JOOR is an online marketplace for wholesale fashion buying. The company is on track to do more than $350 million in transactions in 2013, which is more than three times the amount from 2012. More than 580 brands and designers and 30,000 buyers use the platform including many of the biggest names in fashion. JOOR recently opened up an office in Milan and is opening one soon in Sydney.

This is a prime example of a company applying technology to an industry that is predominantly offline, and succeeding. Founder Mona Bijoor said that most transactions in fashion wholesale happen at trade shows, market appointments, and with handwritten orders. JOOR’s business platform puts the sales process online so retailers and brands can connect in a more efficient way.

“This is a highly fragmented market where retailers can only source products from places they actually go and there is limited data available about the inventory,” she said in an interview. “If online sales of clothing makes sense for the consumer world, why shouldn’t it make sense for wholesale? Our job is to make retailers and brands better, smarter, and faster.”

Bijoor spent most of her career working in fashion with brands like Chanel, Elie Tahari, Cynthia Rowley, and in the buying departments of global retailers. She experienced the pain points on both sides and saw an opportunity to “pioneer wholesale evolution.”

The platform’s core technology connects brands and retailers. Brands create a profile page with marketing materials and retailers put up pages with information about their clients and inventory. Search capabilities are available on both sides using filters like price, trend, region, product etc… and the system finds relevant matches.

Buyers have access to real-time analytics about orders, notes, fulfillment, shipping and billing, as well as lead generation tools. Retailers can look at best selling items, discover new brands, and build and place orders on the platform.

The global fashion industry generates over a $1.5 trillion dollars a year and is growing. Most of the discussion surrounding about fashion tech focuses on consumers, but consumers are at one end of a very long and complicated supply chain that JOOR is  trying to make “less archaic.” This is more important than ever as “fast-fashion” has caused consumers to expect rapid turnover.

Joor’s clients include fashion heavyweights Diane Von Furstenberg, Phillip Lim, Alexander McQueen, Rag & Bone, and Thakoon. Right now the platform is only available for women’s apparel and menswear but Bijoor said she is exploring opportunities in footwear and accessories. Competitors include NuOrder, Balluun, Brandboom, but none have the high profile clientele that JOOR does (although NuOrder raised money from Rachel Zoe).

JOOR is based in New York with offices in LA and Milan and has raised $5.5 million to date from Battery Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Landis Capital, and Forerunner Ventures.

Photo Credit: electric stove/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sales professionals rely on phone calls for making connections, following up on leads, and closing deals. RingDNA released a voice communications platform today that provides sales reps with relevant, contextual data when they need it to make the most of their sales calls. The company also announced raising a $1.9 million seed round.

This iPhone app integrates with Salesforce, Twilio, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and company news feeds. When a call comes in, RingDNA delivers CRM data, social media activity, and behavioral marketing information to eliminate “blind spots” and give reps “actionable business opportunities” in real time.

“Sales reps spend most of their day making and taking calls, but existing mobile CRM apps do little to improve those conversations,” said CEO Howard Brown in an interview. “We don’t see anyone addressing the fact that phone calls and surrounding data are the center of a sales reps’ world. Reps want to know as much as they can about their prospects. Our app focuses on helping enterprise sales reps close more deals by delivering sales intelligence data before, during and after any call.”

RingDNA is not the only startup addressing the demand for data in today’s business environment. Base and Close.io provide comparable products, but Brown said they require switching to a new CRM while RingDNA integrates with existing ones. There are also other products that focus on email, and RingDNA’s approach is “intelligent telephony,” which focuses on the phone as the hub of activity.

Brown previously founded a marketing consultancy called DemandResults and observed the challenges his clients had integrating call metrics from marketing, sales, and service centers into their workflow. Furthermore, he said over 40 percent of sales reps fail to hit their quotas each year. He wanted to build a way to get the right call data to the right person at the right time and improve sales performance as a result.

RingDNA presents users with contacts’ past account history, previous communications, and social data as well as activities from Salesforce. The calls are automatically logged and recorded and the resulting data collected. Executives and marketers can access performance metrics through a dashboard and track what percentage if revenue is closed over the phone, how many inbound calls became leads, and call volume by campaign, channel, or region.

The app was first released to beta testers in August. RingDNA raised $1.9 million from angel investors including people from Salesforce, DropBox, CloudConnect, LeaseStar, Appirio, and Propertyware. Customers include Optimizely, Appirio, and Lease Advisors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sometimes the process of scheduling meetings takes up more time than the meetings themselves. Atlas launched a mobile scheduling app today that seeks to streamline this process.

The apps for iPhone cut down on all the back-and-forth communication and toggling between tabs that people often resort to when setting up meetings. The goal is to stay out of your inbox as much as possible while scheduling. Atlas integrates with your existing calendar products and presents you with available meeting times. You can send someone the times that work for you and they click on the time that works best for them. Appointment made.

“Scheduling right now is a two-screen nightmare for people on all sides,” said CEO Hunter Gray in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’ve taken email, the mode of communication, and the calendar, the hub of context, and put them together on one screen. Atlas fits nicely between mobile calendars and web scheduling products. It is appointment sharing, rather than calendar sharing. We think we can own that market.”

Gray graduated from Yale University and entered the realm of direct sales. He lead a force of 10,000 people and observed “massive” inefficiencies in scheduling. Salespeople out in the field were always on their mobile devices, but they waited until arriving back at their desk to figure out appointment times because it was too much of a hassle on mobile. By then, the moment had passed and people were less inclined to follow up. Along with cofounder Michel Bayan, he set out to build a better system.

In addition to appointment sharing, other features include group scheduling, where you invite people to an event and everyone checks yes, no, or maybe to find the optimal time. Users can also make themselves available, prompting others to schedule a meeting with them. Atlas has productivity features as well, like assigning tasks and notifications when others complete them.

There is a lot of activity in the mobile productivity space. Sunrise, Fantastical, Tempo, not to mention the mobile presence of companies like Asana and web schedulers like Tungle.me. Despite the competition, the founders are confident that their product addresses many of the pain points that these other applications don’t and that the technology provides a superior, cross-platform method for scheduling. Atlas isn’t trying to change the behavior of people who typically make appointments while sitting at a computer. It is for people who schedule on-the-go and want a more efficient way to do it. The app will operate on a freemium model, with a monthly subscription fee for a pro account with added features.

