Uncategorized
This is going to sound difficult and run contrary to the industry conventional wisdom, but bear with me. When a B2B SaaS startup is hiring their first salesperson, I think they should look for someone who: Is a dyed-in-the-wool seller with sales blood coursing through their veins. Their first sales
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I've often quipped that board observers should be like Victorian children: seen and not heard. While that might sound obnoxious, it's not if you understand how hard board seats are to come by and the process through which you get one. There are three ways to
Grateful Dead
Since It Costs A Lot to Win, and Even More to Lose [1] It's hard for a DNA-level marketer and inveterate deadhead [2] to review a book that fuses both. While I first read Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead not long after its publication in 2010, I&
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[Updated 9/23 to include link to a Brian Chesky interview discussing Founder Mode.] Founder mode became all the rage last week, following a Brian Chesky speech (whose contents are seemingly not available online) and a Paul Graham blog post about that speech. Since everyone's weighing in on
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Today is the US launch of Startup Century, a new (and debut) book by Balderton partner James Wise. The book's subtitle provides a great clue to its content: why we're all becoming entrepreneurs -- and how to make it work for everyone. This is neither a
CEO
It's fun when the person who ran marketing at one of your rivals asks you some 20 years later to speak at their annual conference. It's even more fun when it's a fellow CMO-turned-CEO and he's assembled quite an amazing group of
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Earlier today I spoke at SaaStock USA in Austin and gave a presentation on connecting your c-suite to the ground truth. I think it's important that startup founders and leaders understand how easy it is to get disconnected from the ground truth (i.e., the reality of the
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This is a quick post to remind everyone who's attending SaaStock USA in Austin later this week to come to my session at 2:30 pm on Thursday, June 1 on the Scale Stage, entitled How to Connect Your C-Suite to the Ground Truth. I've always
Marketing
This is a post to highlight a recent podcast appearance I made on The Growth Hub podcast with Seija Lappalainen and Reeta Westman, who are both based out of Finland, and with whom I had a lot of fun talking. So much fun, in fact, that we ran long and
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Startups need to make it easy to find great answers to three basic questions on their websites. * What is it? * What do people do with it? * Who is the company behind it? Sure, there are other important questions. How does it work? Why is it different? Who uses it? What
SaaS
Please join us for tomorrow's SaaS Product Power Breakfast with entrepreneur and venture capitalist Paul Jozefak, CEO of Receeve (an all-in-one platform for collections and recovery), on how to use SaaS as a layer atop legacy systems to prove return on investment (ROI) and smooth the customer'
Uncategorized
The good people of Riverside Acceleration Capital and my old friend Jon Temple invited me to speak at their portfolio company CEO Summit and I was only too happy to oblige, particularly because Jon asked me to speak about one of my favorite topics -- marketing in early- and growth-stage