole college degree programs dedicated to the topic? There are, and I think the reason people find the idea of self-service BI confusing…
Going to Market (Again)
Data Talks, Episode 18 Data Talks is Exago’s podcast on all-things business intelligence, analytics, and application software. This month, we’re turning our attention to the crucial role SaaS marketing teams play in the deployment of feature enhancements and major product updates. How do feature launches differ from initial product launches? How do you reposition your…
Picking The Right Metrics For Your SaaS Sales Dashboard
A killer sales dashboard is more than a conglomeration of metrics: it’s a tool custom-made to facilitate your SaaS company’s unique sales strategy. If you’re not sure what data to include on your team’s sales dashboard, there are lots of KPI lists out there to inspire ideas. Ultimately, though, it’s better to design your dashboard…
Reporting to Investors for SaaS
Data Talks, Episode 17 Data Talks is Exago’s podcast on all-things business intelligence, analytics, and application software. This month, we are rejoined by CloudKPI co-founder CEO Maeve Kneafsey for a discussion on reporting to investors for SaaS companies. Knowing which metrics to include at which stages of growth can be a challenge, as can getting…
The Right Way to Calculate 3 Critical SaaS KPIs
Data Talks, Episode 16 Data Talks is Exago’s podcast on all-things business intelligence, analytics, and application software. Did you know there are 43 different ways to calculate churn? This month, we get some much-needed guidance from CloudKPI co-founder Maeve Kneafsey on counting customers, measuring churn, and calculating customer acquisition cost (CAC) — it’s not as…
Best Practices for Staffing Support
How We Hire and Why When scaling a software company, where does your focus in hiring go? Typically software developers, quality assurance engineers, sales, and other roles that expand your feature and client set. Putting the same hiring efforts into expanding and developing your client support staff is likely lower on the list—maybe you reason…
5 Things You Should Expect from Tech Support
Good technical support is crucial to running a successful SaaS business, which is why it can be scary to commit to embedded BI when that also means committing to their Support team. To help you understand what to expect from your future (or current) BI provider’s support team, we put together a list of qualities…
A SaaSy Introduction to Lean UX
Lean UX, sister discipline to the agile development method, is user experience design and usability testing for fast-paced software teams. UX designers build flowcharts, construct wireframes, and conduct user research to help teams design new product features. A UX designer working with an agile team would do all these things while adhering to the tenets of lean UX….
5 Characteristics of a SaaS-Focused BI Application
There are hundreds of business intelligence (BI) solutions on the market, but not all of them are well suited to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. Some are intended as standalone products, others designed for on-premises (“on-prem”) deployment, and still others built for use by individual consumers rather than whole businesses. As a SaaS provider, wading through these options…
Virtues of the Client Advisory Board Meeting
Going Beyond the User Conference The user conference (UC) is ubiquitous among SaaS providers, but comparatively few companies hold additional Customer/Client Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. This, in my opinion, is a missed opportunity. Both events give customers the opportunity to network, share resources, and bring new information back to their respective companies, but they are…