Boards
I'll be speaking next month in Barcelona on the first day of SaaStr Europa, held at the International Convention Center on June 7th and 8th. My presentation is scheduled at 11:25AM on June 7th and entitled The Top 5 Scale-Up Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.
CEO
I talked to a founder a while back who felt like they'd lost a year or two thanks to some strategic distractions foisted upon them by a well-meaning board of directors. While most startup boards try to follow the Hippocratic Oath, some -- like well-meaning but overbearing
Marketing
When asked, “how is it going?” many companies will respond with something akin to, “things are looking strong, the pipeline is up to $50M.” Not a bad statement, but certainly an imprecise one. “Over what timeframe?” you might ask. To which you’ll typically hear one of two answers * “Uh,
CEO
I've always felt that "what keeps you up at night?" was a trick question for CEOs. There's one part of it I'm quite sure about. There cannot be anything that you control that keeps you up at night. Why? Because you'
Marketing
"Advertising is legitimized lying," said the English writer HG Wells. Pop marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a book entitled, All Marketers Are Liars (but cleverly redacted the title). Google suggestions reveal that people have plenty of questions about the authenticity of marketing: Another marketing book adapts the famous
Customer Success
Earlier this week I appeared on a webinar with You Mon Tsang, founder and CEO of ChurnZero, a SaaS application aimed at helping subscription businesses reduce churn. In this post, I will share the video of event, provide a link to the slides, provide a link to the Q&
Marketing
Just a quick post to highlight a video / podcast episode I recently recorded with Cillian Hilliard, fellow board member at work management leader Scoro, and investor at Kennett Partners. Cillian runs a great blog (complete with detailed financial models) at The Novice Investor. (Understanding SaaS Marketing as an Investor - Dave
Management
In the land of disruption, there's always something dying and something lining up to replace it, so we're pretty used to hearing things like "on-premise is dead, long live SaaS." Sometimes, they're right. Despite the 2008-era views of our resident
Marketing
Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Answer: 35% (with 45% and 15% as the top and bottom quartiles). Charts like this, from OpenView's 2021 Financial & Operating Benchmarks survey, help to answer questions like that all
Customer Success
A few weeks back, I sat down with Jonathan Corrie, cofounder and CEO of Precursive -- a Salesforce-native professional services (PS) delivery cloud that provides PS automation, task, and resource management -- to discuss one of my favorite topics, the role of professional services in today's SaaS businesses. Jonathan
HR
The other day a founder asked me about interviewing because a candidate had described me as "a great interviewer," and she wanted to know why. (And for that matter, so did I.) Emboldened by this seeming endorsement, I dashed off what turned into a lengthy email on interviewing
Marketing
Quiz: Your marketing team generates an MQL. It's passed to an SDR, who does basic BANT-style qualification and decides it's real. They create a sales opportunity in your pipeline and pass it to a seller. What number is in the opportunity's value field