Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of advisory work with SaaS startups that are just taking their first tentative steps to market. I’ve sat in meetings at length trying to drill into sales cycles and pricing strategies and it often seems that organizations are flying a little blind without a really good range of metrics to analyse. This at-the-coalface experience has led me to get pretty excited about Israeli startup Totango, a company that wants to solve this problem by offering a real-time customer engagement platform that lets SaaS vendors drill down into the key business metrics for their particular operation.

Totango are today going one step further and, in a move that will make boards of directors, investors and advisers smile, are rolling out a SaaS executive dashboard, essentially a one stop place for executives and advisers to good an accurate handle on where their company is at. Totango integrates information from multiple data sources including the SaaS application itself, marketing tools, CRM and billing.

In terms of specific functionality – Totango powers the following classes of information;

In real time;

  • Activity Streams – stream of user activities on the application (user of account was doing action in module)
  • Conversion Streams – Sign ups, purchase, upgrades, cancellation

On a User/Account basis specific user activities can be tracked including;

  • User actions on the application
  • Application modules being used
  • Unique users
  • Activity Sessions
  • Time between sessions
  • Engagement Score

Within the executive dashboard;

  • Account by status break down (current, week, month, quarter, etc.)
  • Cohort analysis of status changes (weekly and monthly)

Totango provides a really valuable service for companies that are busy trying to grow – I wonder if it isn’t a natural extension of a PaaS play – imagine a Totango-like service as an add on to Engine Yard or Heroku…. More information about Totango in the video below

Totango SaaS Executive Dashboard from Oren Raboy on Vimeo.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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