article thumbnail

Top Hat Raises $22.5M Series C in a Tough Vertical: What Can We Learn from their Success

Version One Ventures

And selling to institutions requires a long sales cycle. Top Hat adopted a bottoms-up approach to distribution, as covered in the Globe and Mail article: Sales took off after Top Hat ignored advice and flipped its sales strategy. As such, Top Hat can provide key lessons for early-stage companies: 1.

Vertical 132
article thumbnail

Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals

ReadWriteStart

Having worked on technology licensing businesses, I have a good idea on how challenging those are from a sales cycle and cash flow perspective and, since Abhijit is still running a bootstrapped operation, I asked him about his strategy to manage the long sales cycle and the associated cash flow challenge.

India 123
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

10 Reasons Why Your Marketing Plans Don’t Work

Up and Running

Take, for instance, a 2010 marketing snafu by Gap. Is it increasing sales by 20 percent per quarter? Strategies for various stages in the sales cycle. Make sure you understand their buying habits and the nature of their loyalty before you drop a big spend on a new marketing campaign.

Marketing 109
article thumbnail

Cracking The Code: Unveilling of the Bessemer's 10 laws of Cloud.

Cracking the Code

Unveilling of the Bessemers 10 laws of Cloud Computing and SaaS - Winter 2010 Release. In regards to calculatimg the "Magic Number" - should the amount included as sales and marketing costs match the length of the sales cycle? ► 2010. (5). State of the SaaS 13: Q1 2010 Sentiment. Newer Post.

article thumbnail

How To Lose Fat And Gain Muscle With Venture Capital

David Teten

According to the CDC’s funding data , just $32 billion of 2010-2014 spending was related to “prevention”, vs. a total of $168 billion for all disease categories combined. All venture capital and NIH funding data for CY 2010 – 2014 in USA. Disability-adjusted life year (DALY) for CY 2010 in USA, multiplied by five.

article thumbnail

Cracking The Code: Impact of the recession on SaaS.

Cracking the Code

However, if the SaaS & Cloud computing industry is doing relatively well in this downturn, the recession has severely impacted the sales&marketing productivity of these companies, with longer sales cycle, smaller deal size and limited upsells opportunity. ► 2010. (5). State of the SaaS 13: Q1 2010 Sentiment.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Then we could focus on standardizing a product that could have an automated sales cycle online. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Facebook Fans Recent & Upcoming Events 2010 I am experimenting with using Plancast to track my 2010 event schedule.

Customer 167