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
CEO
A few days ago, Jason Lemkin from SaaStr sent me a link to the video of my SaaStr Annual 2019 conference presentation, The Five Questions Startup CEOs Worry About. Those questions, by the way, are: 1. When do I next raise money? 2. Do I have the right team? 3.
Boards
Startup boards are complex. While all board members own stock in the company their interests are not necessarily aligned. * Founders may be motivated by a vision to change the world, to hit a certain net worth target, to see their name in an S-1, to make the Forbes 500, or
Sales
Can you solution sell without selling solutions? Sure. But you have to know the difference between the two.
Entrepreneurship
Few phrases bother me more than this one: “I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy. We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.” Huh. Wait minute. If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy.
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.
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
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
CEO
In the past year or so, two of our competitors have abruptly transitioned their CEOs and both have perpetuated a lot of mythology about what happens and/or will happen in such transitions. As someone who's run two startups as CEO for more than a combined ten years,
M&A
As mentioned in my recent Curse of the Megaround post, some companies that find themselves flush with cash and under heavy pressure to grow, decide to embark on dubious acquisitions to help shore up the growth story. As one reader it put it, you can summarize your megaround post with
IPO
As we move into the third week of January, I figured it was “now or never” in terms of getting a set of predictions out for 2015. Before jumping into that, let’s take a quick review of how I did with my 2014 predictions and do some self-grading. 1.
CEO
While driver-based planning is a bit of an old buzzword (the first two Google hits date to 2009 and 2011 respectively), I am nevertheless a huge fan of driver-based planning not because the concept was sexy back in the day, but because it's incredibly useful. In this post,
