Marketing
Who are we? What does our brand stand for? What promise does our brand make? These are some of the questions that quickly come up when thinking about branding. In general, I think branding is a potential marketing rathole for startups, particularly early-stage ones. See my post entitled, If
Marketing
Just a quick post to publish the slides from the talk I gave today at SaaStr Europa in Barcelona on the top 5 mistakes in scale-up. Thanks so much to everyone who attended, stuck around for the AMA session afterwards, and gave me feedback or asked me questions at
Boards
I'll be speaking next month in Barcelona on the first day of SaaStr Europa, held at the International Convention Center on June 7th and 8th. My presentation is scheduled at 11:25AM on June 7th and entitled The Top 5 Scale-Up Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.
Marketing
When asked, “how is it going?” many companies will respond with something akin to, “things are looking strong, the pipeline is up to $50M.” Not a bad statement, but certainly an imprecise one. “Over what timeframe?” you might ask. To which you’ll typically hear one of two answers * “Uh,
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