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
IPO
I'm not a financial analyst and I don't make stock recommendations [1], but as a participant and observer in the software investing ecosystem, I do keep an eye on macro market parameters and I read a fair bit of financial analyst research. Once in an while,
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
Communications
One day back at MarkLogic, we invited our local congresswoman, Jackie Speier, to visit our offices. Regardless of what you may think of her politics, she's an impressive person with an fascinating background including, for those with long memories, that she was the congressional aide shot five times
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'
Culture
I am big believer in strong corporate cultures. Culture can be used to set powerful norms. Culture can bind people in an organization to a common set of values bigger than their quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs). Culture helps attracts the right people to your organization – and can drive
SaaS
Most salespeople are familiar with so-called BANT qualification: does the prospect have Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe in order to make a purchase? While Solution Selling purists dislike BANT (arguing that it's great way to find existing deals that have been already rigged for the competition), most sales
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