Leadership
I've been making a few presentations lately, so I thought I'd share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week at the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series. This one's kind
CEO
Few founder/CEOs come from a marketing background; most come from product, many from engineering, and some from sales, service, or consulting. But few -- ironically even in martech companies -- grew up in the marketing department and consider marketing home. When you combine this lack of experience with the the tendency
CEO
A few days ago, Jason Lemkin from SaaStr sent me a link to the video of my SaaStr Annual 2019 conference presentation, The Five Questions Startup CEOs Worry About. Those questions, by the way, are: 1. When do I next raise money? 2. Do I have the right team? 3.
Recruiting
Happily, in the past several years startups are increasingly recognizing the value of strong sales enablement and sales productivity teams. So it's no surprise that I hear a lot about high-growth companies building onboarding programs to enable successfully scaling their sales organizations and sustain their growth. What&
Culture
I am big believer in strong corporate cultures. Culture can be used to set powerful norms. Culture can bind people in an organization to a common set of values bigger than their quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs). Culture helps attracts the right people to your organization – and can drive
SaaS
Most salespeople are familiar with so-called BANT qualification: does the prospect have Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe in order to make a purchase? While Solution Selling purists dislike BANT (arguing that it's great way to find existing deals that have been already rigged for the competition), most
CEO
Thanks to everyone who attended my session today at the amazing -- and huge -- SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose. In this post, I'll share the slides from my presentation, Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (and some thoughts on how to answer them). The folks at SaaStr
IPO
Enterprise SaaS companies need a lot of money to grow. The median company spends $1.32 to acquire $1.00 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) [1]. They need to make that investment for 14 years before getting to an IPO. It all adds up to a median of $300M in
Boards
I’m super excited for the upcoming SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose from February 5th through the 7th at the San Jose Convention Center. I hope to see you there -- particularly for my session from 10:00 AM to 10:30 AM on Tuesday, February 5th. Last year
Metrics
Thanks to the folks at Piper Jaffray and their recently published 2018 Software Market Review, we can take a look at a recent chart that plots public software company enterprise value (EV) vs. Rule of 40 (R40) score = free cash-flow margin + revenue growth rate. As a reminder, the Rule
Leadership
Most employees tolerate their managers more than love them. According to a year-old survey in Forbes: * Only about 50% of employees say the boss values their opinion. * Only 35% of employees feel inspired by their boss. * Some 25% say they can do a better job than their boss does.
Culture
Would you serve food that fell on the kitchen floor? Then why tolerate typos, broken demos, and numbers that don’t add up? Leaders set culture by defining and enforcing what’s acceptable. You don’t need to shout. You do need to say: that’s unacceptable here.