I’ve Got a Crazy Idea: How About We Focus on Next-Quarter’s Pipeline?
I’m frankly shocked by how many startups treat pipeline as a monolith. Sample CMO: “we’re in great shape because we have a total pipeline of $32M covering a forward-four-quarter (F4Q) sales target of $10M, so 3.2x coverage. Next slide, please.” Regardless of your view on the appropriate magic pipeline coverage number (e.g., 2x, 3x, 4x), […]
Using Time-Based Close Rates to Align Marketing Budgets with Sales Targets
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 sales targets. Let’s pretend it’s […]
Lead Nurturing, Fast and Slow
I’ll borrow the title of one of my favorite books (Thinking, Fast and Slow) to make a few important points about lead nurturing in this post. While there is a strong argument that buyers should be nurtured before, during, and after the initial sale, I’m going to speak in this post about pre-sales lead nurturing, the purpose […]
