Finance
The other day I heard a startup executive say, "we will start to accelerate sales hiring -- hiring reps beyond the current staffing levels and the current plan -- once we start to see the pipeline to support it." What comes first: the pipeline or the egg? Or, to unmix
GTM
I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice, the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, "on his top ten list." Ever the blogger, I replied, "what are the other nine?" Mark's been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies
Branding
Software startups seem drawn by sirens to brand their features. Hey, Apple does it. Think: Siri, Facetime. Microsoft tries it: Cortana. Starbucks even brands a cup size: Venti. So if they can do it, we should too, right? Wrong [1]. But it's so cool. Imagine it's
Marketing
Just a quick post to plug my appearance on a podcast hosted by PMM Hive, a product marketing community that was recently launched by my old friend and colleague Crispin Read, and that's already loaded with some superb product marketing content. Check it out. I'm excited
Marketing
(Revised 06/27/20) I was talking to an old friend the other day who's marketing chief at a successful infrastructure startup. "Congratulations," I said, "I know it was a long slog, but after about a decade of groundwork it looks like things have really
Management
Many moons ago when I was young product marketing manager, I heard a new VP of Marketing speak at a marketing all-hands meeting. He spoke with a kiwi accent and his name was Chris Greendale. What he said were six words that changed my career: Marketing exists to make
Career
Markets are complex. Customers are complex. Products are complex, sometimes very. Heck, the world is complex. What's a marketer to do? Great marketing is about making things simple. We do that by imposing simplicity on a complex world. We might be attacked for so doing -- people might accuse
Entrepreneurship
I earned my spending money in high school and partially paid for college by working as a lifeguard and water safety instructor. Working at a lovely suburban country club you don't make a lot of saves. One day, working from the deep-end chair, I noticed two little
Demandgen
In part I of this three-part series I introduced the idea of an inverted funnel whereby marketing can derive a required demand generation budget using the sales target and historical conversion rates. In order to focus on the funnel itself, I made the simplifying assumption that the company’s
Demandgen
As loyal readers know, I’m a reductionist, always trying to find the shortest, simplest way of saying things even if some degree of precision gets lost in the process and even if things end up more subtle than they initially appear. For example, my marketing mission statement of “makes
Demandgen
In the previous post, I introduced the idea of an inverted demand generation (demandgen) funnel which we can use to calculate a marketing demandgen budget based given a sales target, an average sales price (ASP), and a set of conversion rates along the funnel. This is a handy tool, isn&
Demandgen
Does my company spend too much on marketing? Too little? How I do know? What is the right level of marketing spend at an enterprise software startup? I get asked these questions all the time by startup CEOs, CMOs, marketing VPs, and marketing directors. You can turn to financial benchmarks,