Totango was recognized yesterday as a finalist for a 2012 Revenue Performance Management Excellence Award by Marketo!

We are super excited! See an excerpt from and link to the announcement below. Also remember to check out our session at the upcoming Marketo User Summit. I am very excited to be presenting on lifecycle marketing together with Jeff Wiss, VP Demand Generation from our friends at Zendesk!

Our session will be on May 24th at 11:20 AM in Imperial A of the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. Register here.

Here are the details on our session:

Three Steps to Accelerate Revenues from Existing Customers

Here is the excerpt from our press release:

Marketo Announces Finalists for 2012 Revenue Performance Management (RPM) Excellence Awards

“Revvies” Recognize Outstanding Achievement, Leadership in Companies Leveraging Innovation to Accelerate Revenue Growth

San Mateo, CA – April 25, 2011 – Marketo, the fastest-growing provider of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) solutions, today announced the finalists for its second annual Revenue Performance Excellence Awards. The “Revvies” recognize and celebrate customers and partners that are using Marketo’s marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions to push outside the boundaries and away from their competition.

Adding six new awards this year, Marketo will honor 11 organizations and individuals that are true thought leaders and innovators in their respective industries.

The finalists for the 2012 Revenue Performance Excellence Awards include:

Most Innovative Integration with Marketo

American Public University Systems, Podio, Totango

“We are thrilled by the tremendous volume of submissions for our second annual Revvie Awards,” said Paul Albright, Marketo’s chief revenue officer. “The finalists are truly game-changing companies with leaders delivering amazing results across marketing and sales. It’s an honor to help provide the dramatic business impact evidenced by the stories submitted. Congratulations to each of the finalists for their achievements in driving revenue growth.”

Finalists were selected based on the following criteria: Innovation, leadership, success metrics and business impact and winners will be celebrated on May 24th, 2012 at the 2012 Marketo User Summit.

Totango was quoted today in the Wall Street Journal in an article about Steve Jobs:

“It’s not to that point of being annoying yet, but it might get there,” says Dominique Levin, vice president of marketing at Totango Inc., a software company based in Mountain View, Calif., and Tel Aviv. Her boss, CEO Guy Nirpaz, devoured all 656 pages of the book in three days, then bought copies for his employees—including Hebrew translations for employees in Israel—so they could discuss the book at company meetings.

“When they read it, they’ll see that you can do things differently, be more product focused,” says Mr. Nirpaz, 39 years old, whose company builds software that monitors customer relations. He also hopes employees will take a softer view of their own boss after reading the book, which portrays Mr. Jobs as a brilliant but mercurial leader.

“I’m a good guy, but I’m very demanding,” says Mr. Nirpaz. Once his employees have read the book, he adds, “they’ll see I’m a very nice manager compared to Steve Jobs.”

Ha ha … as I said, we are good guys and don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Check out the article on the WSJ website (at least for the next 7 days).

Come work for me! We are hiring!

– Coders, hackers and UI freaks (Israel)
– Community manager: aka social media ninja (Mountain View, CA)
– Sales development manager: aka front line warrior (Mountain View, CA)

Also hiring a sales manager and customer success manager (Mountain View, CA)

To apply email Jobs[at]TOTANGO[dot]com (pun intended)

Come have a snack, meet your fellow CSM professionals, and stick around for some customer engagement tips from yours truly.

We recently published a study that proves through big-data analysis what many people already know:

Users that are actively engaged a few days into their trial are much more likely to convert to paying customers.

4x times more likely, to be exact. (more details)

This is a great signal for SaaS sales teams that want to identify the accounts that are most likely to convert, but it is also very helpful for marketing and product teams.

Marketing: Relevant, qualified and nurtured new trials are more likely to be engaged once they begin their trial.

Product: A better, clearer and smoother first user experience, increases the amount of trial accounts that actually go through the evaluation.

The question so far has been how to systematically measure the ratio of engaged trials with your offering?

We are pleased to release a new Totango Executive Report which does just that:

Engaged Evaluation (Totango users: View here for your customer base)

A month by month analysis of the percentage of trial accounts that are engaged in their evaluation. Engaged accounts are those that have at least 3 days of active usage during their first two weeks of trial.

What you can learn from this report?

The percentage of engaged evaluations is simultaneously an indicator of the quality of the incoming leads and of the first-user-experience your application delivers. For an established business, you should expect at least 20% engaged evaluation, ideally reaching 50% or more.

Monitor this metric on a month by month basis and take actions in marketing, sales or product onboarding to maintain a high ratio of engaged  evaluations.  To assess leads, you can also break down this information by Source Campaign, in order to identify which marketing campaign are generating the most engaged leads.

