Marketing
Business-to-business (B2B) high technology markets are all about the market and only less so about the technology. This is primarily driven by corporate buyer conservatism -- corporate buyers hate to make mistakes in purchasing technology and, if you're going to make one, it's far better to
Metrics
Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett of Battery Ventures recently published the 2019 version of its outstanding annual software round-up report. I highly recommend this report -- it's 78-pages chock full of great data about topics like: * Why Battery is long software overall * The four eras of software evolution
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.
Communications
The other day I saw this tweet from my friend Nick Mehta, CEO of GainSight, and it got me thinking. It turns out that in addition to making fun music videos for company events, that Nick and I have another thing in common: we both wrestle with finding the right
Leadership
When it comes to evaluating a startup’s performance, I think there are two key, orthogonal questions that need to be examined: 1. Is the company delivering growth? 2. Is management in control of your business? Growth is the primary driver of value creation in a software startup. I’m
Churn
Enterprise SaaS has drifted to a model where many, if not most, companies do multi-year contracts on annual payment terms. How did we get here? * Most enterprise SaaS products are high-consideration purchases. Buyers typically perform a thorough evaluation process before purchasing and are quite sure that the software will meet
Leadership
I've been making a few presentations lately, so I thought I'd share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week at the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series. This one's kind of
CEO
Few founder/CEOs come from a marketing background; most come from product, many from engineering, and some from sales, service, or consulting. But few -- ironically even in martech companies -- grew up in the marketing department and consider marketing home. When you combine this lack of experience with the
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'
CEO
Thanks to everyone who attended my session today at the amazing -- and huge -- SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose. In this post, I'll share the slides from my presentation, Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (and some thoughts on how to answer them). The folks
IPO
Enterprise SaaS companies need a lot of money to grow. The median company spends $1.32 to acquire $1.00 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) [1]. They need to make that investment for 14 years before getting to an IPO. It all adds up to a median of $300M in
Boards
I’m super excited for the upcoming SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose from February 5th through the 7th at the San Jose Convention Center. I hope to see you there -- particularly for my session from 10:00 AM to 10:30 AM on Tuesday, February 5th. Last