Atlas participated in Launchpad LA and has raised $700K from angel investors.

Photo Credit: Atlas

Sales people are an incredibly important resource, but how do you motivate them to close more deals without being an aggressive, insulting prig? LevelEleven believes its flagship app that gamifies the sales process is the answer to that problem.

Detroit-based LevelEleven recently caught our eye when it raised $500,000 in additional seed funding from Detroit Venture Partners and others. The company’s flagship application encourages sales people to meet certain goals like following up on leads, increasing numbers of face-to-face meetings, making calls, and logging events.

Now the company has rebranded the flagship app from the name Contest Builder to (fittingly) Compete. LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh told VentureBeat that the name change was important because the core product was more about creating competitions than creating contests.

“One of the most frustrating things of sales is having so much data but still finding it hard to motivate sales people,” Marsh said. “I call it the ‘sales manager challenge.’ … But it’s a pretty powerful motivator when your name is up in lights on a leaderboard. It can be very emotionally compelling.”

On top of the name change, the app has been redesigned to simplify the user experience and modernize the look. LevelEleven will also soon add new pricing options so customers can make a month-to-month arrangement for the service instead of just a one-year commitment.

The Compete app is built on top of Salesforce’s CRM platform, and claims to be “the number one gamification app” in the Salesforce AppExchange. Marsh said that the company has considered building a standalone app that doesn’t rely on Salesforce, but it will focus on its app for Salesforce for the near future because it has more than 100,000 potential customers that use the platform.

LevelEleven now has about 80 customers, a substantial increase over the 25 it had just six months ago. It has raised a total of $1.5 million in seed funding to date and has 10 employees. Marsh also noted he’s proud of the company’s placement among the emerging Detroit tech scene.

Photo via LevelEleven

Enterprise gamification startup LevelEleven has raised $500,000 in new seed funds to motivate sales people around the world.

Detroit-based LevelEleven offers software that makes sales and selling a game. The company’s flagship product is ContestBuilder, which pushes sales people with a leaderboard, has them mark completed tasks, dangles potential rewards for the top sales people, and more. ContestBuilder is the most popular gamification app on the Salesforce AppExchange.

The company said its approach to sales gamification has helped bring in a lot more customers, and clients have nearly tripled from 25 to over 70 during the past six months. Customers include Comcast, Concur, Delta Airlines, Dyn, Good Technology, Kelly Services, and OpenTable.

LevelEleven raised $1 million back in October, bringing its total seed funding to $1.5 million. The seed funding was led by Detroit Venture Partners, with participation by Hyde Park Venture Partners, The First Step Fund, and private equity investor Rick Inatome.

“Over the past quarter we’ve made huge strides in establishing our brand, further developing our software, and acquiring new customers, so the timing was perfect to secure additional funding,” LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh said in a statement. “Having the support of such prominent investors is a real validation of the work we’re doing to help motivate employee behavior in the enterprise sales and CRM space.”

Check out the video below for more on LevelEleven.

Screenshot via LevelEleven/YouTube

HG Data uses a data-driven approach to help salespeople build lists of potential enterprise customers, and is ready to disrupt the legacy IT market.

The Santa Barbara-based startup today closed a $2 million funding round led by EPIC Ventures.

“While LinkedIn maps the connections between people in business, HG Data maps the connections between businesses themselves – who sells to whom, who buys what, and who partners with whom,” said Craig Harris, CEO and founder of HG Data in a statement.

The company has been building out its algorithms for the past two years. More specifically, it uses machine learning technology to updates its databases with information that is publicly available from press releases, white papers and the like. One of HG Data’s customers might use the tool to pinpoint a company that still runs on a specific type of legacy hardware, and pitch them an alternative.

The company claims its customers can use the data to bolster lead generation, market share analysis and marketing automation.

Angel investors in the round include Kevin O’Connor, founder of DoubleClick and current CEO of FindTheBest; Eric Kanowsky and AJ Rice, both co-founders of Software.com; and Tim Baskerville, former CEO of JupiterResearch.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yammer confirmed today that it is laying off some of its marketing and sales staff, seven months after the company was acquired by Microsoft.

Yammer provides a software as a service product that businesses use to collaborate inside their own social network. The collaboration tool was snapped up by Microsoft in July, though the parent company has kept the technology to continue running instead of shutting it down and absorbing Yammer’s employees.

“We can confirm that Yammer eliminated a small number of sales and marketing positions. Each of our businesses continually assesses and reallocates resources to align with their priorities,” said a spokesperson in a statement emailed to VentureBeat. “Yammer has continued to grow rapidly since becoming part of the Microsoft Office Division.”

The company, which recently opened a new office to house its employees, is likely just trimming off the extra fat after its acquisition. Microsoft already has large sales force, and it can likely handle adding Yammer to its stable of products to push. And Microsoft certainly can support any new marketing efforts.

It also sounds like the company is continuing to hire in its other departments, which means we’re likely not seeing a decline in the value of the product.

hat tip TechCrunch; Yammer image via Robert Scoble/Flickr

Radius has raised $12.4 million to measure these ripples and turn them into actionable sales insights.

Radius crawls the Internet for information about small businesses. The engine collects data in real time from over 22 million businesses and indexes it into a goldmine for sales teams. The information is highly searchable and, when combined with lead generation tools and CRM integrations, makes it much easier for companies to identify potential customers and partners.

The brain behind the company is Darian Shirazi, Facebook’s first intern, who forsook college to pursue life as an entrepreneur. Forbes recently named Shirazi one of its 30 Under 30 tech pioneers. Shirazi swung by the VentureBeat offices to chat about his startup, the funding, and the future of small businesses in America.

“There are big challenges today for business trying to sell to or work with small businesses because there is no good deep information about small mom and pop businesses,” he said. “We are trying to add as much data as we possibly can from all over the web to track the small business economy, which represents 70% of the American economy and is responsible for eight times as many jobs.”

Amassing data of this kind is difficult — many of these companies have a weak (or no) online presence, and their churn rate is extremely high. Shirazi said that 10% of small businesses either move, die, or come into being every month, making it a monumental task to keep up with the rapidly changing index. Furthermore, Radius faces challenges like variations in labels (such as “and” vs. “&”) and distinguishing between multiple stores with the same name. Shirazi and his team, however, are passionate and up for the task.

