Boards
I was talking to a founder friend of mine the other day, and she made a comment about her startup's search for its first non-founder (aka, "professional") CEO. She said the following about the nearly one-year recruiting process: "Because every person in the
Leadership
One of the hardest things about running a startup is you're never sure who to listen to. Your board members own big stakes in the company, but that doesn't automatically align them with you. Your late-stage investors want low multiples on big numbers. Your early-
Management
Many moons ago when I was young product marketing manager, I heard a new VP of Marketing speak at a marketing all-hands meeting. He spoke with a kiwi accent and his name was Chris Greendale. What he said were six words that changed my career: Marketing exists to make
SaaS
Some SaaS startups develop a form of zero-sum delusion early in their evolution, characterized by following set of beliefs. Believing that: * A customer has a fixed budget that is 100% fungible between ARR (annual revenue revenue) and services * It is in the company's best interest to turn
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
Finance
[Updated 3/10 12:09] This is part II in this series. Part I is here and covers the basics of management education, employee communications, and simple steps to help slow virus transmission while keeping the business moving forward. In this part, we'll provide: * A short list of
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
Startups
I'm working with more early-stage companies these days (e.g., pre-seed, seed, seed-plus [1]) and one of the things I've noticed is that many founders cannot clearly, succinctly, and confidently answer some basic questions about their businesses. I decided to write this post
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
Databases
As I’ve been doing every year since 2014, I thought I’d take some time to write some predictions for 2020, but not without first doing a review of my predictions for 2019. Lest you take any of these too seriously, I suggest you look at my batting average
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