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
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 -
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 at
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 Salesforce,
Forecasting
This is the third in a three-post series focused on forecasting and pipeline. Part I examined triangulation forecasts to improve forecast accuracy and enable better conversations about the forecast. After a review of pipeline management fundamentals, part II discussed the use of to-go pipeline coverage to provide clarity on how
Forecasting
This is the second in a three-part series focused on forecasting and pipeline. In part I, we examined triangulation forecasts with a detailed example. In this, part II, we'll discuss to-go pipeline coverage, specifically using it in conjunction with what we covered in part I. In part III,
Marketing
I'm working with a lot of different companies these days and one of the perennial topics is pipeline. * Do we have enough? * Is it spread across reps in a healthy way? * Should I build pipeline then hire reps or hire reps to build pipeline? * From where should pipeline
Demandgen
Download USS_Nimitz_%28CVN-68%29_general_quarters_drill%2C_ca._2013.oga It’s that time of year, I suppose. You’ve hopefully approved your 2021 operating plan by now -- even if you’re on an increasingly popular 1/31 fiscal year end. You’ve signed up for some
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
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&
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