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. Host Huh? What! We spend a few hundred dollars to get a lead, maybe a few thousand to get it converted to a sales opportunity, we give it to our sales team and then they "
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 situations, e.
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
Marketing
I was wondering the other day why Southwest would spend millions of dollars to remind people that Bags Fly Free. I’d argue there are two reasons: * It generally supports their friendly and transparent, low fees brand strategy * It reminds customers that a $500 fare on United might actually cost
Management
I think great learning can come from studying what cost your predecessor his/her job (on the assumption they weren't promoted out of it onto greener pastures). While such matters are invariably complex ("oh, there were a lot of factors, boss relationship, objectives attainment, sales confidence, ..."
Marketing
I'll borrow the title of one of my favorite books (Thinking, Fast and Slow) to make a few important points about lead nurturing in this post. While there is a strong argument that buyers should be nurtured before, during, and after the initial sale, I'm going