– Totango User: See this live for your customer base

– Not a Totango customer yet?: Signup for a free trial or contact us to talk.

Engagement score is an at-a-glance metric which Totango adds to each account.
Its purpose is to give you a sense of how active and engaged a particular account is with your cloud application.

An account’s Engagement Score is calculated by looking at the aggregate amount of time spent, by all users of the account, with the application in the last 14 days.
This number is then normalized across all accounts of the same life-cycle stage to produce a number between 0 – 100.
Accounts with an engagement score of 0 were the least active during this period, whereas those with a score of 100 were the most active.

Example: For a setup with three lifecycle stages:

• New Trial
• Activated
• Paying

An account in the Paying stage with an Engagement Score of 99 is the most active Paying customer (together with any other accounts with the score of 99)

An account in the Activated stage with an Engagement Score of 50 is more active than half of the current Activated accounts

A New Trial account with an Engagement Score of 0 is the least active at this stage (usually reflecting a period of 14 days of no activity)

Today, I’m happy to announce that Totango has analyzed the customer engagement and optimized the sales and customer success interaction with more than one million prospects!

We sure learned a lot from our beta stage and this is the place to thank all our wonderful customers who were taking part of our beta stage.

Out of the massive data we’ve gathered, here are 4 main conclusions that could help sales and customer success teams to understand where to focus in order to increase revenues: from new sales, expansion sales and renewals.

• Free trial users who are still active during day 3 of their trial were 4 times more likely to convert into paying users than the average customer

What can I do with that information?
SaaS sales teams could use this insight by focusing their time and close more deals

• Active trial users who were contacted by a sales rep were 70% more likely to buy the paid service than those who weren’t

What can I do with that information?
This proves that timely and contextual engagement with prospects results in more sales

• A full half of paid SaaS customers log in less than once a month or do not use their paid service at all. Another 19% is using their paid service less than once a week. Only 14% of paid customers use their service weekly and only 17% use it daily

What can I do with that information?
Have customer success team focus on the non-active paid users and the sales teams to focus on the frequent users to increase upsell

• Most cancellations were preceded by a period of non-use

What can I do with that information?
SaaS customer success teams could use this insight to configure alerts for inactive users and to pro actively reach out to these customers and offer help

Click to Tweet this Infographics

Embed this infographic on your site

<br /> <a href=”http://www.totango.com/blog/2012/01/totango-analyzed-engagement-and-optimized-sales-with-over-one-million-businesses/” _mce_href=”http://www.totango.com/blog/2012/01/totango-analyzed-engagement-and-optimized-sales-with-over-one-million-businesses/”><img title=”4 Conclusions from Totango Aggregate Customer Analysis – Infographic” src=”http://www.totango.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/PR-Infographics1.jpg” _mce_src=”http://www.totango.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/PR-Infographics1.jpg” alt=”4 Conclusions from Totango Aggregate Customer Analysis – Infographic” width=”600″ /><br /> </a><a href=”http://www.totango.com” _mce_href=”http://www.totango.com”>Totango – Real Time Customer Engagement for SaaS and Web App</a><br />

Today, I’m happy to announce that Totango has analyzed the customer engagement and optimized the sales and customer success interaction with more than one million prospects!

We sure learned a lot from our beta stage and this is the place to thank all our wonderful customers who were taking part of our beta stage.

Out of the massive data we’ve gathered, here are 4 main conclusions that could help sales and customer success teams to understand where to focus in order to increase revenues: from new sales, expansion sales and renewals.

• Free trial users who are still active during day 3 of their trial were 4 times more likely to convert into paying users than the average customer

What can I do with that information?
SaaS sales teams could use this insight by focusing their time and close more deals

• Active trial users who were contacted by a sales rep were 70% more likely to buy the paid service than those who weren’t

What can I do with that information?
This proves that timely and contextual engagement with prospects results in more sales

• A full half of paid SaaS customers log in less than once a month or do not use their paid service at all. Another 19% is using their paid service less than once a week. Only 14% of paid customers use their service weekly and only 17% use it daily

What can I do with that information?
Have customer success team focus on the non-active paid users and the sales teams to focus on the frequent users to increase upsell

• Most cancellations were preceded by a period of non-use

What can I do with that information?
SaaS customer success teams could use this insight to configure alerts for inactive users and to pro actively reach out to these customers and offer help

Embed this infographic on your site

<a href=”http://www.totango.com/blog/?p=1915&preview=true” _mce_href=”http://www.totango.com/blog/?p=1915&preview=true”><img src=”http://www.totango.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/PR-Infographics.jpg” _mce_src=”http://www.totango.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/PR-Infographics.jpg” alt=”4 Conclusions from our Aggregate Customer Analysis – Infographics” title=”4 Conclusions from our Aggregate Customer Analysis – Infographics” width=”388″ height=”518″/><br/><a href=”http://www.totango.com” _mce_href=”http://www.totango.com”>Totango – Real Time Customer Engagement for SaaS and Web App</a>

Learn How to Convert Free Users into Paying Customers in a 30 minute webinar
Register here!

