Ann Sung Ruckstuhl

MongoDB’s integrations and multi-cloud capabilities allow organizations to move quickly and avoid lock-in to any particular cloud provider or AI technology in this rapidly evolving space. Delve into the details of all the AI announcements from #MongoDBlocal NYC in this blog. https://lnkd.in/eJUGaJVK

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Exciting read on the transformative power of AI in the SaaS landscape! This article from Duncan McGillivary at ANSA Insight sheds light on how AI is revolutionizing data dominance in legacy vertical SaaS industries. From optimizing operations to enhancing customer experiences, AI is unlocking new possibilities.  #ai #verticalsaas

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Re-reading "The Bezos Blueprint" by Carmine Gallo page 17, references Bezos commencement speech to the 2010 Princeton Class. "What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. In the end, we are our choices." "Six years after his speech at Princeton, Bezos revisited the theme in taking pride in your choices, not your gifts. "This is something that's super important for young people to understand, and for parents to preach to young people. It's really easy for a talented young person to take pride in their gifts. 'I'm really athletic,' or 'I'm really smart,', or 'I'm really good at math.' That's fine. You should celebrate your gifts. You should be happy. But you can't be proud of them. What you can be proud of is your choices." Did you work hard? That's a choice. Did you study hard? That's a choice. Did you practice? That's a choice. "The people that excel combine gifts and hard work, and the hard work part is a choice." Bezos said. (The Bezos Blueprint, page 17 Carmine Gallo) Profound, simple, and true. #thebezosblueprint

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Discover how PreSales teams are evolving, adapting, and unlocking new opportunities in 2024 👀 From organizational structure to budgeting and analytics, explore the trends shaping the industry: https://lnkd.in/eGvrCeJT ​

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What are the root causes of poor GTM team alignment? Our recent survey sheds some light on what your revenue team Ops peers are saying. These comprehensive reports provide all the information. https://gag.gl/4YHwRD #RevOps #DataQuality #RevTeamAlignment

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What should an aspiring #CMO know? Fantastic bonus question from Kathleen Booth at the end of the panel discussion ’How is the cmo role being reinvented’ with Andrew Davies Paddle, Jack Foster of WorkRamp and Alex Poulos of Crossbeam. Andrew P says: "First and foremost, prioritize the business goals over everything else. Care more about growing the company than sticking to your budget. Stay curious, not judgmental, and make sure to deeply understand the company, its customers, and your team." Jack F adds: "Talk to customers regularly and have a bias towards action. Don't get stuck in analysis paralysis; get stuff out the door and iterate based on feedback." Andrew D, the accidental CMO(!) advises: "Understand the business inside out and allocate resources strategically to drive revenue. Be the primary source of customer insight within the organization to steer marketing efforts effectively." In summary, aspiring CMOs should focus on the business, prioritize customer interaction and action, and drive revenue through strategic resource allocation and customer-centric insights. #CMOInsights #MarketingLeadership 💼📈#goldenhour

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Long weekend listening: Had an awesome conversation with Tim Zonca and Vidya Raman on their podcast The Enterprise GTM. We talked about finding the right tech waves to ride, approaching enterprise sales for developer tools, and more ! Sneak peek: 🤝 The quality of people you work with significantly influences the outcome of your company. 🏃‍♂️ Momentum is everything. Never underestimate it. 🧠 Having complete clarity of thought at any given time is very important. Ask yourself, "Who are we doing this for, and how will it change their lives?" Full #podcast episode here: https://lnkd.in/gx-5EuvU

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Product Market Fit (PMF) is a crucial yet elusive concept for many early-stage startups. Achieving it can make or break a company's long-term success. In the latest episode of the "Founder & CEO Podcast," Michael Viscuso and I discuss what PMF is, what it looks like, and what to do once it's achieved. Check out the podcast here: https://lnkd.in/g2fw7v9g

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AI-native companies need to embrace new pricing paradigms (price based on work done, on outcome vs hours, etc). Inevitably, new pricing models are accompanied by new workflows, new ways of invoicing, and new challenges around billing. This makes Sequence's modern billing platform particularly relevant: Sequence helps finance and commercial teams automate manual billing and stop revenue leakage. Sequence has just launched their CPQ Product for B2B software businesses with hybrid pricing, designed specifically for AI, B2B SaaS and Fintech startups. This release empowers B2B teams to create flexible pricing proposals or contracts, including teams selling custom deals with usage tiers, minimum commitments, or ramped pricing, Sequence CPQ works for any pricing model or deal term. As a customer says: "Sequence is like a notion page supercharged with pricing tools." Excited for Sequence to build the critical infrastructure needed to enable new, flexible paradigms that are critical for the AI revolution.

