Uncategorized
I just finished delivering my presentation at SaaStr Annual 2020, dubbed Churn Is Dead, Long Live Net Dollar Retention. The presentation is about understanding SaaS businesses: how to think about them, how to value them, how to use unit economics like CAC and churn to measure them, all with a
Churn
The SaaStr Annual conference was delayed this year, but Jason & crew know that the show must go on. So this year's event has been rechristened SaaStr Annual @ Home and is being held in virtual, online format on September 2nd and 3rd. The team at SaaStr have assembled
Marketing
I spoke this morning to a private equity (PE) firm's gathering of portfolio company CEOs, CROs, and CMOs. Our topic, one of my favorites, was how to get sales and marketing working together to drive business results. While I talked about the predictable subject of alignment, I covered
Finance
I was playing around on the enterprise comps [1] section of Meritech's website today and a few of the charts I found caught my attention. Here's the first one, which shows the progression of the EV/NTM revenue multiple [2] for a set of 50+ high-growth
Finance
The other day I heard a startup executive say, "we will start to accelerate sales hiring -- hiring reps beyond the current staffing levels and the current plan -- once we start to see the pipeline to support it." What comes first: the pipeline or the egg? Or,
Entrepreneurship
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by UCLA Anderson professor Richard Rumelt is by far my favorite book on strategy. In this post I'll explain why I love this book, provide an overview of Rumelt's core concepts, and offer a few thoughts on (and dare I say an
GTM
I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice, the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, "on his top ten list." Ever the blogger, I replied, "what are the other nine?" Mark's been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies
Branding
Software startups seem drawn by sirens to brand their features. Hey, Apple does it. Think: Siri, Facetime. Microsoft tries it: Cortana. Starbucks even brands a cup size: Venti. So if they can do it, we should too, right? Wrong [1]. But it's so cool. Imagine it's
Marketing
Just a quick post to plug my appearance on a podcast hosted by PMM Hive, a product marketing community that was recently launched by my old friend and colleague Crispin Read, and that's already loaded with some superb product marketing content. Check it out. I'm excited
HR
I've worked with several startups that fell into the following pattern: * Selling a SaaS application at a healthy price (e.g., $100K to $200K ARR) * With low, fixed-cost implementation packages (e.g., $25K) * But a product that actually takes maybe $50K to $75K to successfully deploy * Resulting in
Marketing
(Revised 06/27/20) I was talking to an old friend the other day who's marketing chief at a successful infrastructure startup. "Congratulations," I said, "I know it was a long slog, but after about a decade of groundwork it looks like things have really
SaaS
You start by listing every rep your company has ever hired in order by hire date. You then record their sales productivity (typically measured in new ARR bookings) for their series of quarters with the company, up to and including their current-quarter forecast (which you shade in green).