Finance
[Updated 3/10 12:09] This is part II in this series. Part I is here and covers the basics of management education, employee communications, and simple steps to help slow virus transmission while keeping the business moving forward. In this part, we'll provide: * A short list of
Leadership
I just reached out to the CEOs I work with with on this topic and figured I should also do a quick post to speak to the CEOs who follow Kellblog as well. The primary purpose of this post is to remind busy startup CEOs that an important part of
Metrics
Enterprise SaaS and retailers have more in common than you might think. Let's think about retailers for a minute. Retailers drive growth in two ways: * They open new stores * They increase sales at existing stores Opening new stores is great, but it's an expensive way to
Finance
I’ve seen numerous startups try numerous ways to calculate their sales capacity. Most are too back-of-the-envelope and too top-down for my taste. Such models are, in my humble opinion, dangerous because the combination of relatively small errors in ramping, sales productivity, and sales turnover (with associated ramp resets) can
Career
In work life from time to time you may be accused of not listening. It may not be fair. You may not like it. But you'd be shocked how many people completely flub their reaction when the boss, a coworker, or a customer says, "you're
Startups
I'm working with more early-stage companies these days (e.g., pre-seed, seed, seed-plus [1]) and one of the things I've noticed is that many founders cannot clearly, succinctly, and confidently answer some basic questions about their businesses. I decided to write this post to help entrepreneurs
Demandgen
In part I of this three-part series I introduced the idea of an inverted funnel whereby marketing can derive a required demand generation budget using the sales target and historical conversion rates. In order to focus on the funnel itself, I made the simplifying assumption that the company’s new
![The Evolution of Software Marketing: Hey Marketing, Go Get [This]!](https://kellblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/get-more-leads-2015.jpg)
Demandgen
As loyal readers know, I’m a reductionist, always trying to find the shortest, simplest way of saying things even if some degree of precision gets lost in the process and even if things end up more subtle than they initially appear. For example, my marketing mission statement of “makes
Databases
As I’ve been doing every year since 2014, I thought I’d take some time to write some predictions for 2020, but not without first doing a review of my predictions for 2019. Lest you take any of these too seriously, I suggest you look at my batting average
Demandgen
In the previous post, I introduced the idea of an inverted demand generation (demandgen) funnel which we can use to calculate a marketing demandgen budget based given a sales target, an average sales price (ASP), and a set of conversion rates along the funnel. This is a handy tool, isn&
Demandgen
Does my company spend too much on marketing? Too little? How I do know? What is the right level of marketing spend at an enterprise software startup? I get asked these questions all the time by startup CEOs, CMOs, marketing VPs, and marketing directors. You can turn to financial benchmarks,
Marketing
Slowly and steadily, over the past decade, the industry has evolved from a mentality of “all salesreps must do everything” – including some percent of their time prospecting -- to one of specialization. We, with the help of books like Predictable Revenue, have collectively decided that in-bound lead processing is different