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
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
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
Demandgen
Most startups today use some variation on the now fairly standard terms SAL (sales accepted lead) and SQL (sales qualified lead). Below see the classic [1] lead funnel model from marketing bellwether Sirius Decisions that defines this. One great thing about working as an independent board member and consultant is
Career
When I lived in France for five years I was often asked to compare it to Silicon Valley in an attempt to explain why -- in the land of Descartes, Fourier, and Laplace, in a country where the nation's top university is a military engineering school that wraps together
CAC
Just a quick post to say I'm honored to have made number seven on the countdown of the top ten most downloaded podcasts of all time on the SaaStr Podcast. The podcast in question is an interview performed by Harry Stebbings of The Twenty Minute VC where we
Marketing
In my last post, I made the case that the simplest, most intuitive metric for understanding whether you have too much, too little, or just the right amount of pipeline is opportunities/salesrep, calculated for both the current-quarter and the all-quarters pipeline. This post builds upon the prior
Marketing
Pipeline is a frequently scrutinized SaaS company metric because it's one of relatively few leading indicators in a SaaS business -- i.e., indicators that don't just tell us about the past but that help inform us about the future, providing important clues to our anticipated performance