“My family has started businesses for hundreds of years,” he said. “I care about the small-business economy and I care about data. There isn’t really a way to do this halfway. We have spent the past three years working on this database. This funding will help us build a sales team for ourselves, add engineers, add new data sources, and build up a data science team to build the best data product out there for small businesses.”

Using Radius, sales and marketing teams targeting small businesses can apply specific filters like ratings, increasing/decreasing traffic, minority-owned etc., to pull up lists of businesses that fit their criteria. Based on the results, they can build informed and actionable lead lists. Target customers include daily deals and e-commerce sites, business insurance agencies, web hosting companies, and payment platforms.

The financial sector represents a major market for Radius’ technology, which is why American Express significantly contributed to this round. While Shirazi did not comment on whether this was a strategic partnership, he did say there was “alignment” and “overlap” between his product and American Express’ goals.

Radius’ data is valuable for a huge range of applications. As small business owners become more tech-savvy, this is just the first toe dip into the pool.

Existing investor Blue Run Ventures also participated, after throwing in for Radius’ first $6 million round along with Comcast. Radius is based in San Francisco and has 20 employees.

Barriers to entry have fallen with light touch interfacing and sticky product features through web and mobile apps, as well as APIs. Deal flow opportunities are tremendous: Think scoring 50 fold+ in revenue over long term contracts with large clients, as opposed to one-night-stands with consumer who can flake out at any given time.

Exciting times, to be sure — but investing time, capital, and resources to align the ideal go-to-market strategy can easily burn out the most ambitious and experienced.

For those that are just starting out, here are a few ground business, marketing, and personal rules for building the foundation of a highly scalable business-to-business startup:

1.  Don’t compete, just win

Execution trumps ideas every time.

Once you get past your ‘friends and family’ circle of prospects, no one will care about or your offering unless you push.  You’re going to need tons of positive and assertive take-no-prisoners-style energy, while still being likable and a fun person for the other side to talk to.

When you get tired or frustrated, always push for one more call.  It will give you a boost to perform and deliver above average more consistently.

2. Forget about 100% reliance on inside sales

It’s for the rich and well experienced, not for you.

You don’t have enough time or money to buy $10Ks in media, convert, and measure and expect to be successful from day one.   Invest your time building a pipeline of prospects - through your network and straight cold calling like crazy.  Find the processes that work and the customers that find value in your offering and pay.  Constantly adapt your site messaging and selling methodologies based on paying customer feedback.

You’ll still need to buy media, but keep the budget low and consider it strictly for branding to build awareness, not direct revenue.

3. Get attention fast

You can’t do it alone on the phone.

Reach out to media outlets that speak to your target market right off the bat — don’t wait for your product to be perfect. Instead, focus on bringing one to three killer beta customers that can vouch for your offering.  Highly visible beta users or customers will always speak better than you can about your company and are instantly recognizable by your prospective customers.

4. Hustle big

Remember David and Goliath?  It’s scary reaching out to people for the first time and selling… even scarier when approaching larger companies.

But the important thing is that a few heavyweight names in your category will validate your market and the strategy you’re implementing to engage them.  More than likely, it will take just as much time to bring on board as a smaller prospect … so why shoot small?

Shoot big, welcome them as partners, and promote your relationship as much as possible.

5. Eat and train well

Workout in the morning – at least four work days a week.  By working out, you’ll find some type of physically stimulated activity that you’ll get addicted to doing every morning.  You’ll come to the office ready to kick ass and will have more energy to continuously perform all day — believe it.

It’s a long road that will be challenging and confusing, but it will pay off.

When in doubt – focus strictly on execution!

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing and Chief Customer Advocate at Newvem, a web-based cloud usage analytics service that enables CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, Developers and Operators to capture and improve the effectiveness of their public cloud operations  and ensure their cloud infrastructure is in sync with business performance so they are financial efficient and contribute to a company’s profits. Follow him at @cameronperon.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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InsideSales applies data science and statistics to increase sales for businesses. Its products provide cloud-based sales automation and predicative analytics services to get the most out of remote sales efforts and stay on top of leads. Tools include the PowerDialer, PowerText, and PowerSocial, which help salespeople increase their reach, as well as gamification tools and scheduling assistance. It’s PowerDialer for SalesForce 5.0 is one of the most popular applications on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Clients include Cisco, Dell, Eloqua, Gannet, and Groupon. Sales for InsideSales itself grew by over 100 percent last year, according to a statement issued by the company, and are continuing to grow. This hefty investment will help scale the platform as well as add new solutions.

New investor U.S. Venture Partners and existing investor Hummer Winblad Venture Partners led this round.

InsideSales.com was founded in 2004 and is based in Provo, Utah. This brings its total funding to $39 million to date, following a $4 million Series A in August of 2012. Read the press release.

Infusionsoft has raised $54 million from Goldman Sachs to help small businesses succeed. It does this by building custom, all-in-one systems that combine CRM, email, and social marketing, and sales tools. From this platform, small business owners can more effectively attract new customers, wage automated marketing campaigns, engage existing customers, and drive sales.

Infusionsoft started out as a custom software shop in 2001. The founders quickly realized that companies sought this type of comprehensive product. Its target customers are businesses with two to 25 employees that are “owner-operated, lack IT support, follow their buyers online and desperately need effective sales and marketing tools to succeed.” While Marketo, Hubspot, and Salesforce offer comparable solutions, they do not cater specifically to this segment.

“The small business market is underserved by software companies,” said CEO Clate Mask in an email interview. “Most vendors in the sales and marketing SaaS industry are gunning for the enterprise clients and their products show it. Mid-market software and IT support is too expensive and complicated, but simple marketing and sales tools can’t effectively manage their growing businesses. True small businesses are left having to figure out how to make these systems work for their needs and it usually fails.”

Customers include wedding videographers, kickboxing gyms, and animal clinics as well as internet startups. Infusionsoft has over 12,000 customers around the world and grew by more than 50 percent last year. This third round investment will contribute to developing the product and accelerating its own marketing and sales efforts.

