Demandgen
"How's it going at StartCo?" I asked. "Great," the CMO replied. "We hit 105% of our pipeline generation (pipegen) goals last quarter, and with a healthy pipe/spend ratio of above 10." "Nice," I said. "How is sales doing?
Branding
I was thrilled to get together with Janessa Lantz (former CMO at dbt Labs) to join her and Amrita Gurney's podcast, Standout Startup Brands, to discuss a topic that most people don't even want to talk to me about -- branding! Yes, I'm known
Marketing
"If a bird walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck." -- James Whitcomb Riley Many marketers are in such a hurry to talk about topical issues that they forget the duck test: if it walks like
AI
Last week I hosted an event at the Balderton Capital London headquarters discussing the impact of AI on go-to-market (GTM) functions. The event was inspired by two things: * My aborted attempt to write an AI GTM guide, after I realized just how huge the space was and how fast it
Demandgen
I had a lightbulb moment in the car yesterday listening to the Revenue Vitals podcast. It wasn't a flash of insight so much as a flash of synthesis. I've been driving a lot lately, so I also had time to listen to the amazing Acquired podcast,
Marketing
The other day an old friend, a highly accomplished marketing executive, asked me a simple question: if you only had five metrics to summarize marketing performance for a quarterly business review (QBR) or board meeting, what would you pick? In this post, I'll share my answer to that
Marketing
This post is going to get a little weird because it's going to do two things at once. * Discuss an interesting, if dated, survey [1] I found on the sometimes tense relationship between CEOs and PE operating partners (and other senior advisors like executives in residence) [2]. * Demonstrate
Marketing
Be the second kind. The other day I was meeting with an advisory client [1], talking with the CMO and a handful of go-to-market team members. We started to discuss marketing, topics like product positioning and the website. So I asked for some feedback. I displayed the company's
Management
Last week in London, fellow Balderton EIR David Vismans and I held a joint meeting to discuss the working relationship (or moreover, the lack thereof) between product and marketing organizations. David is a career product leader, who worked for over 8 years leading product at Booking.com. I am a
Communications
Carta, an otherwise boring company solving a mundane-if-important problem, managed to get itself in the news this past week for all the wrong reasons. The fiasco was the result of CEO Henry Ward writing a post on recent negative press that was presumably intended to inoculate his audience, but instead
Marketing
In my capacity as an EIR at London-based Balderton Capital, I spoke earlier today at SaaStock in Dublin on What Founders Need To Know About Product Marketing. In the session, we discussed four key questions: * What is product marketing? (Surprisingly vague and varied.) * How do you know if someone’s
Marketing
I decided to take a quick break from SaaS metrics after doing a matched set of conference presentations in the past two months (strategic at SaaStr Annual and tactical at SaaS Metrics Palooza) -- and that's not to mention starting the SaaS Talk podcast with my "metrics