Culture
Quick: * How big is the Acme deal? $250K. * What's Joe's forecast for the quarter? $500K * What's the number this year? Duh. $7,500K. Awesome. By the way: $250K what? $500K what? $7,500K what? ARR, ACV, bookings, TCV, new ARR, net new ARR, committed
Branding
I first read The One to One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in 1997, four years after it was published. As a marketer, the book made a big impression on me. It was revolutionary stuff: we should make the paradigm shift from mass marketing to individualized marketing. When
GTM
There's some great content out there on the subject of hiring your first VP of sales at a startup, so in this post I'm going to do some quick thoughts on the subject in an effort to complement the existing corpus. In other words, this is
Demandgen
Download USS_Nimitz_%28CVN-68%29_general_quarters_drill%2C_ca._2013.oga It’s that time of year, I suppose. You’ve hopefully approved your 2021 operating plan by now -- even if you’re on an increasingly popular 1/31 fiscal year end. You’ve signed up for some
Finance
This post was prompted by feedback to the last prediction in my 2021 annual predictions post, The Rebirth of Planning and Enterprise Performance Management. Excerpt: EPM 1.0 was Hyperion, Arbor, and TM1. EPM 2.0 was Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, and Planful (nee Host Analytics). EPM 3.0 is being
BI
I admit that I’ve been more than a little slow to put out this post, but at least I’ve missed the late December (and early January) predictions rush. 2020 was the kind of year that would make anyone in the predictions business more than a little gun shy.
Enterprise
About twenty years ago, before I ran two startups as CEO and served as product-line general manager, I went through an intrapreneurship phase, where I was convinced that big companies should try to act like startups. It was a fairly popular concept at the time. * I got all excited
Enterprise
(This is the third in a three-part restructuring and build-out of a previous post. See note [1] for details.) In the first two posts in this series, we first defined a repeatable sales process and then discussed how to prove that your sales process is repeatable. All that
Enterprise
(This is the second in a three-part restructuring and build-out of a previous post. See note [1] for details.) In the prior post we introduced repeatable sales process as the Holy Grail of enterprise software sales and, unlike some who toss the term around rather casually, we defined
Enterprise
(This is the first in a three-part restructuring and build-out of the prior post. See note [1] for details.) The number one question go-to-market question in any enterprise software startup is: "do you have a repeatable sales process?" or, in more contemporary Silicon Valley
Culture
Most of us are familiar with Mark Leslie’s classic Sales Learning Curve and its implications for building the early salesforce at an enterprise startup. In short, it argues that too many startups put “the pedal to the metal” on sales hiring too early – before they have enough knowledge, process,
The good people of Riverside Acceleration Capital and my old friend Jon Temple invited me to speak at their portfolio company CEO Summit and I was only too happy to oblige, particularly because Jon asked me to speak about one of my favorite topics -- marketing in early- and growth-stage