Boards
I am surprised by how many startup CEOs leave the board hanging at the end of the quarter. As a CEO my rule of thumb was that if a board member ever asked me about the quarter then I'd failed in being sufficiently proactive in communications. In tight
Finance
In this post we’re going to look at the management accounting side of multi-year SaaS deals that grow in value over time. I’ve been asked about this a few times lately, less because people value my accounting knowledge [1] but rather because people are curious about the CAC
Customer Success
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had
Demandgen
I can’t tell you the number of times, as we were tearing down our booth after having had an epic show, that we overheard the guy next door calling back to corporate saying that the show was a “total waste of time” and that the company shouldn’t do
Career
So, you're thinking of taking a job at a startup, but are nervous about the risk, perhaps having trouble telling one from another, and unsure about knowing what's really important in startup success. In this post, I'll share what I consider to be a
Forecasting
Just a quick post to share a slide deck I created for a session I did with the top S&M executives at a private equity group's sales and marketing summit. We discussed some of my favorite topics, including: * Some fun quotes on marketing and sales * Sales
Bubbles
Today famed venture capital podcaster and now venture capitalist at StrideVC, Harry Stebbings, released a new episode of the Twenty Minute VC podcast with me as his guest. (iTunes version here.) Harry's interview was broad-ranging, covering a number of topics including: * Financing lessons I've learned during
Communications
Whenever I have the chance to watch a big league politician at work, I always try to study their communications skills in an effort to learn from the best. In a previous post, I presented what I learned watching Congresswoman Jackie Speier work a room, a pretty amazing sight, in
Marketing
Business-to-business (B2B) high technology markets are all about the market and only less so about the technology. This is primarily driven by corporate buyer conservatism -- corporate buyers hate to make mistakes in purchasing technology and, if you're going to make one, it's far better to
Boards
The folks at Host Analytics kindly asked me to speak at their annual conference, Host Perform 2019, today in Las Vegas and I had a wonderful time speaking about one of my favorite topics: the board view of enterprise performance management (EPM) and, to some extent, companies and management teams
Metrics
Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett of Battery Ventures recently published the 2019 version of its outstanding annual software round-up report. I highly recommend this report -- it's 78-pages chock full of great data about topics like: * Why Battery is long software overall * The four eras of software evolution
Churn
In looking at this issue across several companies, I've noticed a disturbing trend / missed opportunity in how many SaaS companies classify the reason for customer churn. Roughly speaking, if companies were hospitals, they'd too frequently be reporting the cause of death as "stopped breathing."