Branding
From time to time, every CMO faces a key question: to brand or not to rebrand? Often, it’s right after joining a company and you want to make a big splash. Sometimes, it’s after you’ve been with a company for a while and you and some told-timers
Entrepreneurship
I’ve increasingly spoken to startup employees who find themselves in a difficult trap. Let’s demonstrate it via an example: Say you joined a startup in September 2009 as an early employee and immediately received a stock-option grant of 400,000 shares with a strike price of $0.10
Career
This is a sister post to my recent one, Career Decisions: What to Look For in a Software Startup. That piece is all about what to look for when considering taking a job at a software startup. This piece is kind of the opposite: what to look out for when
Boards
I am surprised by how many startup CEOs leave the board hanging at the end of the quarter. As a CEO my rule of thumb was that if a board member ever asked me about the quarter then I'd failed in being sufficiently proactive in communications. In tight
Customer Success
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had
Career
So, you're thinking of taking a job at a startup, but are nervous about the risk, perhaps having trouble telling one from another, and unsure about knowing what's really important in startup success. In this post, I'll share what I consider to be a
Forecasting
Just a quick post to share a slide deck I created for a session I did with the top S&M executives at a private equity group's sales and marketing summit. We discussed some of my favorite topics, including: * Some fun quotes on marketing and sales * Sales
Communications
Whenever I have the chance to watch a big league politician at work, I always try to study their communications skills in an effort to learn from the best. In a previous post, I presented what I learned watching Congresswoman Jackie Speier work a room, a pretty amazing sight, in
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
Boards
The folks at Host Analytics kindly asked me to speak at their annual conference, Host Perform 2019, today in Las Vegas and I had a wonderful time speaking about one of my favorite topics: the board view of enterprise performance management (EPM) and, to some extent, companies and management teams
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
Churn
In looking at this issue across several companies, I've noticed a disturbing trend / missed opportunity in how many SaaS companies classify the reason for customer churn. Roughly speaking, if companies were hospitals, they'd too frequently be reporting the cause of death as "stopped breathing."