Customer Success
The CEO. Thanks for reading. # # # I was tempted to stop there because I've been writing a lot of long posts lately and because I do believe the answer is that simple. First let me explain the controversy and then I'll explain my view on it. In
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
Metrics
Enterprise SaaS and retailers have more in common than you might think. Let's think about retailers for a minute. Retailers drive growth in two ways: * They open new stores * They increase sales at existing stores Opening new stores is great, but it's an expensive way to
Finance
I’ve seen numerous startups try numerous ways to calculate their sales capacity. Most are too back-of-the-envelope and too top-down for my taste. Such models are, in my humble opinion, dangerous because the combination of relatively small errors in ramping, sales productivity, and sales turnover (with associated ramp resets) can
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
Marketing
Pipeline is a frequently scrutinized SaaS company metric because it's one of relatively few leading indicators in a SaaS business -- i.e., indicators that don't just tell us about the past but that help inform us about the future, providing important clues to our anticipated
Demandgen
I’m frankly shocked by how many startups treat pipeline as a monolith. Sample CMO: “we’re in great shape because we have a total pipeline of $32M covering a forward-four-quarter (F4Q) sales target of $10M, so 3.2x coverage. Next slide, please.” Regardless of your view on the appropriate
Customer Success
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had