It’s thought that a high-touch approach to customer success does not scale.

Here are the common objections:

• There aren’t enough hours in the day to personally oversee 10,000 users.
• Even if there were enough hours in the day, there aren’t enough of us to do it and still be profitable.
• Even if there were enough of us, there’d be no way to keep track of it all effectively.

Zapier, a SaaS middleman for app integration, thinks differently.

The idea is simple: connect your SaaS app to Zapier, and Zapier will connect it to over 1,000 apps. The formula is one programmers will be intimately familiar with since it’s basically an if/then statement. For example: if a user submits a Zendesk ticket, then post the ticket to a Slack channel.

Apps can create actions and triggers, controlling each other and automating frustrating admin work behind the scenes so you don’t have to bother with it.

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While it might seem new and intimidating, machine learning in business is already bringing massive benefits to companies and consumers alike.

From increasingly effective product suggestions to accurate journey time predictions and advanced customer analytics, machine learning is an incredibly powerful tool which lets you analyze every important aspect of your business without wasting human hours on the task.

But what exactly is machine learning, and how do you go from knowing that to actually using it?

“Instead of using labels to teach an AI what each object it’s looking at is, this DeepMind project teaches itself because it learns to recognise images and sounds by matching them up with what it can see and hear.

This method of learning is almost exactly like how humans think and learn to understand the world around them.” – Vaughn Highfield, How Google DeepMind is learning like a child: DeepMind uses videos to teach itself about the world

Keep reading to find out all of this and to see examples (both good and bad) of how companies like Google and YouTube are using machine learning to enhance their business in game-changing ways.

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It’s impossible to run a successful business without taking the time to track your core business metrics.

If you don’t, then good luck knowing:

• How much pure profit you’re earning
• Where costs can be cut
• Whether you’re selling enough
• How much debt you have
• Whether you’ll be bankrupt next quarter

Having said that, where do you start? There are so many metrics you could be tracking that it’s easy to get stuck tracking and recording everything rather than analyzing and acting on your data.

That’s why I’ve collected 53 core business metrics right here to get you started. Stop wasting time wondering what to track or flicking between 20 different posts going over five stats each – every metric here comes with a brief description and formula or method for easily tracking it.

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What do you do if you don’t have the time or know-how to document and improve your processes?

You hire a business process consultant of course!

While we’ve talked endlessly in the past about why processes are important and how to manage your own, hiring a business process consultant lets you reap all the benefits without having to spend an age assessing your organization and talking to every last employee involved.

So, if you want to organize your processes and bring efficiency to your business but don’t have time to do it yourself, read on!

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The following is a guest post from Sam Suthar, the CMO of Tagove.

Scaling your business is almost impossible until you know your customer’s value. Whether you’re going to scale a brick-and-mortar business or an online business, it doesn’t matter; it’s vitally important to understand what each customer is worth to your business.

Statistics by Unicom Group show that 50% of customers naturally churn every 5 years. Sadly, this number can increase if you fail to understand what the customer who signed up last night is worth.

Can you reduce your churn and increase customer retention rate?

Yes, it’s doable. Although very tricky. In the rest of this article, I will show you how to scale your business by first knowing the value of each customer.

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I’ve written before about how we collect feedback on our marketing material and how that helps us write useful posts for our subscribers, but the other reason we gather user feedback focuses on expanding and improving the Process Street app.

With user feedback data, we can:

• Choose which features to build based on the frequency they’re requested
• Get data on bug reports which helps our engineering team build fixes
• See the most common industries and use cases for our product, which guides our marketing in the right direction

Whether you’re in software or not, you still need to be gathering and processing feedback from everybody possible: leads, prospects, free users, and paying customers.

In this post, I’m going to outline the three methods you can use to gather feedback for your company. These are three methods we’ve used ourselves in the past as our business has evolved, so the complexity and usefulness of each method is higher than the last. Which method is right for you?

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Are you ready to market your SaaS product to enterprises? Do you know what makes or breaks a million dollar deal?

There’s a huge segment of SaaS companies that target only SMBs, and an increasingly well-funded bunch that go after the enterprise market from the outset. Some, like Dropbox, Asana, and HubSpot, have gradually scaled their products to meet the needs of enterprise customers. By looking at their enterprise-specific landing pages, we can isolate the key factors these companies have chosen to persuade enterprises, and find out what works.

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On August 25th, we launched a library of 1000+ real sales and emails from the top 280 SaaS companies.

The library was hosted on a microsite, Inside SaaS Sales, which allows users to browse the full sales cadences, organized in the order the message or voicemail was sent.

The launch landed us almost 800 votes on Product Hunt, 10,000+ site visits, a mention in Hiten Shah‘s SaaS Weekly, and publicity from the SaaS and VC community.

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A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of GDPR.

It seems to be the one thing everyone in the data security industry is talking about, Equifax aside…

Articles are being written, consultancy firms are popping up, and businesses are quietly panicking.

Yet, like so many grand legislative changes, many people are unsure what GDPR is, how it could affect their business, or whether they should even be worried about it at all.

In this article, we’ll be looking to clear up some of those misconceptions while presenting actionable steps for how companies can go about adjusting to the coming changes. We’ve scoured the available resources to find the answers to our concerns about GDPR and now we’re sharing it with you.

(Still employ a consultant though. As you’ll see, there’s too much at stake not to!)

We’ll explore not just the impact on European companies but also companies outside the European market who process or control data which could come under the scrutiny of these EU measures.  SaaS companies like Process Street will find themselves needing to adapt their services for their large European clients, and if you work within the SaaS field you might have to do so too.

Before we go further, let me give you a Too Long; Didn’t Read:

The best short summary of the ethos of GDPR I’ve read comes from Wired:

For companies that have more than 250 employees, there’s a need to have documentation of why people’s information is being collected and processed, descriptions of the information that’s held, how long it’s being kept for and descriptions of technical security measures in place

The GDPR broadly sets out:

• You need to have a system in place to manage data and security.
• You need to have that system fully documented.
• You need to operate with the parameters of the GDPR, e.g.
  • Consent boxes cannot be auto-filled as “yes”.
  • Companies must respond to access requests from users within 1 month.
  • Requests for personal information must be processed free of charge.

At the end of this article, you’ll find a free Process Street checklist which uses ICO recommendations and Article 29 Working Party advice to guide you through assessing your company’s GDPR readiness!

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The Art of SaaS shows that even industry veterans are sick of unnecessary jargon and bloated descriptions.

Rather than spending thousands of words (or multiple books) trying to explain every variation of the SaaS model, it draws from the experiences of Dr. Ahmed Bouzid and Dave Rennyson in order to cover all of the basics of a quality SaaS business in less than 60 pages.

Being so short, an Art of SaaS review might seem redundant at first. Why not just read the book in about an hour and learn what the authors believe to be:

• What SaaS is
• The bargain between vendor and user
• The importance of uptime (and how to maintain it)
• The three priorities all teams should share
• The three practices which achieve those priorities
• The structure of every team, and how they should be managed

Well, in this post I’m going to cover both the core takeaways of The Art of SaaS and the context surrounding the book itself by drawing from other figures in the field.

I’ll show you why this odd little volume is worth reading and what pitfalls to avoid when taking it at face value.

Let’s get started.

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