“The news of this deal might shock some people due to the size of the round and the fact that it’s coming from a company outside of Silicon Valley,” said Mask. “But anyone who’s been following Infusionsoft knows that this makes perfect sense. We’ve had a vision for a long time and we stuck to it like glue. Every decision made — from hiring to product development — reflects that vision and now we’re ready to go big.  The sales and marketing SaaS market is blowing up, the small businesses market is blowing up, and we have the most perfect launch pad.”

This brings Infusionsoft’s total raised capital to $71 million. Previous investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and vSpring Capital. The headquarters are in Chandler, Ari. (or Silicon Desert). It currently has 350 employees.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Just over a month after winning the right to see details of Apple’s licensing deal with HTC, Samsung must reveal some of its private data to Apple. Justice Lucy Koh has denied the Korean company’s bid to keep detailed sales data private, according to Bloomberg.

Samsung wanted to know more about how HTC is licensing key patents from Apple to cover its Android phones. Apple wants to know exactly how many models of its many smartphones Samsung has sold in the U.S., which would of course have financial repercussions in the billion-dollar judgment that Apple won against Samsung almost half a year ago, and that Apple has been trying to increase ever since.

Koh’s judgment means that Apple will get data on model sales, but it will not see exact channel pricing or profit margin details. Interestingly, in October last year, Koh had granted Samsung to not only get data on model sales, but also the right to see key iPhone profitability data.

This latest round just adds to the complexity of the relationship between the two largest smartphone manufacturers in the world. Apple and Samsung are enemies and partners, as Apple still sources some key components from the massive multinational manufacturer — such as the iPhone 5′s central processing unit and screens for some of its phones.

Since late last year, Samsung has alternately played hardball and softball, first saying that it would not pay Apple royalties and then unilaterally dropping patent injunctions against Apple in Europe.

With these two latest private data reveals, this is turning into a unwilling corporate equivalent of an adolescent show-me-yours-I’ll-show-you-mine. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry wishes Samsung and Apple would just get a room.

Which is precisely what Koh called for in December, telling the two warring companies that “it’s time for global peace.”

Photo: Nan Palmer/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has reached the highest smartphone market share ever thanks to strong sales of the iPhone 5, according to the latest sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

With the iPhone 5 joining the 4 and 4S models still in the market, Apple broke through the 50 percent barrier and reached 53.3 percent market share in three months ending Nov. 25.

And the good news for Apple doesn’t stop there, according to Kantar:

“Apple has reached a major milestone in the U.S. by passing the 50 percent share mark for the first time,” Kantar director Dominic Sunnebo said in a statement, adding that the research company expects Apple to make “further gains” during December.

The same cannot be said across the Atlantic.

Samsung is top dog in Europe, with the highest number of sales and a 44.3 percent market-share position. Apple came in second place with 25.3 percent, while HTC, Sony, and Nokia are all vying for third. Nokia is taking back some of its lost share in the U.K., Sunnebo said, but it’s having a tough time reaching the most desirable demographic: youth.

“Over the past six months, just 28 percent of Nokia Lumia 800 sales have come from under 35s, compared with 42 percent of all smartphone sales,” Sunnebo said.

Meanwhile, Windows phones in the U.S. continue to have a tough slog, Kantar’s data suggests. With Microsoft putting on a full-court marketing press, the next quarter “will prove crucial in revealing initial consumer reactions to the Nokia 920 and HTC Windows 8X devices,” Sunnebo added.

Looks like Apple has found the marketsharing winning formula: releasing new phones. Now if only they could do that every quarter.

photo credit: PHOTO/arts Magazine via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dropbox has had no trouble convincing consumers to use its tools, but it will need a dedicated sales team to reach large enterprises. To bolster its sales and support team, it has brought on Kevin Egan, a vice president at Salesforce.com, and Kim Malone Scott, who ascended the proverbial ladder at tech giants like Google and Apple.

Kim Malone Scott

The San Francisco-based company develops software to help businesses and consumers store files, photos, and more. The market is full of competition from the likes of Box and Google Drive, but Dropbox is the undisputed king of cloud collaboration, and it hit the 100 million user milestone in November. The company has two offices — in San Francisco and Dublin, Calif. — and a burgeoning staff of about 250 employees.

[Related: Read more about how business-focused startups are putting off hiring a traditional sales team, and favor the "freemium" distribution model.] 

As Dropbox continues to grow its team and rumors fly that its readying for a 2013 IPO, it may struggle to keep its startup culture in tact. New hire Scott may be able to help with that; she recently taught professional development and management skills at Apple, where she wrote the curriculum on company culture. Prior to Apple, she spent six years at Google as a director, and has sales and operations experience with AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick.

[Related: Read more here about how Salesforce and Intuit are working to maintain a startup-like culture.]

Dropbox has also poached Egan from Salesforce, where he spent a decade working in its sales and operations teams. In his current role, he works as a senior vice president of global recruiting.

This year, Dropbox has primarily focused on building out its engineering team. It lured the designer of the Facebook “Like” button and the creator of the programming language Python. It also boosted its engineering firepower through talent acquisitions; it recently acquired Audiogalaxy and Snapjoy.

I’m curious to see whether Dropbox is successful in selling its products to large companies, given the spate of high-profile security breaches. Competitors Box and Egynte are already making headway in the enterprise with a traditional sales push — it’s a massive market opportunity for any cloud software company.

Paper chain image via Dirk Ercken, Shutterstock 

He’s also the author of a chart-topping Amazon book that sold 40,000 copies in its first eight weeks of publication — and shot to the top spot in Amazon’s science fiction charts — by following a very strategic publishing and publicity model, which he shared with me when we chatted a few weeks ago.

This is a hot topic right now. Well-known entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki just published APE (Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur), which gives step-by-step instructions on how to self-publish. And an astonishing 27 of the top 100 books on Kindle are self-published.

Here’s how Mather did it.

“I have a background as an entrepreneur and as I was writing the Kindle came out and I wanted to try it,” Mather said. “Traditional publishers have the connections into the bookshops, and pay for printing … but now creators can access the market directly.”

Mather had started writing his novel in 2010, and by 2012 had 150,000 words and 600 pages of The Atopia Chronicles. But he didn’t just throw the novel into the massive Amazon ocean of titles and hope for the best. Using his background in startups and his savvy as an entrepreneur, he created an 11-step program to market and launch the book.

