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 luddite below,
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.
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 at
Management
I'd previously posted a video of my SaaStr 2021 presentation, A CEO's Guide to Marketing, but it was a bit of hack (a link into the stage stream) done favoring time-to-market over production values. In this post, I'm embedding the official SaaStr 2021 video
Boards
Have you ever been to a board meeting where 60 minutes were allocated on the agenda for discussion of a strategic topic? What happened in that session? * You probably started late because board meetings are hard to keep on time. * Some exec, maybe the CEO, probably presented a "few
AR
Using the Marketing Fundamental Tension Quadrant to Map Your Demandgen and Communications Strategy Years ago I wrote a post on what I call the fundamental tension in marketing: the gap between what we want to say and what our audience wants to hear. For example, let's say we&
Marketing
With angel and seed money flowing, and a great environment for company creation, I've been talking to a lot of seed-stage and pre-seed stage startups of late. They often ask me about positioning. Listening to myself talk, I realized that I didn't really sound like me,
Management
Some friends wonder why, as someone who considers himself a strategist, I care so much about execution. Is it because I'm a perfectionist? Well yes, but that's only one reason (and perfectionism is a weakness [1] in business, not a strength). Is it because I like
Databases
Well it's time for my annual predictions post, a series now in its eighth year. Before diving in, let me remind readers that I do these predictions in the spirit of fun, they are not business or investment advice, and that all of my usual disclaimers and terms
SaaS
I think two demo practices are nearly universal these days and I'm not a big fan of either: * Using a demo as the primary call-to-action on a website [1] * Using demo as a sales cycle stage I discussed using demo as the primary website CTA in a previous