Management
I'm amazed by the number of times I see companies performing searches, even for key positions, without a clear idea of what they're looking for. Rephrasing Lewis Carroll, "if you don't know what you're recruiting for, any candidate looks great."
Customer Success
The CEO. Thanks for reading. # # # I was tempted to stop there because I've been writing a lot of long posts lately and because I do believe the answer is that simple. First let me explain the controversy and then I'll explain my view on it. In
SaaS
Some SaaS startups develop a form of zero-sum delusion early in their evolution, characterized by following set of beliefs. Believing that: * A customer has a fixed budget that is 100% fungible between ARR (annual revenue revenue) and services * It is in the company's best interest to turn
Management
This post in part III in a series. Part I covers the basics of employee communications. Part II provides information on how several leading companies are handling the situation and offers specific thoughts on financial planning. This part, a set of curated links that I have found useful, was formerly
Career
Markets are complex. Customers are complex. Products are complex, sometimes very. Heck, the world is complex. What's a marketer to do? Great marketing is about making things simple. We do that by imposing simplicity on a complex world. We might be attacked for so doing – people might accuse
Entrepreneurship
I earned my spending money in high school and partially paid for college by working as a lifeguard and water safety instructor. Working at a lovely suburban country club you don't make a lot of saves. One day, working from the deep-end chair, I noticed two little
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
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