Should Your Startup Have a Quota Club? (And How Much to Spend on It.)
December is when most SaaS startups are closing out the year, trying to finalize next year’s operating plan (hint: I know a software company that can help with that), starting to get a clear view on which salespeople are going to make their number, and thus beginning the process of figuring out who to invite […]
Highlights from the Fenwick & West 3Q18 Venture Capital Survey
It’s been a few years since I wrote about this survey, which I post about less to communicate recent highlights and more to generate awareness of its existence. The Fenwick & West Venture Capital Survey is must-read material for any entrepreneur or startup CEO because it not only makes you aware of trends in financing, […]
5 Things I Wished I Asked Before Switching from Employee to Founder (Video + Transcript)
Co-Founder and CEO at GoCardless, Hiroki Takeuchi and CEO and Founder at Shipamax, Jenna Brown on their switch from the employee role to the founder role and what they learned along the way. If you’re a current founder, do you agree? What lessons did you learn along the way? Also, if you didn’t join SaaStr […]
Lost and Founder: A Painful Yet Valuable Read
Some books are almost too honest. Some books give you too much information (TMI). Some books can be hard to read at times. Lost and Founder is all three. But it’s one of the best looks I’ve seen when it comes to giving the reader a realistic look at the inside of Silicon Valley startups. […]
10 Secrets to Putting on a Great Event
So we’ve been putting on events for a while at SaaStr. It started off by accident — we did a meet-up in 2013 as an experiment, with no content. And almost 400 folks came! Then we did a second meet-up in 2014 with a little content, and it went well. Then 2015 was the first […]
How To Present a Quarterly Sales Forecast to Your SaaS Company Board
While most companies put real thought into how they present numbers in their post-quarter board decks and other management reports, one area in which you’ll find a lack of discipline is in how they present quarterly sales forecasts to the board. They’re typically done as a quick update email to the board. They’ll usually mention […]
Assume Your Top Partners Compete With You By Year 4
I note a whole bunch of recent announcements: Salesforce is now competing with a whole ‘nother bunch of its top partners with its new High Velocity Sales Cloud. It adds better dialer and cadence functionalities, among others, competing at least in part with a dozen or more of its top partners. While a lot of […]
Using “Win Themes” to Improve Your Sales Management and Increase Win Rates
At most sales review meetings what do you hear sales management asking the reps? Questions like these: What stage is this opportunity in? What value do you have it at in the pipeline? Is there upside to that value? What forecast category is it in? In what quarter will it close? What competitors are in […]
The Three Types of Customer Success Manager
Since we’re now officially in 2019 planning season, I’ve been thinking about — among other things — our Customer Success model for next year and talking with friends in my network about that. Since Customer Success is (sadly, perhaps) still a relatively new discipline in enterprise software companies, I’d say the whole field is evolving […]
Video of my SaaStr 2018 Presentation: Ten Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS
While I’ve blogged about this presentation before, I only recently stumbled into this full-length video of this very popular session — a 30-minute blaze through some subtle SaaS basics. Enjoy! I look forward to seeing everyone again at SaaStr Annual 2019. (Cross-posted @ Kellblog)
