Cloud
I love metrics. I live for metrics. Every week and every quarter I drown my team in metrics reviews. Why? Because metrics are the instrumentation -- the flight panel -- of our business. Good metrics provide clear insights. They cut through politics, spin, and haze. They spark amazing debates. They help you
Churn
**** Please note that this post has been superseded by A Fresh Look at How to Measure SaaS Churn Rates. I'm leaving it posted to protect in-bound links only and to provide a referral to my latest material on this subject. **** While I've already done a
Seven words that changed the world: “make a plan that you can beat.” This pithy piece of wisdom was first passed onto me by the sage of Sequoia Capital, Mike Moritz, on the first day of my six-year journey at MarkLogic, during which time we grew the company from
Management
I have to admit I’m not a fan of succession planning in general, at startups in particular, and especially when the successee is involved in the process. Why? Because the process quickly ends up presumptuous and political. In my experience, the successee is more concerned with being a “good
Cloud
Chatting with some SaaS buddies the other day, we ran into a fun -- and fairly subtle -- SaaS metrics question. It went something like this: VP of Sales: "-- Wait a minute, our ACD on new business is 2.0 years. If customers are renewing for shorter terms than those of
CEO
One of the most awkward situations in business is trying to recruit someone who will work for to-be-hired (TBH). For example, say you’ve started a search for a director of product marketing, have a few great candidates in play, only to have your marketing VP suddenly quit
Management
I built a very successful marketing career based on a three-word mission statement that I picked up from Chris Greendale, back when I was a product marketer at Ingres. Chris always said that marketing exists to make sales easier. I loved those three words. I embraced that simple concept.
Cloud
I'm a big fan of software-as-a-service (SaaS) metrics. I've authored very deep posts on SaaS renewals rates and customer acquisition costs. I also routinely point readers to other great posts on the topic, including: * David Skok's excellent posts on SaaS metrics
Cloud
One thing that amazes me is when I hear people talk about how they analyze churn in a cloud, software as a service (SaaS), or other recurring revenue business. You hear things like: * "17% of our churn comes from emerging small business (ESB) segment, which is normal because small
CEO
While driver-based planning is a bit of an old buzzword (the first two Google hits date to 2009 and 2011 respectively), I am nevertheless a huge fan of driver-based planning not because the concept was sexy back in the day, but because it's incredibly useful. In
Management
I often get asked by technical founders what business / marketing / strategy books they should read. While there are many excellent relatively new books (e.g., The Lean Startup), the primary purpose of this post is to list a set of classic business books that most (older) business people have read
Marketing
Theodore Levitt At some point in every marketer's career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean
