Marketing
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen market research that suffers from one key problem. It goes something like this: * What do you think of PRODUCT's user interface? * Do you think PRODUCT should be part of suite or a standalone module?
Leadership
I read this New York Times editorial this morning, How the Truth Got Hacked, and it reminded me of a situation at work, back when I first joined Host Analytics some four years ago. This line, in particular, caught my attention: Imagine the conversation we’d be having if we
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Since we're wrapping up what has been a simply amazing Host Analytics 2016 sales kickoff, I thought I'd share some of the rules I've developed, learned, appropriated, discovered, et cetera during my career. Rule 1: for salespeople, your signed compensation plan is your admission
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Sometimes leaders have second agendas: * CEO: I want to win for my shareholders and prove I can take a company public. * Founder: I want to win for my shareholders and destroy the great evil at Microsoft. * Volleyball coach: I want to win the league and prove to the world that
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About two years ago, I did a post with a chart from JMP that showed the correlation between the value of a SaaS business and its growth rate. Today, I'm back with a chart from RBC [1] that shows things haven't changed. The correlation here is
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Seven words that changed the world: “make a plan that you can beat.” This pithy piece of wisdom was first passed onto me by the sage of Sequoia Capital, Mike Moritz, on the first day of my six-year journey at MarkLogic, during which time we grew the company from effectively
SaaS
While I did my own post on the Box S-1, I also noticed that fellow CEO blogger, Tien Tzuo of Zuora, had done a post of his own with the catchy title These Numbers Show That Box CEO Aaron Levie is a Genius. I saw the post, clipped it to
Marketing
[Major revision 5/11/14 5:10 PM] * "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Benjamin Disraeli. * "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." -- Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of communications theory and coiner of the phrase "the medium
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There's a rule out there, circulated widely as conventional wisdom, that you should never bring up a problem in the workplace unless you have a proposed solution. For example, consider the following excerpt from this Inc. Magazine article, Eight Things Great Bosses Demand from Employees: Rule 6: Provide
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Business travelers spent $260B in 2012 with food services being the #1 source of expense. Salespeople love dinners with customers and prospects. Marketers love networking dinners. We have customer advisory board dinners, pre-board dinners, awards dinners, relationship-building dinners, team dinners, customer appreciation dinners, partner summit dinners, project completion dinners, analyst
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There's a well established school of thought that high-tech startups should focus on a few vertical markets early in their development. The question is whether government should be one of them? The government seems to think so. They run a handful of programs to encourage startups to focus
Management
I was talking to a startup CEO the other day and he said: Sales is From Mars, Engineering is From Venus Sure. Two things typically go wrong in this relationship. One is that you have a strategic alignment problem. The other is that you're treating sales and engineering