After $2m-$3m in ARR, Your Leads Should Always Grow. Here’s Why.
Progress in SaaS is never as linear as it looks years down the road. Everyone has rough quarters (often at least 1 in 5). And we almost had a full Year of Hell, often during a tough transition. I certainly did (twice). More on that here: The SaaS Year of Hell. And Then – Reignition. […]
The Lead Plateau You May Hit Just As It Gets Good. How to Plan Around It.
This post is such an important one, I took a moment update it for 2019. Just when it sarts to get good, again and again, I see the same thing: the number of leads each month stalls out. Many SaaS companies hit an “organic lead plateau” at several phases: When you get Really Big, at […]
The Most Important Chart for Managing the Pipeline: The Opportunity Histogram
In my last post, I made the case that the simplest, most intuitive metric for understanding whether you have too much, too little, or just the right amount of pipeline is opportunities/salesrep, calculated for both the current-quarter and the all-quarters pipeline. This post builds upon the prior one by examining potential (and usually inevitable) problems […]
Do We Have Enough Pipeline? The One Simple Metric Many Folks Forget.
Pipeline is a frequently scrutinized SaaS company metric because it’s one of relatively few leading indicators in a SaaS business — i.e., indicators that don’t just tell us about the past but that help inform us about the future, providing important clues to our anticipated performance this quarter, next quarter, and the one after that. […]
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), […]
What really is Product Marketing?
On the heels of this post about What Really is Go-To-Market?, I have had a ton of discussions about the constant tussle between product management and product marketing, especially at later stage growth businesses or divisional teams at large companies. Between Kahuna (startup) and at SuccessFactors/SAP as GM (ginormous largeco) I’ve seen this play out […]
If Rebranding’s the Answer, What was the Question?
From time to time, every CMO faces a key question: to brand or not to rebrand? Often, it’s right after joining a company and you want to make a big splash. Sometimes, it’s after you’ve been with a company for a while and you and some told-timers are bored with the current branding and want […]
SaaS in Africa: 10 Things We Learned From Scaling to 1M Users (Video + Transcript)
Join Anish Shivdasani, CEO of Giraffe, as he provides unique African experiences learned from scaling to 1M users. Want to see more content like this? Join us at SaaStr Annual 2020. Anish Shivdasani, CEO @ Giraffe FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW How’s it guys? You guys good? How’s everyone feeling? Yeah, great. Awesome, man. It’s […]
10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective Of AI In Marketing
Top-performing companies are more than twice as likely to be using AI for marketing (28% vs. 12%) according to Adobe’s latest Digital Intelligence Briefing. Retailers are investing $5.9B this year in AI-based marketing and customer service solutions to improve shoppers’ buying experiences according to IDC. Financial Services marketers lead all other industries in AI application adoption, with 37% […]
All Platforms Have Their Favorite Partners. Be One Of Them If You Can.
Recently I was catching up with an exec from a SaaS company well in excess of $100m ARR. One of the key platforms their app integrates with has started to … slow down their access. Slow down access to new features, to semi-documented APIs. Slow down access to their team. In fact, the partner’s sales […]