“If you go the self-publishing route, it’s definitely the year to get started,” he told me. “But you need to start with good reviews and get early sales … if you start to become popular, you get into the recommendation system, and the system feeds itself.”

So Mather created the Shakespeare system, an 11-step process to get to number one. Briefly, it outlines the key tips to getting attention, getting reviews, and getting sales:

1. Serialize
   Attention spans are short and readers don’t necessarily trust a new author. Consider breaking your novel into smaller, bit-sized chunks
2. Hook
   The first part of your story needs to be punchy and leave the reader wanting more.
3. Amazon only
   Focus only on Amazon first, because it’s the biggest and sells the most. By focusing, you can promote better, and you can move up rankings quicker. After some success you can consider other platforms.
4. Key networks
   Promote the book in your personal networks. Ask people to re-post your free book offers. Email people. Share it on LinkedIn. Email top-selling authors, and ask them to review your book or even share it with their audiences.
5. Empathy
   You must create a character that people can connect with
6. Select Program on Amazon
   Choose the Amazon Select Program because you can offer your book for free for 5 days in every three months. Then promote it on the free books websites.
7. Perceived value
   Create perceived value by offering a deal … for instance by pricing six serialized parts at $0.99 each, and the entire book at $2.99
8. Editing
   You will get killed in reviews if your book is not well edited. Go on Craigslist, find some unemployed English major, and pay a few bucks to get it edited. Use a real editor if you have the cash, but it’ll be expensive.
9. All free posting sites
   Get feedback on your book from 20 or so people by paying the $10-20 for reading your book. Bonus: they’ll probably become your biggest promoters and will be happy to write reviews for you later. And use the free press release sites when you release your book.
10. Reviews
    It’s critical to get reviews as these have a direct impact on Amazon ranking and recommendations. Don’t do fake reviews — you’ll get caught. Do ask friends and relatives and contacts to review the book.
11. Engage
    Engage with readers via a video blog, or any blog (here’s Mather’s). Show progress on future books. Get them engaged somehow.

By using this system — and by working a 14-hour day when his book was released — Mather ensured that his book launch didn’t disappear into the vast Amazon machine without a ripple. (If you’re wondering why it’s called the Shakespeare system, check the first letters of each step.)

“You need to prepare beforehand and do it all at once, at launch day,” he told me. “I started at three AM, sent out three to four press releases, ran through the whole marketing program in 14 hours, and by the next day I was number one in science fiction.”

One thing that is critical, Mather says, is pricing.

“I talked to a lot of science fiction readers, and it’s sort of like the music industry,” he told me. “A book from a big publisher is $10-15  … so people will pirate them. But if you price it at $2-3, they won’t. And, since you’re getting 70% of the purchase price from Amazon versus maybe 20% from a regular publishing deal … you’re better off in the end.”

The results are pretty obvious: a book that went to first in Amazon’s science fiction list in a day is still on three different top-ten lists and is currently ranked 1,813 on the overall Amazon’s best-sellers list. Not bad for a first-time author.

Of course, it’s not all about the system. One thing that Mather did add when we chatted: it helps if the book is good.

Influitive’s software helps businesses mobilize their customers into advocates and use these advocates strategically as part of marketing campaigns. The products are geared towards business-to-business companies, rather than those selling consumer-facing products.

Basically, Influitive helps boring, unsexy companies activate an “army” of advocates to boost their sales effort. Using AdvocateHub, marketers invite customers to join a community and incentivize them with perks and privileges. It is one thing for an athletic gear company to motivate their brand enthusiasts with free sneakers. It is quite another to find passionate fans of email marketing software or telecommunications systems, and yet referrals, references, and social media are valuable assets when selling a product or service.

A statement issued by the company states that trust in corporate sales and marketing continues to drop, and B2B buyers are increasing their reliance on social media and “blind” peer endorsements to make purchasing decisions. Influitive offers a more productive alternative by gamifying the process.

Since it raised the seed round, Influitive has increased its sales by 145%. The new funding will help the company build its marketing, sales, and service teams and further development of AdvocateHub. Hummer Winblad and Relay Ventures led this round, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Illuminate Ventures, and other angels and firms.

Influitive is based in Toronto and San Francisco. Read the press release. 

But there’s a dirty little secret that mobile commerce has been keeping. It’s slow — deadly slow.

Site monitoring and testing company Keynote tracks the speed and reliability of top U.S. e-commerce sites, and over the weekend things slowed down dramatically. Especially today, on Cyber Monday.

“The average page load time for a mobile retail site … on Cyber Monday is now slower than 18 seconds, or roughly twice as slow as normal,” Aaron Rudger, a mobile manager at Keynote, said in a statement.

Source: Keynote

Fastest mobile sites

That’s almost nine times slower than the average time on top e-commerce companies’ desktop sites: 2.27 seconds. And it’s an eternity while you’re standing there staring at your tiny screen. It’s something I’ve noticed personally even when it’s not Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and even when using fast LTE networks with an iPhone 5 or a Google/Samsung Nexus.

But there’s mobile, and there’s mobile.

Of that 16.3 percent of Black Friday commerce that came in over mobile, the lion’s share — 10 of those 16 percentage points — were purchases made on iPads. Only about a quarter of iPads are sold with cellular connectivity — most are Wi-Fi models. And only a very small fraction, about six percent, of iPad browsing sessions come over cellular networks.

All of which means that iPad numbers are very different from what we typically imagine when we think of “mobile commerce.” iPad-facilitated traffic and sales data gets lumped in with smartphones under the big tent of “mobile,” but the tablet experience of a large screen, beefy processor, and fast local Wi-Fi is very different from a tiny screen, over sometimes-jammed cellular networks, and a generally slower processor.

What that means is: mobile shopping on a phone isn’t exactly the best — or speediest — experience.

“This is quite detrimental and will certainly impact a customer’s experience negatively and can easily motivate a shopper to abandon a site altogether or go to a competitor’s mobile shopping site,” Rudger said.

The solution, according to Keynote, is better sites and better testing, especially testing under load.

Source: Keynote

Slowest mobile sites

photo credit: Michael W. May via photopin cc

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Lattice Engines, which bills itself as “Big Data for Big Sales,” is bulking up with big money. Today the company announced closing a $20 million round with venture capital big whigs New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia.

