Forecasting
Just a quick post to share a slide deck I created for a session I did with the top S&M executives at a private equity group's sales and marketing summit. We discussed some of my favorite topics, including: * Some fun quotes on marketing and sales * Sales
SaaS
(Revised 5/4/19, 10:41 AM.) After years of experience with and thinking about multi-year, prepaid SaaS deals, my mental jury is back in the box and the verdict is in: if you're a startup that is within my assumption set below, don't do them.
Recruiting
Happily, in the past several years startups are increasingly recognizing the value of strong sales enablement and sales productivity teams. So it's no surprise that I hear a lot about high-growth companies building onboarding programs to enable successfully scaling their sales organizations and sustain their growth. What'
SaaS
Most salespeople are familiar with so-called BANT qualification: does the prospect have Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe in order to make a purchase? While Solution Selling purists dislike BANT (arguing that it's great way to find existing deals that have been already rigged for the competition), most sales
Marketing
"The last thing I want at Quota Club is to be lying on a chaise lounge by the pool, roll over, and see some effing marketing guy next to me."
Boards
While most companies put real thought into how they present numbers in their post-quarter board decks and other management reports, one area in which you'll find a lack of discipline is in how they present quarterly sales forecasts to the board. They're typically done as a
Enterprise
At most sales review meetings what do you hear sales management asking the reps? Questions like these: * What stage is this opportunity in? * What value do you have it at in the pipeline? * Is there upside to that value? * What forecast category is it in? * In what quarter will it
Forecasting
If your sales organization is like most, you classify sales opportunities in about four categories, such as: * Commit, which are 90% likely to close * Forecast, which are 70% likely to close * Upside, which are 33% likely to close * Unlikely, which are 5% likely to close And then, provided you have
Marketing
There are only two archetypal marketing messages, exemplified by: * Bags Fly Free, a current advertising slogan used by Southwest airlines. * Soup is Good Food, a 1970s campaign slogan used by Campbell's soup [1]. Quick, what's the difference between these two messages? Soup is Good Food answers
Entrepreneurship
I remember one day, years ago, when I was a VP at $10M startup and Larry, the head of sales, came in one day handing out t-shirts that said: "Code, sell, or get out of the way." Neither I, nor the rest of marketing team, took this particularly
Metrics
Perhaps you’ve seen this movie: CEO: “Wow the quarterly pipeline dropped 20% this week. What’s going on sales VP?” Sales VP: “Well, that’s because we cleaned it up this week.” CEO: “That sounds great, but you said that last week.” VP of Sales: “Well, that’s because
Marketing
Like it or not, once in a while it's appropriate for a vendor to walk away from a prospective deal. Why might you want to do that? * You think your product is a poor fit with the customer's needs. * You believe there is insufficient budget to