Branding
Decades ago I had the pleasure of watching a branding video, created by a San Francisco ad agency, narrated by an advertising executive with a familiar voice who'd narrated scores of commercials [1]. It was, I believe, entitled Staying in Character and while I've searched the
Demandgen
Back in the day I was taught that marketers do three things, memorized via the acronym STP: segment, target, position. * Divide the audience into different segments. For example, dividing consumers by demographics or dividing businesses by size or industry. * Select the segments that the company wishes to target for its
Demandgen
There's a common debate out there, it goes something like this: "Our sales development representatives (SDRs) need to look for pain: finding business owners with a problem and the ability to get budget to go fix it." Versus: "No, our SDRs need to look for
Management
The good people of Costanoa Ventures invited me to speak at their summit where they gather portfolio company CEOs to participate in an impressive set of sessions related to building and scaling startups. I was honored to be in the company of friends and respected colleagues like Nick Mehta and
Leadership
I remember one time having an argument that went like this: Joe: I think there's enough detail in there. Dave: No, there's not. There's no underpinnings, there's no rigor in the thought process. Remember, David Ogilvy always said "good writing is
Management
The folks at Plannuh, specifically Peter Mahoney, Scott Todaro, and Dan Faulkner, asked me to write the foreword for their new book, The Next CMO: A Guide to Marketing Operational Excellence. (Free download here.) Here's what I wrote for them. CMO is a hard job. Early in my
CAC
Thanks to everyone who attended my SaaStr 2020 presentation and thanks to those who provided me with great feedback and questions on the content of the session. The slides from the presentation are available here. The purpose of this post is to share the video of the session, courtesy of
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-
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, to unmix