Lattice’s salesPRISM platform analyzes data and delivers real-time reports with specific and actionable data to sales representatives, who can use the information to generate leads and close deals. Its “secret sauce” (for data, not burgers), is the use of predictive analytics to help sales people anticipate their customers’ behavior.

According to Lattice, the technology can increase pipeline opportunities by up to 75%, triple conversion rates, and double cross-sell rates at existing customers. These results have helped the company double its enterprise customer base, win multiple awards, and work with big organizations like Adobe, ADP, Cox Communications, Dell, Staples and SunTrust.

Lattice is based in San Mateo. This is its third round of institutional funding. Read the press release.

The National Retail Federation’s latest poll says 147 million shoppers is a slight decrease from the 152 million who shopped last year’s Black Friday, possibly due to this being the earliest Thanksgiving since 2007. But per-shopper spending looks to jump 25 percent, according to a Consumer Electronics Association poll, to $218.

“The 2012 Thanksgiving weekend has the potential to be the biggest shopping weekend on record [in the U.S.],” the CEA’s chief economist, Shawn DuBravac, said in a statement.

Sixty percent of U.S. adults — about 140 million Americans — plan to buy at least one Christmas gift this weekend, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. That one gift — plus whatever goodies we buy ourselves — will add up fast.

Multiply the 147 million American shoppers that NRF predicts may hit stores this weekend with the average per-shopper spend CEA is estimating, and you’ve got almost $32 billion in gifts and assorted goodies flying off both real and virtual shelves this weekend — $32,046,000,000, to be exact.

That would be a major increase from last year, which saw about $11.4 billion in Black Friday sales and $1.25 billion in Cyber Monday revenues. But it does cover the entire weekend: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and combines both offline and online sales.

According to new Nielsen poll, a lot of those gifts will be electronics, as kids are hoping for iPhones, iPads, and Nintendo Wii Us under the tree. The same is true of gifts Americans present to themselves, and adults’ wish lists are full of tablets, smartphones, and laptops.

According to the CEA a third of Americans will visit a bricks-and-mortar store, while another 20 percent will prefer to let their fingers do the walking, online.

But not all is sweetness and light.

As the U.S. government deals with an impending “fiscal cliff,” half of consumers surveyed by the CEA say they’re worried and that it will affect their spending — perhaps in anticipation of taxation increases in the new year. Eighteen percent said the fiscal cliff will have a “large impact” on their spending.

But perhaps not very large, if we’ll be spending $32 billion in four days this weekend.

photo credit: Michael Holden via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

ServiceMax, a Pleasanton-Calif. startup that provides cloud-based field service operations, raised $27 million today.

It offers customers web and mobile applications for scheduling and workforce optimization and contract management in the field. For instance, a company with a sales force on the move can use the ServiceMax product to invoice a customer instantly.

The company has over 200 customers in over 20 different industries, including large enterprises like Elekta, Pentair, and Electrolux.

ServiceMax CEO, Dave Yarnold told me that with the funding, it will expand its sales and marketing efforts, as well as double down its efforts to gain traction in Europe and Asia. The company faces tough competition from leading enterprise players like Oracle.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are almost as many field service people in the United States as there are salespeople. For this reason, Yarnold, a former vice president of Global Sales at SuccessFactors, said they will focus their efforts on building technology for field service, rather than encroach on Salesforce’s territory. “It’s a massive market, and probably a more important one since these technicians and engineers are face to face with your customers every day,” he explained.

The tool is built on Force.com, Salesforce.com’s cloud based service — the cloud computing giant participated in previous funding rounds.

This round of series D funding was led by Crosslink Capital with participation from existing investors, Trinity Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Emergence Capital. ServiceMax has received a total of $52 million in venture funding.

Image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung has shipped more than 30 million units of its flagship Galaxy S III smartphone in five months, the company giant announced today in a somewhat misleading blog post.

The electronics giant claims it “surpassed 30 million global sales,” but it later clarified that these were “channel sales” (aka shipments) rather than direct sales to customers.

The Galaxy S III went on sale in June, and we’re fans of the device. In September, Samsung said that it had sold 20 million Galaxy S III smartphones to retailers. At that rate, it shipped a head-spinning 10 million phones during the past two months, even with heavy competition from Apple’s iPhone 5 and other powerful Android smartphones.

“The Galaxy S III continues to be a runaway favorite with customers around the world,” JK Shin, the president of Samsung’s mobile division, said in a statement. “Meeting this sales milestone in five months sets another record for Samsung, and we are extremely proud and yet motivated to continue to provide our customers with products that they love.”

Consumers are flocking to Windows 8. Microsoft has sold more than 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in its first three days, chief executive Steve Ballmer announced this morning.

Ballmer revealed the figure during his opening keynote at the Build developer conference — which we’re calling Microsoft’s most important event ever — in Redmond this morning. He also noted that Microsoft has sold “tens of millions” of Windows 8 upgrade units to corporate customers, who can upgrade when they see fit. Windows 8 officially launched last Friday, October 26.

Speaking at Nokia’s Lumia 920 launch in September, Ballmer boldly predicted that we’ll see 400 million Windows 8 devices next year.

Last week, Microsoft’s Windows head Steven Sinofsky announced that the company has sold more than 670 million Windows 7 units since its release in 2009. So far, Windows 8 is off to a strong start — though I have a feeling many consumers will choose to stick with Windows 7 instead of upgrading. From my experience, Windows 8 works best on new hardware with touchscreens or modern touchpads — on a desktop or older laptop, Windows 8 doesn’t really have much to offer beyond Windows 7.

Founders Dwight Crow and Christopher Berner were acqui-hired by Facebook today. Terms were not disclosed, but what is clear is that Facebook is not getting into the business of helping you buy and sell cars. At least, not anymore than it already has via the Facebook Marketplace app, powered by Oodle.

The founders announced their new jobs on the Carsabi blog:

We created Carsabi back in Oct 2011 with the goal of easing the process of purchasing a used car and providing a service that aims to index every automotive vehicle and connect more users to their car of choice each day.

But now it’s time for us to take a different turn. We want to take this impact to the next level – and help Facebook users connect and share. Because Facebook is not acquiring Carsabi.com, we’re looking for someone to buy the Carsabi service, so the two of us can focus on our new jobs. We can’t thank all of you that have used Carsabi enough – developing Carsabi has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and we hope we helped you think differently about how to find the perfect used car!

