OpenView Weekly: 4/21/18
April 21, 2018
OV | Weekly – April 21, 2018
Hi Friend of OpenView,
Is Blue Apron’s struggle with churn a warning sign to SaaS businesses? Do cold meetings actually convert? We explore this and more in the OV Weekly.
Happy reading!
“There are many contributing factors to Blue Apron’s struggles, including rising competitive pressure, Amazon’s push into food, and distribution challenges. But there’s one overarching issue: customer churn,” writes OpenView’s Kyle Poyar.
Customers have fallen out of love with Blue Apron’s subscription model and several of the trends that work against Blue Apron actually apply to B2B SaaS companies. It might finally be time to rethink subscription-only pricing.
Here are just a few reasons why:
- Customers want pricing to scale directly with usage and revenue.
- Many SaaS use cases are one-time or occasional.
- Vendors are under pressure to prove (and price based on) performance.
- The rise of developers as influential SaaS buyers.
Read the full post here for more on how this move away from subscription-only pricing may play out.
Cold sales meetings don’t covert. Or do they?
Is everything we thought we knew about cold sales meetings wrong? Perhaps you just haven’t been doing them right? New survey data shows the cold meetings can and do win over customers. But you have to play into the prospect’s needs. Read the full article here.
🎧BUILD Podcast: Setting the Tone as a New CEO
Joining an established company as a new CEO can be intimidating. In this latest episode of BUILD, Alex Shootman, Workfront CEO, walks through his experience, pit falls to avoid and advice for maintaining morale and culture. Listen to the full episode here.
Build your customer experience arsenal with post-purchase marketing.
For many fast-growing companies, marketing is focused on one thing: acquiring customers. Then, a prospect becomes a customer and something strange happens: companies abruptly stop marketing to them.
Customers are taken for granted or ignored. They feel unloved, unappreciated and underserved. All this leads to churn – if you’re not marketing to your customers, someone else surely is. And soon enough that customer will be gone. Read the full post here.
Here’s what else we’re reading 📖
- Simplifying Complicated Messages to Increase Conversion in B2B
- 5 Tips to build an effective B2B Content Marketing Strategy
- What to Do When Your Employees are Passionate About Diversity
Here’s what else you need to know this week:
We welcomed two new companies to the OpenView portfolio this week 🎉 Please join us in welcoming project44 and Applitools to the OpenView family. Read more about our investment in p44 here and Applitools here.
Our newest portfolio company, project44, is hiring a Strategic Account Executive. Learn more about the role and apply here. Or you can view all open positions across our portfolio here.
🚨WEBINAR ALERT 🚨How to Optimize Your Pricing for Sales Growth. Join OpenView’s pricing guru, Kyle Poyar, Price Intelligently’s Patrick Campbell and Steli Efti of Close.io for a pricing webinar on April 25. You can register here.
That’s it for now. See you back here next week! In the meantime, say 👋on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
This newsletter was lovingly curated by OpenView’s marketing team. Think our readers would benefit from your expertise? Submit your content to Labs by emailing [email protected].
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