Communications
Blocking the End Run: Eleven Words to Reduce Politics in Your Organization
This isn't political. He just happened to be talking to me about another matter when he mentioned this problem.
Latest
Management
How to Train Your VP of Sales to Think About the Forecast
Imagine a board meeting. Director: What’s the forecast for new ARR this quarter? Sales VP: $4.3M, with a best case of $5.0M. Director: So what’s the most likely outcome? Sales VP: $4.3M. Director: What are you really going to do? (The classic newb trap question.
AR
How To Get Your Startup a Halo
How would you like our company to win deals even when you tie or lose the product evaluation? Halo effects do precisely that. This post discusses what halo effects are and how to use them to your advantage.
BI
Why has Standalone Cloud BI been such a Tough Slog?
I remember when I left Business Objects back in 2004 that it was early days in the cloud. We were using Salesforce internally (and one of their larger customers at the time) so I was familiar with and a proponent of cloud-based applications, but never felt great about BI
Entrepreneurship
Do You Want to be Judged on Intentions or Results?
It was early in my career, maybe 8 years in, and I was director of product marketing at a startup. One day, my peer, the directof of marketing programs hit me with this in an ops review meeting: You want to be judged on intentions, not results. I recall being
HR
The Role of Professional Services in a SaaS Business
I love to create reductionist mission statements for various departments in a company. These are designed to be ultra-compact and potentially provocative. My two favorite examples thus far: * Marketing exists to make sales easier. * HR exists to help managers manage. I like to make them based on real-life
Culture
10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Moving into Management
I went looking for a post to help someone decide if they should move into management, but couldn't find one that I really loved. These three posts aren't bad. Nor is this HBR article. But since I couldn't find a post that I thought
Marketing
The Dogshit Bar: A Memorable Market Research Concept
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen market research that suffers from one key problem. It goes something like this: * What do you think of PRODUCT's user interface? * Do you think PRODUCT should be part of suite or a standalone module?
IPO
The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was
Management
In-Memory Analytics: The Other Kind - A Key Success Factor for Your Career
I'm not going to talk about columnar databases, compression, horizontal partitioning, SAP Hana, or real-time vs. pre-aggregated summarization in this post on in-memory analytics. I'm going to talk about the other kind of in-memory analytics. The kind that can make or break
BI
Kellblog’s 2017 Predictions
New Year’s means three things in my world: (1) time to thank our customers and team at Host Analytics for another great year, (2) time to finish up all the 2017 planning items and approvals that we need to get done before the sales kickoff (including the one most
Management
A Fresh Look at How to Measure SaaS Churn Rates
[Editor's note: revised 3/27/17 with changes to some definitions.] It’s been nearly three years since my original post on calculating SaaS renewal rates and I’ve learned a lot and seen a lot of new situations since then. In this post, I’ll provide a