We want to give special thanks to our partners, customers, and investors for helping us fulfill our dream.

Christopher & Dwight

A Y Combinator grad with attitude, Carsabi launched at Demo Day in March of this year. The goal was to index every vehicle for sale and connect the right user to the right car. That goal became a tougher job when, in its crusade to shut down competition, Craigslist blocked Carsabi from indexing its car listings.

That may also be the reason Carsabi’s traffic has halved recently:

Source: Compete.com

Carsabi traffic

Crow and Berner are now looking for a buyer for the Carsabi service, since Facebook will not be taking that over, but it’s unclear who will want a scraping service that is blocked from one of the key scraping sources … and, as a Y Combinator company doesn’t have a ton of investment.

It won’t help that the site currently looks a little abandoned:

Source: Carsabi

Carsabi, October 1 at 2:30 PST

Perhaps Craigslist itself could use a new interface to potentially lucrative car sales.

photo credit: Vu Bui via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After setting a new record with 2 million iPhone 5 pre-orders in one day, Apple announced today that it has sold more than 5 million iPhone 5 units since it went on sale Friday.

While certainly a strong showing for Apple, the figure is below the 6 million iPhone 5 units Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster expected Apple to sell in the worst case. For the entirety of September, Munster expects Apple to sell around 8 to 10 million units, while other analysts  predict 10 to 12 million units sold.

Apple also announced that more than 100 million iOS devices have upgraded to the latest version of its mobile OS, iOS 6, which was released last week.

Last year, Apple sold 4 million units of the iPhone 4S in its launch weekend. But the iPhone 5 will rack up sales over the next few weeks faster than its predecessor, as Apple has managed to roll it out internationally faster than any iPhone before. The iPhone 5 will hit countries including Italy, Ireland, New Zealand, and Sweden on September 28.

Update: Munster released the following statement to explain his missed projection (via MacRumors):

We believe there are two factors that negatively impacted the number. First, our sales expectation assumed that Apple would include all phones pre-ordered online. We believe that this may have been up to 1 million additional units as units pre-ordered after the middle of the first day were projected to be available in October. Second, we noted 1.25 days of Apple Retail inventory compared to 2.5 days during the 4S launch. Our 8 million estimate assumed full weekend availability and the counting of all online pre-orders. We believe that if supply were not a constraint and Apple included all pre-orders, the launch weekend number would have been closer to 7-8 million, assuming ~1 million October pre-order sales and an additional 1-2 million units at retail.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dreamforce is typically a spectacle and a whole lotta fun, but this year it was bigger than ever before.

Salesforce.com claims that its annual San Francisco-based conference is the largest cloud computing event of the year. With over 60,000 people in attendance this year, this may well be true. The majority popped in and out of the event, and were primarily interested in listening in to the keynote addresses by Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson. Another highlight for ticket-holders was the performance by aging rockers, The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Attendees will have noticed a number of new faces. Salesforce.com has been on an acquisition spree this year, buying up five companies including social media marketing company, Buddy Media, and most recently, co-browsing startup, GoInstant. These execs brought into the company through acquisitions were given a starring role at the conference.

A number of new products were announced at Dreamforce, including Salesforce Touch, Marketing Cloud, Chatterbox and so on. To read more about the announcements, read our coverage here.

If you weren’t lucky enough to attend or you’re eager to relive those glory moments, check out our photo gallery.

[Photo credits: Dean Takahashi and Christina Farr]

Dice Holdings has purchased iconic tech properties Slashdot, SourceForge, & Freecode from Geeknet for $20 million cash, the company announced today.

“The acquisition of these premier technology sites fits squarely into our strategy of providing content and services that are important to tech professionals in their everyday work lives,” said Scot Melland, the CEO of Dice Holdings, in a statement. “The SourceForge and Slashdot communities will enable our customers to reach millions of engaged tech professionals on a regular basis, and this significantly extends our company’s reach into the global tech community.”

We heard back in May that Geeknet was looking to sell its online media properties to make its stock more valuable. In 2011, the three online media properties generated about $20 million in revenue.

Slashdot and SourceForge are the two big properties being sold off, while Freecode is quite small. Slashdot, a user-generated tech news and analysis site, attracts 3.7 million uniques per month. SourceForge, a site for developing and downloading open-source software, attracts 40 million monthly uniques. Freecode, an index of Linux and cross-platform software, has about 500,000 unique visitors each month.

With its online media business sold off, Geeknet says it will focus all its efforts on growing its ThinkGeek site, a place to buy all kinds of geek merchandise.

Pile of cash via stockshoppe/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After iPhone 5 preorders sold out on Apple’s website in one hour on Friday, I expected some impressive preorder figures. Apple this morning announced that the iPhone 5 surpassed 2 million pre-orders in its first 24 hours, blowing away the iPhone 4S’s record of 1 million preorders in the same time.

If you really wanted to land an iPhone 5 on release day, September 21, you had to get your preorder in early. Preorders from Apple’s website showed delayed shipments one hour after they were made available, and delays hit orders on carrier websites later on in the day. Your only choice now to get an iPhone at release is to line up at an Apple or carrier retail store.

AT&T also announced this morning that the iPhone 5 set new sales records, though as usual it didn’t give any specific figures.

As much as the the iPhone 5 impressed me when it was announced, I’m not in much of a rush to upgrade at this point. Partially, it’s because I can’t get discounted pricing from AT&T until October, but I’ll also be able to enjoy many of the software upgrades in iOS 6 on my iPhone 4S. Or maybe I’m just trying to soothe myself after missing out on a release day preorder.

Sales communications startup Clearslide has raised $28 million in its second round of funding aimed at opening a New York City office, developing new products, and increasing marketing efforts, the company announced today.

ClearSlide offers its customers cloud-based apps for giving presentations without the friction and hassle associated with services like WebEx and GoToMeeting. On top of phone, web, and e-mail presentation tools, it also gives sales people analytics tools to keep teams on message and establish best practices. Additionally, it has iPad and iPhone apps to help with in-person pitching.

“We focus exclusively on sales teams and supporting inside and outside sales reps,” Al Lieb, the CEO and cofounder of ClearSlide, told VentureBeat. “Traditionally, sales has been ‘every man for himself.’ But our tools are empowering a team-based approach.”