About Totango:
Totango analyzes in real time customer engagement and intention within SaaS applications to help you grow your business

Increase your sales revenue!
Try Totango free for 30 days

TOTANGO is at the Cloud Expo in Santa Clara today. Another day, another cloud conference! My head is spinning. So rather than a long update from the conference, this  time a short list with the top 10 tweets from the conference to date. I still think these give a nice overview of the sentiment here.  I have to say that my personal feeling is that the infrastructure storm behind Cloud is starting to die down a bit and that there is a lot of talk on: 1) how to protect and optimize the cloud infrastructure already built out and 2) how to make use of this wonderful new infrastructure. Of course trend 2 is good news for TOTANGO. The next wave may be new enterprise applications powered by the cloud!

Onto the Top 10 from CloudExpo:

Tweet 1:

@GarimaRT: 37% oracle customers have private clouds already deployed. Seems very high to me.

Tweet 2:

@wrecks47: New applications move cloud sooner than extensions to existing applications – observation based on latest @IOUG survey

Tweet 3:

@DrJCL: Oracle claims its customers are adopting #PaaS faster than #IaaS.

Tweet 4:

@GarimaRT: Department apps, home grown apps are most frequently run in private clouds.

Tweet 5:

Overheard @ #CloudExpo in Santa Clara today “all the vendors are here, all our customers are back east”.

Tweet 6:

@AddThis The Web of APIs = the Web of the Future #Cloudexpo #cloud : http://t.co/Im1FeRC9

Tweet 7:

@jorke Liking presentations that actually demo stuff like #Terremark and #newrelic … Far too much markitecture in other pressos… #CloudExpo

Tweet 8:

@centerdigital At #cloudexpo: “There is no way IT can avoid a move to the cloud” BTIS tp

Tweet 9:

@threshershark #cloudexpo 20% of cloud VM’s are idle – provisioning needs to change too and so do charging models

Tweet 10:

@sec_prof @randomuserid: #cloudexpo security panel: 10% corp laptops undetected bots; 30% personal devices.< FUD. So over 1billion infected devices?

Next I am going to walk the expo floor. Perhaps more on that tomorrow.

Do you have a cloud app but don’t know how to measure your metrics?
Our SaaS Dashboard can easily do that for you!
Try it now for FREE

Today we’re announcing our $3.8 million Series A financing as well as opening our service to the public with a free beta offering.

I wanted to give a bit of a personal perspective to what is being announced today and put it in context.

In early 2009 I was looking for the next opportunity. Cloud computing in general and Software-as-a-Service specifically were continuing to rapidly gain ground and it was clear that almost every aspect of the software was undergoing massive change: how software is delivered and consumed, bought and sold; everything was changing.

It was clear that while SaaS presents enormous opportunities for vendors, it also introduces new challenges. Much of the focus in the industry has been on the technical aspects of these challenges: how to build scalable, high-performing, reliable multi-tenant services. But while these technical challenges are interesting and important, we felt that not enough attention was being given to the business side. In SaaS, the customer engagement model is fundamentally different.

The SaaS Customer Engagement Challenge

Most SaaS companies put their services in front of potential customers on the web and allow for a self-paced evaluation process. The sales process is no longer controlled by the companies’ sales people. However, sales teams do need to keep up with the high volume of evaluating prospects and make sure the users find what they need to make a favorable buying decision.

Most SaaS pricing models are based on subscription or usage, which allows customers to stop using — and stop paying for — the service at any time. That, plus low switching costs, mandates that SaaS companies constantly monitor customer satisfaction and improve the value that is being delivered.

In addition, the engagement between customers and the business is indirect. There are almost no customer visits, minimum sales calls, and most of the interaction between clients and the business is usage of the service. This no-touch and low-touch engagement model creates a wide gap in how companies understand their customers.

But there is one huge advantage SaaS companies have over their traditional counterparts — they can measure the actual way in which prospects and customers use their products. That is, if they have the tools to properly track and analyze such activities.

Helping SaaS Companies Understand Their Customers

So we set out to help SaaS companies understand their customers through their actual interactions on the service. It also quickly became clear for us that [1] customer facing staff — sales, customer success and others –  are looking for practical and actionable solutions [2] based on this information, and not YAD (or yet another dashboard, as it is often referred to).