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"One of the hardest things for growth-minded leaders is to acknowledge and accept that they cannot be everything to everyone," says our CEO David Keil in his latest Fast Company article. What does this mean in today's AI world? See for yourself in this compelling article.

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Thanks to Dave Rigotti and team for a wonderful #PLGTM conference in SF. I had great discussions with sales and marketing leaders and here are some observations on how PLG has evolved. Part 1: Time to rethink PLG practice ✔ While the core idea of PLG revolves around self-service adoption and user-driven growth, the practice has evolved, and companies are recognizing the need for a hybrid approach. ✔ For a lot of practitioners, PLG means self-service and users adopt the product without sales support. In practice, PLG leads to increases S&M costs increasing CAC. So, it no more just about building a product but putting the marketing $ behind it. ✔ Enterprise buyers are researching on their own and have good information before they come to the call. Huge number of prospects want sales help in navigating the value prop but want to try out themselves. ✔ PLG does lead to execution speed driving the awareness, showing the value, decreasing sales cycles and enabling simple and faster expansion. ✔ There is a myth that only startups or B2C companies use PLG and has to be bottom-up approach. While many of the companies we know and products we use might be B2C, lot of enterprise B2B companies are PLG as well. e.g. users can simply signup and start using Calendly, Canva or Airtable. teams can start using the products like loom, figma and datadog. ✔ Bringing customers need a hybrid approach in 2024. You need to provide user value created by the product and buyer value created by sales teams. Think about product market fit and product customer fit - leading to greater number of happy customers ✔ Every KPI you are measuring should drive an outcome. If you collect data, ask "what is it used for? " and "how does it help customer or adoption?" ✔ As the PLG model continues to evolve, companies must adapt and embrace a balanced approach that leverages the power of self-service adoption while providing sales support to drive customer success and long-term growth. Thanks to David Yockelson and Dave Boyce for providing engaging discussion on the core of PLG. #productledgrowth #productledsales #salesledgrowth #startups #salesleadership #productmanagement

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Proud of this team who do a lot behind the scenes to help the organization meet its targets, from running GTM programs and plays, to supporting enablement of our field-facing functions, and partnering with our product org to launch new capabilities. It takes a lot of cross-functional collaboration, rolling your sleeves to get the job done, and a growth mindset to always want to improve! FIVE THEMES that are top of mind for us at Optimizely: 👉 #Content is still at heart of every experience. In a world where content generation has never been easier, governance and risk mitigation have become table stakes. While we solve for this very problem today through our Content Marketing Platform - I'm starting to hate the name because it does so much more than content marketing. The more I speak to customers, the more I hear that the value of it is in the ability to enforce governance and risk mitigation. We are also super excited about the release of our new SaaS CMS and Visual Builder - a few more weeks! 👉 #Personalization is still top of mind for marketing leaders and this is the year we are doubling down on this! Next quarter, we are releasing Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (this deserves a post in itself), and Edge Delivery, which allows you to personalize at the Edge! We are continuously investing in our customer data platform through new integrations, such as 6sense, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights for a seamless omnichannel activation. (Did someone say personalized ABM campaign with 6Sense and Optimizely?) 👉 #AI - Every board is now asking each department head about how they are using AI to create efficiencies in their org. We ourselves are investing in an internal AI practice, as well as embedding AI to our products to make the lives of customers better. From AI campaign kits, to auto-generation of test variants, to automated customer narratives, our product org is going all in! 👉 #Customer retention is top of mind for every business leader today and continues to be the most impactful growth lever. At Optimizely we seek to help customers drive adoption and create value for their organizations. This is why we're investing in building an Enterprise platform that solves for many parts of the content value chain, and not just point solutions that create more complexity. 👉 #Growth - As Clayton Christensen says, "Strategy is Temporary". How do you continuously know where growth is going to come from? This is why a culture of testing-and-learning is so important. The winners are the ones who pilot things, seek learnings, and scale up or down depending on results. They are the ones who put thought into their work but don't wait for perfection to take action. What about you? What's top of mind for you? P.S. Here's our faces 4 hours into our end-of-quarter retrospective workshop :) Joey Moore Rommil Santiago Paige Clark Mårten Bokedal Haley Sullivan Nora Tolgyesi Rohit Bhalla

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Doing some prep work this weekend for the June 26 webinar Saurabh Agrawal from Zenskar. Taking a preliminary look at the results of the PeakSpan Capital Ibbaka 2024 Survey on Net Revenue Retention. In the webinar we will look at Why usage-based pricing is gaining popularity among software and API providers, catering to a growing demand for flexible and value-aligned pricing How to effectively align usage-based pricing with customer value, ensuring a win-win scenario for you and your customers The hidden advantages of higher NRR rates when combining usage-based pricing with traditional subscription models Best practices for seamlessly integrating a usage-based pricing component into your existing pricing strategy https://lnkd.in/g5wrv68s #billing #SaaS #NRR #pricing #webinar