During the past two years, the company has seen strong growth. Lieb (pictured left with co-founder Jim Benton above) said the company’s “users, customers, and revenue” have increased 400 percent each year. The company has “hundreds” of customers, but declined to give a more specific number. Customers include CareerBuilder, Expedia, Gannett, Rackspace, and The Weather Channel.

The new funding round will help the company continue to expand its team and create new native mobile apps. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation by prior investors Greylock Partners and Felicis Ventures. Both Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and John Jack, former CEO of Fortify Software, have joined ClearSlide’s board of directors.

“I was really impressed by ClearSlide’s team, as well as their operating metrics and rate of market adoption,” Deeter said in a canned statement. “There is extremely strong customer demand for their offering and we’re thrilled to work closely with ClearSlide in their next stage of hyper growth.”

San Francisco-based ClearSlide has raised a total of $39 million, including its $11 million first round. It currently has 110 employees. Along with establishing a brand-new New York City office, the company plans to double the total number of its employees using the new funds

Clearslide founders photo: Clearslide

Declining orders from big smartphone clients like Nokia have handed Foxconn International it largest-ever first-half loss.

The Foxconn Technology subsidiary, which only gives earnings twice a year, reported a $226 million loss, a huge increase over the company’s $18 million loss at the same point last year.

The reason for the loss is fairly straightforward: Key Foxconn International clients like Nokia and HTC can’t sell enough phones, and as a result are making manufacturing orders that are too small for Foxconn International to justify fulfilling. This, in conjunction with the global economic downturn, is eating into Foxconn’s bottom line.

“Looking forward, challenging economic conditions around the world may continue to cast uncertainties in our business environment,” the company said in its earnings report. ”The management team remains cautious over the future handset market conditions in 2012.”

That doesn’t bode well for Foxconn International’s smartphone clients, who are clearly scaling back their expectations for the upcoming holiday season.

Unlike parent company Foxconn Technology, Foxconn International doesn’t manufacture Apple products like the iPhone, a smartphone that’s clearly immune to the downturn hitting the clients of Foxconn International.

Foxconn International’s share prices have taken a hit on the earnings news, dropping roughly eight percent in trading today.

After revealing his motivation, Patel proceeded to reveal the methods behind his madness — the metrics he measures that have driven KISSmetrics to 100 percent year-over-year growth. Patel says every entrepreneur needs to track 10 specific areas of metrics:

1. People, not unique visitors
   UVs are not a valid measurement of activity. Customers might visit your site from multiple browsers on their laptop, plus a tablet or a mobile phone. In Google Analytics, they all look unique … so you need to start tracking people: log-ins, credentials, and usernames.
2. Time to buy
   Some people need time before they buy, says Patel. Give them that time, but be looking at marketing attribution — the first entry source, all the referrers in-between, and especially the last one before they buy. KISSmetrics tire-kickers need seven touches — blog, website, Twitter, Facebook, ads, and so on — before they convert to customers. You will find some interesting things, Patel said. Originally, the KISSmetrics team thought that Twitter didn’t convert. On a closer look, they say that there was no conversion if they viewed the data episodically, but customers did convert over time. Better tracking also enables better assessment of marketing ROI … now you really know the process that people take before buying.And one more tip: retargeting is important. Patel related an example of a mattress he was interested in buying that was $1,000, then $800, then $700 as he continued to occasionally click on the ad and became more and more likely to buy.
3. Targeted feedback from ideal customers
   Getting feedback from all the people who visit your website is useless, says Patel. Instead, ask the people who are your ideal customers … the insights will be much more valuable. Exit surveys are one of the tools KISSmetrics uses for this purpose.
4. Engagement level
   When Patel analyzed site engagement by traffic source, he saw that people from Twitter were spending almost two minutes on site, and that people who arrived at the website from a search engine using the keyword “heat map” were engaging much more than others. That enabled KISSmetrics to focus on those visitors who were already engaging the most.
5. Site and app events
   Tracking events is critical to knowing what part of your application users are actually using. For example, by adding event tracking to basically everything on the site, Patel determined that the addition of live chat on the site — talk to a sales rep — killed conversion. If something in your app or site is not being used, strip it away, Patel says. It’s extra, clutter, and distraction.
6. Real conversion rate
   Conversion doesn’t end when someone signs up. Free users can convert into paid users, so you need to track where free users originally came from, says Patel, and maintain that tracking over time. For one of KISSmetrics’ client, Bing and Google converted the same in terms of free trial users. But people who came in from Bing were almost five times more likely to enter their credit cards and buy the product. Knowing that helped the client focus their marketing efforts. Patel likes to track not just where customers came from but also what they did before converting — and then look for patterns.
7. Cancellations
   It’s easier to keep existing customers than get new ones, Patel says. That’s not rocket science, but knowing in detail what’s happening with cancellations and why is critical to growth. “You may have this big leaky bucket that everything is draining out of,” says Patel. “So stop filling it and start fixing the bucket.” For KISSmetrics, the number one reason people canceled was price, so Patel made cancelers an offer right during the cancellation process. The one-time offer, which gave exiting users the next 12 months at 40 percent off, achieved a 10 percent conversion rate.If users still don’t take that offer, KISSmetrics automatically allows them to ”name your own price.” If that number fit within predetermined levels, the company instantly accepted it.

   “If you can reduce churn, you’re going to be making a lot more money,” says Patel.

8. Lifetime value of the customer
   It’s OK to lose money in the short run, according to Patel, as long as you make it up in the long run. Which is why weight-loss companies offer all those money-back guarantees.
9. Cohort analysis
   Numbers on a user graph that are going up and to the right are fine, but they can often mask problems as new users join a growing service, says Patel. Entrepreneurs have to check user cohorts, or segments, to see how they are doing. For example: all the users who joined in August 2011 … where are they six months later? A year later?
10. User segments
    Don’t treat all your customers the same. Some are free, some paid, some are long-term, and some short-term. Then use marketing automation with Hubspot or Marketo to communicate appropriately to those different user groups.

When you track, Patel says, odd things jump out of the data that can make you much more profitable. One final example: Cutting the KISSmetrics demo time in half doubled conversions … probably due to more perceived urgency in customer’s minds.

Which is precisely how metrics can make you money.

Image credit: John Koetsier