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
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 one by
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
Boards
Over the years I've noticed how different CEOs take different degrees of ownership and accountability when it comes to the board of directors. For example, once, after a long debate where the board unanimously approved a budget contingent on reducing proposed R&D spending from $12M to
Demandgen
I’m frankly shocked by how many startups treat pipeline as a monolith. Sample CMO: “we’re in great shape because we have a total pipeline of $32M covering a forward-four-quarter (F4Q) sales target of $10M, so 3.2x coverage. Next slide, please.” Regardless of your view on the appropriate
Branding
From time to time, every CMO faces a key question: to brand or not to rebrand? Often, it’s right after joining a company and you want to make a big splash. Sometimes, it’s after you’ve been with a company for a while and you and some told-timers
Boards
We’re announcing today that I’m joining the board of directors of Profisee, a leader in master data management (MDM). I’m doing so for several reasons, mostly reflecting my belief that successful technology companies are about three things: the people, the space, and the product. I like the
Entrepreneurship
Who else but my old friend Jim Milbery, a founding partner at ParkerGale, could come up with a podcast called the Private Equity Funcast, complete with its own jingle and with a Thunderbirds-inspired opening? Jim and I worked together at Ingres back in the -- well “pre-Chernobyl” as Jim likes
Entrepreneurship
I’ve increasingly spoken to startup employees who find themselves in a difficult trap. Let’s demonstrate it via an example: Say you joined a startup in September 2009 as an early employee and immediately received a stock-option grant of 400,000 shares with a strike price of $0.10
Career
This is a sister post to my recent one, Career Decisions: What to Look For in a Software Startup. That piece is all about what to look for when considering taking a job at a software startup. This piece is kind of the opposite: what to look out for when