AI
Below I’m cross-posting an article I wrote for the launch of Topline Media, the media spin-out from Pavilion, a popular community for go-to-market (GTM) leaders. This article was originally published by Topline on 10/9/25. Since this was written for the launch of a new publication, I made
AI
Unlike many marketers, I’m not particularly prone to hyperbole, and thus “crisis” is not a word that I use lightly. But I think saying “pipeline crisis” is warranted today when discussing what’s happening in marketing and is a key underlying cause for the broader malaise in SaaS growth.
Boards
The Hippocratic Oath is a well known oath of ethics taken by physicians. It requires them to swear, among other things, to do no harm in dealing with patients. While chatting with a VC the other day, it occurred to me that we should have a similar concept for startup
AI
Today, I presented at SaaS Metrics Palooza 2025 on the differences between selling work and selling software. I'd like to thank my metrics brother, Ray Rike, for inviting me to speak and I'd like to thank everyone who attended the session. Topic covered include: * Defining outcomes
GTM
Today Dan Teodosiu, Thor Mitchell, and I hosted a Balderton webinar entitled Aligning Product and Go-To-Market (GTM) Using Customer Value Metrics. We are all executives in residence (EIRs) at Balderton -- Dan covers technology, Thor covers product, and I cover go-to-market -- and, in a display of cross-functional walking-the-talk, we
Career
To the extent that most sellers today started their careers as SDRs and to the extent that there is a strong trend to replace SDRs with AI agents (e.g., Piper from Qualified), I have a simple question: whence will come tomorrow's sellers? [1] It's not
Customer Success
The concept of an ideal customer profile (ICP) has been around for a long time, but like its cousin, the minimum viable product (MVP), it is often misunderstood. In this post, I'll offer some background commentary on the ICP concept and then build into one of my favorite
AI
I first met Ian Howells in London long ago, as fellow footsoldiers in the early relational database wars. While you had to be pretty technical to do product marketing in those days, Ian was technical with a capital T, having just sprung from university with a PhD in distributed databases.
GTM
My fellow Balderton Capital EIR Dan Teodosiu and I recently published an article on aligning product and go-to-market teams using metrics, specifically customer-value metrics. In this post, I'll talk a bit about the article and how we came to write it, with the hope that I'll
Branding
Every day I hear more and more about the “sea of sameness” from founders, CEOs, CROs, and CMOs. The dialog goes something like this: * There are so many products out there, * They are getting more similar, * Customers are more confused than ever, * Unable to see the differences between them. * Thus,
Communications
[Cross-posted from LinkedIn, see note.] <rant> I can't tell you the number of times I applied this rule when I ran marketing from $30M to $1B at Business Objects back in the day. It's 1:00 AM, I'm doing final edits on
Uncategorized
This is going to sound difficult and run contrary to the industry conventional wisdom, but bear with me. When a B2B SaaS startup is hiring their first salesperson, I think they should look for someone who: Is a dyed-in-the-wool seller with sales blood coursing through their veins. Their first sales