Culture
Here's a great slide from the CFO Summit at Zuora's 2017 annual flagship Subscribed event. Since they talk about this as under-assignment, since people aren't great at flipping fractions in their head, and since I think of this more intuitively as over-assignment, I'
Forecasting
In this post we'll examine how we to use pipeline conversion rates as early indicators of your business performance. I call such indicators triangulation forecasts because they help the CEO and CFO get data points, in addition to the official VP of Sales forecast, that help triangulate where
Demandgen
This post builds on my prior post, Win Rates, Close Rates, and Milestone vs. Flow Analysis. In it, I will take the ideas in that post, expand on them a bit, and then apply them to difficult problem of ensuring you have enough marketing demand generation budget to hit your
Marketing
Hey, what's your win rate? It's another seemingly simple question. But, like most SaaS metrics, when you dig deeper you find it's not. In this post we'll take a look at how to calculate win rates and use win rates to introduce
Marketing
I remember one time reading a win/loss report that went something like this. Host Huh? What! We spend a few hundred dollars to get a lead, maybe a few thousand to get it converted to a sales opportunity, we give it to our sales team and then they "
Sales
Can you solution sell without selling solutions? Sure. But you have to know the difference between the two.
Sales
After the SaaSacre of early 2016, investors generally backed off a growth-at-all-costs mindset and started to value SaaS companies using an "appropriate" balance of growth and profitability. The question then became, what's appropriate? The answer was: the rule of 40 [1]. What's the rule
Management
Quick: what's the biggest deal in this quarter's sales pipeline? Was that the biggest deal in last quarter's pipeline? How about the quarter before? Do you have deals in your pipeline older than your children? If you're answering yes to these questions,
Management
Imagine a board meeting. Director: What’s the forecast for new ARR this quarter? Sales VP: $4.3M, with a best case of $5.0M. Director: So what’s the most likely outcome? Sales VP: $4.3M. Director: What are you really going to do? (The classic newb trap question.
Metrics
There are a lot of SaaS posts out there with some pretty fancy math in them. I'm a math guy, so I like to geek on SaaS metrics myself. But, in the heat of battle running a SaaS company, sometimes you just need to keep it simple. Here&
Management
This post reviews Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s new book, From Impossible to Inevitable, which is being launched at the SaaStr Conference this week. The book is a sequel of sorts to Ross’s first book, Predictable Revenue, published in 2011, and which was loaded with great ideas about
Management
At Disney -- a company that is truly focused on customer experience -- every “cast member” (i.e., employee) gets six weeks of training before they see a “guest” (i.e., customer). "Face characters" (e.g., Snow White walking through the park) spend an additional 40 hours just