Dave Kellogg
CEO, HostAnalytics, a leader in cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM).
Previously Dave was SVP/GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce , CEO at MarkLogic and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as it grew from $30M to over $1B. See Dave's disclaimers at Kellblog.
The Strategy Compiler: How To Avoid the “Great” Strategy You Couldn’t Execute
Few phrases bother me more than this one: “I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy. We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.” Huh. Wait minute. If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy. Maybe it was a great strategy for some other […]
Blocking the End Run: Eleven Words to Reduce Politics in Your Organization
People are people. Sometimes they’re conflict averse and just not comfortable saying certain things to their peers. Sometimes they don’t like them and are actively trying to undermine them. Sometimes they’re in a completely functional relationship, but have been too darn busy to talk. So when this happens, how do you — as a manager […]
Dear Marketing: Stop Putting the Template Over the Story
I’ve always thought that if marketers wrote newspapers, the famous New York Times headline of August 8, 1974 would have looked like this: Instead of how it actually looked, which was: What’s the difference? While both of the above presentations are structured, the newspaper doesn’t let the template get in the way of story. The […]
How to Train Your VP of Sales to Think About the Forecast
Imagine a board meeting. Director: What’s the forecast for new ARR this quarter? Sales VP: $4.3M, with a best case of $5.0M. Director: So what’s the most likely outcome? Sales VP: $4.3M. Director: What are you really going to do? (The classic noob trap question.) Sales VP: I think we can come in North of that. […]
How To Get Your Startup a Halo
How would you like your startup to win deals not only when you win a customer evaluation, but when you tie — and even sometimes when you lose? That sounds great. But is it even possible? Amazing, yes — but you need have a halo effect working to your advantage. What is a halo effect? Per […]
Why has Standalone Cloud BI Been Such a Tough Slog?
I remember when I left Business Objects back in 2004 that it was early days in the cloud. We were using Salesforce internally (and one of their larger customers at the time) so I was familiar with and a proponent of cloud-based applications, but never felt great about BI in the cloud. Despite that, Business […]
Do You Want to be Judged on Intentions or Results?
It was early in my career, maybe 8 years in, and I was director of product marketing at a startup. One day, my peer, the director of marketing programs hit me with this in an ops review meeting: You want to be judged on intentions, not results. I recall being dumbfounded at the time. Holy […]
The Role of Professional Services in a SaaS Business
I love to create reductionist mission statements for various departments in a company. These are designed to be ultra-compact and potentially provocative. My two favorite examples thus far: Marketing exists to make sales easier. HR exists to help managers manage. I like to make them based on real-life situations, e.g., when someone running a department […]
Don’t Start a Customer Relationship with a Lie
As a manager, I like to make sure that every quarter that each of my direct reports has written, agreed-to goals. I collect these goals in a Word document, but since that neither scales nor cascades well, I’ve recently been looking for a simple SaaS application to manage our quarterly Objectves and Key Results (OKRs). […]
Quick Thoughts on Tagetik Acquistion by Wolters Kluwer
Yesterday, the tax and accounting division of Dutch publishing giant Wolters Kluwer announced the acquistion of Italian enterprise performance management (EPM) vendor Tagetik for 300M Euros, or about $318M. Founded in 1986, Tagetik was a strong regional European player in on-premises EPM and about 2.5 years ago had raised $37M in capital in order to attack the […]
