Management
Imagine a board meeting. Director: What’s the forecast for new ARR this quarter? Sales VP: $4.3M, with a best case of $5.0M. Director: So what’s the most likely outcome? Sales VP: $4.3M. Director: What are you really going to do? (The classic newb trap question.
AR
How would you like our company to win deals even when you tie or lose the product evaluation? Halo effects do precisely that. This post discusses what halo effects are and how to use them to your advantage.
Entrepreneurship
It was early in my career, maybe 8 years in, and I was director of product marketing at a startup. One day, my peer, the directof of marketing programs hit me with this in an ops review meeting: You want to be judged on intentions, not results. I recall being
HR
I love to create reductionist mission statements for various departments in a company. These are designed to be ultra-compact and potentially provocative. My two favorite examples thus far: * Marketing exists to make sales easier. * HR exists to help managers manage. I like to make them based on real-life situations, e.
Culture
I went looking for a post to help someone decide if they should move into management, but couldn't find one that I really loved. These three posts aren't bad. Nor is this HBR article. But since I couldn't find a post that I thought
IPO
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was
Management
I'm not going to talk about columnar databases, compression, horizontal partitioning, SAP Hana, or real-time vs. pre-aggregated summarization in this post on in-memory analytics. I'm going to talk about the other kind of in-memory analytics. The kind that can make or break your career. What do
BI
New Year’s means three things in my world: (1) time to thank our customers and team at Host Analytics for another great year, (2) time to finish up all the 2017 planning items and approvals that we need to get done before the sales kickoff (including the one most
Management
[Editor's note: revised 3/27/17 with changes to some definitions.] It’s been nearly three years since my original post on calculating SaaS renewal rates and I’ve learned a lot and seen a lot of new situations since then. In this post, I’ll provide a
Boards
[Updated 5/1/18 to add net new ARR, LTV/CAC, and both customer and employee NPS.] In the course of my board and advisory work, I get to look at a lot of software as a service (SaaS) startups financials and I'm often surprised how people choose
Startups
One of the hardest hires -- and one of the hardest jobs -- is to be the first VP of sales at a startup. Why? * There is no history / experience * Nobody knows what works and what doesn't work * The company may not have a well defined strategy so
Leadership
It was back in the 1990s, at Versant, when my old (and dearly departed) friend Larry Pulkownik first introduced me to the phrase: Win Them Alone, Lose Them Together And its corollary: Ask for Help at the First Sign of Trouble Larry told me this rule from the sales perspective:
