Marketing
"Advertising is legitimized lying," said the English writer HG Wells. Pop marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a book entitled, All Marketers Are Liars (but cleverly redacted the title). Google suggestions reveal that people have plenty of questions about the authenticity of marketing: Another marketing book adapts the famous
Marketing
Just a quick post to highlight a video / podcast episode I recently recorded with Cillian Hilliard, fellow board member at work management leader Scoro, and investor at Kennett Partners. Cillian runs a great blog (complete with detailed financial models) at The Novice Investor. (Understanding SaaS Marketing as an Investor - Dave
Management
In the land of disruption, there's always something dying and something lining up to replace it, so we're pretty used to hearing things like "on-premise is dead, long live SaaS." Sometimes, they're right. Despite the 2008-era views of our resident
Marketing
Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Answer: 35% (with 45% and 15% as the top and bottom quartiles). Charts like this, from OpenView's 2021 Financial & Operating Benchmarks survey, help to answer questions like that all
Marketing
Quiz: Your marketing team generates an MQL. It's passed to an SDR, who does basic BANT-style qualification and decides it's real. They create a sales opportunity in your pipeline and pass it to a seller. What number is in the opportunity's value field
Management
I'd previously posted a video of my SaaStr 2021 presentation, A CEO's Guide to Marketing, but it was a bit of hack (a link into the stage stream) done favoring time-to-market over production values. In this post, I'm embedding the official SaaStr
AR
Using the Marketing Fundamental Tension Quadrant to Map Your Demandgen and Communications Strategy Years ago I wrote a post on what I call the fundamental tension in marketing: the gap between what we want to say and what our audience wants to hear. For example, let's say we&
Marketing
With angel and seed money flowing, and a great environment for company creation, I've been talking to a lot of seed-stage and pre-seed stage startups of late. They often ask me about positioning. Listening to myself talk, I realized that I didn't really sound
Management
Some friends wonder why, as someone who considers himself a strategist, I care so much about execution. Is it because I'm a perfectionist? Well yes, but that's only one reason (and perfectionism is a weakness [1] in business, not a strength). Is it because I like
Demandgen
I hopped over to London a few weeks back to visit my friends at Balderton Capital (where I'm now working as an EIR) and during the visit we decided to host a meetup for portfolio company founders, CEOs, and CMOs to discuss the question of how to build
Marketing
TLDR: Think twice before you do and three times about how you do it. While it's a very common practice, I think it's often a lazy one, done by default, and without regard for either the buyer or seller downstream. When I visit enterprise SaaS websites
Demandgen
I've mentioned this idea a few times of late (e.g., my previous post, my SaaStock EMEA presentation) [1] and I've had some follow-up questions from readers, so I thought I'd do a quick post on the subject. Back in the day at