Career
Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat. The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With, and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it
AI
I'm a big fan of Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five marketing community he has built. While I have always liked the idea of peer-networking communities, I think they change from vitamin to painkiller in times of rapid change. Why? Because the playbooks haven't been written
Enterprise
Something fun happened today. A reader reached out who had been digging through my early-2000s and 2010s posts trying to understand the history of the software industry. That immediately got my attention because I love people who study history. It’s the best way to understand the present. And a
AI
Today, we continue my annual tradition of making ten predictions for the coming year while reviewing my ten predictions for the prior one. As always, I’ll remind you of some disclaimers: (a) don't view this as investment advice or anything resembling it, (b) while I generally avoid
Marketing
How could I not love a marketing book that says -- on page one -- that "great marketing makes sales easier”? That's long been a mantra of mine, the North Star that drove my marketing career, and it served me well for many decades. Today, I'
Marketing
Why your messaging needs a number written for the buyer, not for you. Musical theater offers a surprisingly useful lesson for B2B marketers: the “I want”song. Nearly every musical features an "I want" song third or fourth in the score, after we've been introduced to
AI
Unlike many marketers, I’m not particularly prone to hyperbole, and thus “crisis” is not a word that I use lightly. But I think saying “pipeline crisis” is warranted today when discussing what’s happening in marketing and is a key underlying cause for the broader malaise in SaaS growth.
AI
Today, I presented at SaaS Metrics Palooza 2025 on the differences between selling work and selling software. I'd like to thank my metrics brother, Ray Rike, for inviting me to speak and I'd like to thank everyone who attended the session. Topic covered include: * Defining outcomes
GTM
Today Dan Teodosiu, Thor Mitchell, and I hosted a Balderton webinar entitled Aligning Product and Go-To-Market (GTM) Using Customer Value Metrics. We are all executives in residence (EIRs) at Balderton -- Dan covers technology, Thor covers product, and I cover go-to-market -- and, in a display of cross-functional walking-the-talk, we
Customer Success
The concept of an ideal customer profile (ICP) has been around for a long time, but like its cousin, the minimum viable product (MVP), it is often misunderstood. In this post, I'll offer some background commentary on the ICP concept and then build into one of my favorite
AI
I first met Ian Howells in London long ago, as fellow footsoldiers in the early relational database wars. While you had to be pretty technical to do product marketing in those days, Ian was technical with a capital T, having just sprung from university with a PhD in distributed databases.
Branding
Every day I hear more and more about the “sea of sameness” from founders, CEOs, CROs, and CMOs. The dialog goes something like this: * There are so many products out there, * They are getting more similar, * Customers are more confused than ever, * Unable to see the differences between them. * Thus,