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
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
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
Metrics
I'm revising this post because I learned today that I've been named not once (as I thought yesterday) but twice to the SaaStr All-Time Top 25 List of podcast episodes (see Top 1-12 and Top 13-25). Apologies for the confusion, but wow, what
Demandgen
I hopped over to London a few weeks back to visit my friends at Balderton Capital (where I'm now working as an EIR) and during the visit we decided to host a meetup for portfolio company founders, CEOs, and CMOs to discuss the question of how to build
Marketing
TLDR: Think twice before you do and three times about how you do it. While it's a very common practice, I think it's often a lazy one, done by default, and without regard for either the buyer or seller downstream. When I visit enterprise SaaS websites
Management
Is your leadership team world-class? Are some of your executives holding your company back? Could you grow faster if you replaced your head of sales? Does your board think you have the right leadership team? Heck, does your leadership team think you have the right leadership team? Do your
Growth
In my new capacity as an EIR at Balderton Capital, I recently gave a presentation to a leadership meeting at a high-growth, Balderton-backed startup offering my perspectives on growth and the challenges that come with it. I discussed these five challenges: 1. Next-levelitis, an obsessive focus on