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2024 has already proven to be a transformative year for partner marketing. Our joint opportunity is massive, and we—in ServiceNow Global Partner Marketing—are all in. As we scale to $20B in revenue, your expertise and co-creations are a key driver to our joint success! We know you’re focused on getting to market faster¾and building your business. And we want to make it even easier for you to work with us and get your job done. We’re committed to elevating the partner marketing experience to give you immediate access to the strategies, programs, and campaigns that’ll help you create the demand to get there. Join me at the Global Partner Marketing booth at Knowledge 2024 to learn more about all we’ve done … and all that is to come. We’re ready to answer your questions, get your feedback, and explore what we can accomplish in 2024 and beyond. Here’s a quick sneak peek … Discover and learn Gain full access to everything our partner marketing teams offer—in one place. Our new digital front door will help you find the right programs, strategies, tools, trainings, and resources—when and where they’re needed. Our new Partner Marketing Institute offers in-depth training—from strategy to best practices—to hone expertise and maximize our joint marketing ROI. Create and customize Spend less time building—and more time doing. Campaign Creator will allow you to access turnkey, curated campaigns that are easy to co-brand and customize, so you can create excitement in the market. And when custom content—or extra support—is needed, access our Demand Center to leverage a marketplace of ServiceNow-vetted and trained vendors to speed up timelines and make procurement processes simpler. Engage and connect Grow pipeline and accelerate opportunities with new and existing customers through programs that maximize impact. We’ve made it easier for you to launch awareness and demand campaigns on leading-edge topics. And our impact is amplified when we leverage various incentive and recognition programs—whether it’s Partner Development Fund co-funding, grants for partner award winners, or exclusive assets for specialization partners. Knowledge is just around the corner, and I’m thrilled to connect with you in Las Vegas at the Partner Pavilion to demo new experiences and tools that will help us grow together.

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If you're a RevOps leader charged with moving your GTM execution faster -- this thought-leadership session is for you. Join us on May 30th in San Diego at the RevOps Co-op conference. We are bringing a panel of top-notch speakers to share their insights and success playbooks. Here's the session line-up for "Blood, Sweat & Sales People: Confessions from the RevOps Frontline": Eyal Orgil, DealHub's CRO, dives deep into the heart of the action with RevOps experts Ayelet Germanski (PlexTrac) and Amie Weizer (Zensai), revealing their unfiltered secrets to GTM mastery. Gain 3 crucial insights: Scale with Speed: Master the art of GTM scaling – launching AND maintaining growth momentum. Discover how to thrive in a resource-constrained market through smart process streamlining and efficient workflows. Adapt to Conquer: Learn how to react quickly to market shifts and build resilience for the unexpected. Uncover expert tactics for achieving growth even with limited resources. RevOps Revolution: Optimize your RevOps journey. Identify the signs that you need a reboot, foster seamless collaboration across departments, and ensure your entire RevOps process aligns perfectly with your organization's goals. Let's meet in person - secure a time to chat here >>> https://okt.to/Fb7rxE Use the discount code 'RAFDealHub10' to get 10% off your event ticket! #GTM #revops #thoughtleadership

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Today Zig Serafin shared the latest XM innovations from Qualtrics, enabled by Qualtrics AI. Experience management with AI delivers humanized intelligence, making it possible for every organization to build an understanding of every customer and employee. This understanding creates human connections at scale. Hear more about Qualtrics AI from Zig, and stay tuned for more from #QualtricsX4 ⬇ https://lnkd.in/ekTRYRwM .

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I recently sat down with VentureBeat to discuss the value of composable commerce for businesses. We talked about how composable technology helps businesses launch new experiences 30% faster than monolithic providers (and at lower costs as you can imagine) and the positive impact that our customers have seen leveraging the commercetools products. Check out the full piece here: https://lnkd.in/dsmnZsVd

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I had a lot of fun chatting with Tan Wilson about the CollabraLink journey as well as my journey as an entrepreneur and CEO. Spoiler alert: I had to learn A LOT on the fly! : ) #collabralink #entrepreneurship #govcon

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Are you a SaaS leader looking for some valuable insights on how to help navigate the evolving landscape of B2B technology? I've found the article (& podcast) for you! Zapier CEO Wade Foster and SaaStr CEO Jason M. Lemkin discuss the future of B2B sales, emerging trends like the rise of AI, increased focus on customer success, and the importance of remote work. This article offers great perspectives on what lies ahead for SaaS in 2024 and beyond. #saas #b2b #ai #b2bsales #saasleadership

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