Before we wrote a single line of code, we talked to more than 50 SaaS companies, trying to validate our initial assumptions. It was clear from these conversations, and especially from the fact that many companies have developed homegrown tools that crudely attempted to address this need, that we were on to something.

Those homegrown solutions were developed, well frankly, half-ass, without a long term strategy. As a result, there was constant friction between the business users who need the information and the engineering team, which was already barely keeping up with its core product development responsibilities.

The Totango Solution

We created the initial version of Totango, and worked for almost a year with a number of SaaS companies of all sizes and industries in a private beta. From this we learned (and are still learning) how SaaS companies would like to analyze and act on customer usage information.

Today we are publicly releasing the first solution we developed through this process. It is a set of tools that help sales teams increase their effectiveness by improving the conversion rate of evaluating users into paying customers. We’ve built this by spending many days at the offices of our initial clients to learn their daily routines and practices so that we could provide the missing tools they’ve been looking for. The initial results with these private beta customers were amazing, and we feel very confidently that it is time to share our solution with a wider audience.

For now, the product is free. And although we will announce pricing in the coming months, we are planning to always offer a free tier.

When it comes down to it, we’re a SaaS company ourselves and we know first hand how important it is to get people up and running in minutes, so we’ve made sure Totango is as simple as can be to get going.
You can read our official press release here.

We’re ready Totango, please join us.
— Guy

About TOTANGO:
TOTANGO analyzes in real time customer engagement and intention within SaaS applications to help you grow your business

Increase your sales revenue!
Try TOTANGO free for 30 days

Lean startups are not about learning — or at least not just about it. Learning is not enough because translating what you’ve learned into value is just as important and often no less difficult.

Measure–Learn–Act is a key tenet of lean startups. We are big believers in lean. We run Lean startup Israel and frequently blog and talk about our experiences of running a lean company.

Measure-Learn-Act is also a core part of our company vision. We believe measuring, learning and acting on usage-data is the right way to build, scale and operate any SaaS and web-business — and we’re building Totango to help companies do just that.

In this post, we’ll talk about how we “eat our own dogfood” and use this principle, and the Totango product, to drive our own product’s evolution.

In his remarkable work on lean-startups, Eric Reis uses the following definition for measuring progress at a startup:

We found that to be a limiting concept.

We discovered that when we defined learning as our core objective, we ended up spending too much energy on our own learning (running A/B tests, minimum viable versions to learn about market interest, etc.) and not enough on leveraging our learning to deliver value to end-users and customers.

In other words, learning is not enough and is not the end goal. The real test of a startup is whether it builds a service of value — one that people want to use and can’t live without.

So our definition of progress is:

‘Value’ means we released a product or service enhancement that helps customers accomplish something better or faster. ‘Validated’ is that we have a way to quantify the value delivered, usually through a positive change to one of the key usage metrics we track.

If, and only if, we reach that point do we declare progress. All the rest are considered internal milestones along the way.

Here is a set of product-level metrics we monitor on an ongoing basis:

Each product or service improvement we undertake needs to ultimately manifest itself with an improvement to one of these metrics. For example, changes to our signup process need to yield an improvement in signup numbers; a better customer onboarding process should result in a higher and faster rate of activations.

Our most interesting metric is ‘Engaged Organizations’. Our goal here is to have a quantifiable way to determine if accounts that went through the signup and activation process are actually deriving value from the solution. We measure this by counting the number of days each user performed meaningful interactions with our solution.

‘Meaningful interactions’ are not generic: each service naturally has a different set (in our case it can be usage of our inbox capabilities or interacting with an activity stream).

They also change over time when new functionality is added or product pivots are made. The point is that they provide a solid way to validate if users are seeing value in our solution, which in turns helps us determine if changes we make have a positive impact.

Validated-value-delivered is the way we measure progress, but that doesn’t mean we don’t spend a lot of time trying to learn what customers want. In fact, we’ve found that is the only way to consistently be able to add value. Otherwise, you spend too much time on bad ideas and get overly invested in product directions that ultimately prove incorrect.

We try to build an MVP (minimum viable product) as the first step for every product idea or feature request we handle. If we get good validation on the need, we know it’s a good place to spend more time.

Forcing ourselves to scientifically validate our assumptions about customer needs not only helps us reach results faster, it frees us from the need to argue to death over the merits of certain product directions.Rather than argue about it, we find a quick way to validate things as a precursor to spending more time on them.

But we don’t stop there, and neither should you.Measure value delivered.

It’s the best way to keep yourself true to the core mission of creating value, and make sure your product is on track.

About TOTANGO:
TOTANGO analyzes in real time customer engagement and intention within SaaS applications to help you grow your business

Increase your sales revenue!
Try TOTANGO free for 30 days