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 sales
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
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 kids
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 new
![The Evolution of Software Marketing: Hey Marketing, Go Get [This]!](https://kellblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/get-more-leads-2015.jpg)
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,
Marketing
Slowly and steadily, over the past decade, the industry has evolved from a mentality of “all salesreps must do everything” – including some percent of their time prospecting -- to one of specialization. We, with the help of books like Predictable Revenue, have collectively decided that in-bound lead processing is different
Demandgen
Most startups today use some variation on the now fairly standard terms SAL (sales accepted lead) and SQL (sales qualified lead). Below see the classic [1] lead funnel model from marketing bellwether Sirius Decisions that defines this. One great thing about working as an independent board member and consultant is
Marketing
In my last post, I made the case that the simplest, most intuitive metric for understanding whether you have too much, too little, or just the right amount of pipeline is opportunities/salesrep, calculated for both the current-quarter and the all-quarters pipeline. This post builds upon the prior one by