Marketing
There are only two archetypal marketing messages, exemplified by: * Bags Fly Free, a current advertising slogan used by Southwest airlines. * Soup is Good Food, a 1970s campaign slogan used by Campbell's soup [1]. Quick, what's the difference between these two messages? Soup is Good Food answers
BI
I preferred Silicon Valley [1] back in the day when companies raised modest amounts of capital (e.g., $30M) prior to an IPO that took 4-6 years from inception, where burn rates of $10M/year looked high, and where $100M raise was the IPO, not one or more rounds
AR
From time to time marketers and executives need to talk about the competition with those outside the company, including analysts, partners, and prospective investors. In this post, we'll cover my 4 rules for this type of communication. Be Consistent. The biggest mistake people make is inconsistency, often because
Marketing
Like it or not, once in a while it's appropriate for a vendor to walk away from a prospective deal. Why might you want to do that? * You think your product is a poor fit with the customer's needs. * You believe there is insufficient budget to
Demandgen
This post builds on my prior post, Win Rates, Close Rates, and Milestone vs. Flow Analysis. In it, I will take the ideas in that post, expand on them a bit, and then apply them to difficult problem of ensuring you have enough marketing demand generation budget to hit your
Marketing
Hey, what's your win rate? It's another seemingly simple question. But, like most SaaS metrics, when you dig deeper you find it's not. In this post we'll take a look at how to calculate win rates and use win rates to introduce
Marketing
I remember one time reading a win/loss report that went something like this. I invited my CFO to the meeting to see the demo. Your AE showed up and said, "I just want to show a few slides to frame the demo." Fifteen minutes later he was
Management
At many enterprise software companies product management (PM) ends up defaulting into a role that I can’t stand: The Roadmap Guys*. Like a restaurant with one item on the menu, the company defaults into ordering one thing from product management: a roadmap pitch. * “The VP of PM is in
Communications
I've always thought that if marketers wrote newspapers, the famous New York Times headline of August 8, 1974 would have looked like this: Instead of how it actually looked, which was: What's the difference? While both of the above presentations are structured, the newspaper doesn'
HR
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
Marketing
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
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