Enterprise
(This is the first in a three-part restructuring and build-out of the prior post. See note [1] for details.) The number one question go-to-market question in any enterprise software startup is: "do you have a repeatable sales process?" or, in more contemporary Silicon Valley patois, "do you
Culture
Most of us are familiar with Mark Leslie’s classic Sales Learning Curve and its implications for building the early salesforce at an enterprise startup. In short, it argues that too many startups put “the pedal to the metal” on sales hiring too early – before they have enough knowledge, process,
Finance
The other day I heard a startup executive say, "we will start to accelerate sales hiring -- hiring reps beyond the current staffing levels and the current plan -- once we start to see the pipeline to support it." What comes first: the pipeline or the egg? Or,
SaaS
You start by listing every rep your company has ever hired in order by hire date. You then record their sales productivity (typically measured in new ARR bookings) for their series of quarters with the company, up to and including their current-quarter forecast (which you shade in green).
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
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
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'
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