Cloud
Chatting with some SaaS buddies the other day, we ran into a fun -- and fairly subtle -- SaaS metrics question. It went something like this: VP of Sales: "-- Wait a minute, our ACD on new business is 2.0 years. If customers are renewing for shorter terms than those of
CEO
One of the most awkward situations in business is trying to recruit someone who will work for to-be-hired (TBH). For example, say you’ve started a search for a director of product marketing, have a few great candidates in play, only to have your marketing VP suddenly quit
Management
I built a very successful marketing career based on a three-word mission statement that I picked up from Chris Greendale, back when I was a product marketer at Ingres. Chris always said that marketing exists to make sales easier. I loved those three words. I embraced that simple concept.
Cloud
I'm a big fan of software-as-a-service (SaaS) metrics. I've authored very deep posts on SaaS renewals rates and customer acquisition costs. I also routinely point readers to other great posts on the topic, including: * David Skok's excellent posts on SaaS metrics
Cloud
One thing that amazes me is when I hear people talk about how they analyze churn in a cloud, software as a service (SaaS), or other recurring revenue business. You hear things like: * "17% of our churn comes from emerging small business (ESB) segment, which is normal because small
CEO
While driver-based planning is a bit of an old buzzword (the first two Google hits date to 2009 and 2011 respectively), I am nevertheless a huge fan of driver-based planning not because the concept was sexy back in the day, but because it's incredibly useful. In
Management
I often get asked by technical founders what business / marketing / strategy books they should read. While there are many excellent relatively new books (e.g., The Lean Startup), the primary purpose of this post is to list a set of classic business books that most (older) business people have read
Marketing
Theodore Levitt At some point in every marketer's career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean
SaaS
While I did my own post on the Box S-1, I also noticed that fellow CEO blogger, Tien Tzuo of Zuora, had done a post of his own with the catchy title These Numbers Show That Box CEO Aaron Levie is a Genius. I saw the post, clipped it
Marketing
[Major revision 5/11/14 5:10 PM] * "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Benjamin Disraeli. * "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." -- Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of communications theory and coiner of the phrase "the medium is the
IPO
I thought I'd take a quick read of the Zendesk S-1 today, so here are my real-time notes on so doing. Before diving in, let me provide a quick pointer to David Cummings' summary of the same. My notes: * 40,000 customers in 140 countries
Leadership
In business we have a sad tendency to copy success blindly. I remember the first time I read about this I didn't even understand what I was reading: "Nothing in business is so remarkable as the conflicting variety of success formulas offered by its numerous practitioners and
