Management
I'm a big believer in written quarterly goals. The old way to do this was to adopt "management by objective" (MBO) and to write down a set of MBOs for each quarter for each team member. Most folks would do this either in Word, or if
Boards
Dave Kellogg's presentation at SaaStr 2018 on the ten non-obvious things about scaling a SaaS startup.
Leadership
In an effort to promote my upcoming presentation at SaaStr 2018, which is currently on the agenda for Wednesday, February 7th at 9:00 AM in Studio C, I thought I'd do a quick post sharing what I'll be covering in the presentation, officially titled, "
Communications
One of the interesting new challenges I faced when I joined Host Analytics about 5 years ago was working with an offshore development team in India. Host was originally co-founded in both the US and India, so literally from inception we had employees in both places. While this has proven
Decision Making
In every executive team there are going to be times when people don't agree on certain important strategic or operational decisions. Some examples: * Should we split SDRs inbound vs outbound? * Should we map SCs to reps or pool them? * How should we split upsell vs new business focus
Forecasting
In this post we'll examine how we to use pipeline conversion rates as early indicators of your business performance. I call such indicators triangulation forecasts because they help the CEO and CFO get data points, in addition to the official VP of Sales forecast, that help triangulate where
Demandgen
This post builds on my prior post, Win Rates, Close Rates, and Milestone vs. Flow Analysis. In it, I will take the ideas in that post, expand on them a bit, and then apply them to difficult problem of ensuring you have enough marketing demand generation budget to hit your
Marketing
Hey, what's your win rate? It's another seemingly simple question. But, like most SaaS metrics, when you dig deeper you find it's not. In this post we'll take a look at how to calculate win rates and use win rates to introduce
Marketing
I remember one time reading a win/loss report that went something like this. Host Huh? What! We spend a few hundred dollars to get a lead, maybe a few thousand to get it converted to a sales opportunity, we give it to our sales team and then they "
Management
At many enterprise software companies product management (PM) ends up defaulting into a role that I can’t stand: The Roadmap Guys*. Like a restaurant with one item on the menu, the company defaults into ordering one thing from product management: a roadmap pitch. * “The VP of PM is in
Sales
Can you solution sell without selling solutions? Sure. But you have to know the difference between the two.
Entrepreneurship
Every now and then I take a dive into an S-1 to see what clears the current, ever-changing bar for going public. After a somewhat rocky IPO process, Tintri went public June 30 after cutting the IPO offering price and has traded flat thus far since then. Let's