In SaaS, You Have to Love the One You’re With
Recurring revenue businesses are hard. You need so many different types of people (sales, support, client success, demand gen, product, engagement, dev). The customers complain, especially your most loyal ones. You have to get on planes. You have to grovel. It’s tough. And for a lot of us … well … it just turns out [...]
Why You’ll Want to Raise $100,000,000 for Your SaaS Start-Up: The Incremental Customer
With all the SaaS companies raising big, later-stage rounds these days you may wonder … why? I mean, just because you can raise $100m or whatever epic number … should you? Today, I think the answer is yes. Though perhaps not for the reasons you might think. There are a couple of standard reasons companies [...]
Reprise — How I Evaluate HRM Vendors/Products — What Impresses Me
Show Me The Money! [After many vendor briefings in Q1 2011, I published a series of blog posts summarizing my reactions to those briefings which really captured, as of then, how I evaluated vendors and their products/services. Rereading those posts after a two year hiatus, I was struck not only by their relevance to my [...]
Reprise — How I Evaluate HRM Vendors/Products — Capability Matters
[After many vendor briefings in Q1 2011, I published a series of blog posts summarizing my reactions to those briefings which really captured, as of then, how I evaluated vendors and their products/services. Rereading those posts after a two year hiatus, I was struck not only by their relevance to my current thinking about this [...]
Personas Are The Future of Enterprise Apps: Lessons Learned From Scribe Software
In any technology-centric company, product managers, engineers and developers who have their finger on the pulse of customers have the highest credibility and respect. Over time they also have the most success in their careers. This happens because their innate understanding of the customer is the most valuable currency there is to a development team. [...]
The 48 Types of VP Sales. Make Deadly Sure You Hire the Right One.
Oy, the VP of Sales. The toughest hire. Such a high failure rate. I want to help. So this is the third in our series. The first post is What a Great VP of Sales Actually Does. So you expect the right things, and hire your rockstar at the right time to do the right [...]
Reprise — How I Evaluate HRM Vendors/Products — Strategy Matters
Happy Pesach! And for those of you with a few minutes to spare, this video from http://www.maccabeats.com will get you into the right mood. For those of you who celebrate Pesach, and for those of you who don’t, my personal prayer is that every form of slavery, from physical to economic to psychological, will be wiped out [...]
The $64,000,000 Question: When Things Become Unstoppable
A little while back, a VC asked me what I thought of a prospective mid/late stage investment. I was/am reasonably familiar with this company as it is adjacent to EchoSign. My answer was, well, I’d probably pass — certainly at the valuation (12x+ ARR). I said the product was ooooold and the platform dated, the [...]