Can you accelerate a sale?
I haven’t sold for a living in almost 20 years but then again as an independent analyst I am always selling my ideas. I’ve also studied selling for a long time both as a rep and now as someone who tries to understand how we apply technology to a very human-to-human process; I think my […]
Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6, getting beyond the blinking cursor into the application layer
There’s a new release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry out this week. We’ve been seeing great pick-up from customers, and the nature of conversations I’ve been seeing while visiting them has been changing from operations, IaaS-driven topics to discussions about improving application development and delivery. This release also reflects that shift “up the stack.” Here’s my […]
See How Far Your VPs Can Take You. You May Be Surprised.
The other day, I met with a great founder who talked with me about how he was about to top his VP of Sales. This VP had gotten him from $0 to $1.5m in ARR in pretty short order, recruiting a great small team of reps under her, and had really nailed the formula. But […]
Doesn’t appear there is really a way out of short-term business thinking
In a book excerpt released by McKinsey , they provide a perspective about what it will take to shift markets away from a short-term way of thinking. They pulled together a range of heavy weights to talk about their opinions on this topic. Nitin Nohria – focused on the CEO and their “crush of immediate concerns”. This […]
Don’t Forget the Services Revenue
If you’re doing SaaS for the first time (or even the second), the whole idea of charging for “Services” may seem an anathema. It sure did to me. If your product is so easy to use that you barely need sales people, why in the world would I need to charge for implementation? For support? For […]
Why You’ll Need Just about $3,000,000 to Build Your First Real Sales & Marketing Team
Every week, I meet with several entrepreneurs, often bootstrapped or close to it, who fit the following sort of model: Gotten to Initial Traction (~$1.5m ARR), or getting close to it, or a bit beyond; and With nice growth (>=100% YoY); and Company isn’t really burning much cash because The CEO basically is the VP […]
“The Predictable Revenue Guide To Tripling Your Sales” by Aaron Ross and Jason M. Lemkin — Download Part 1 Now!
Ok, this will be fun. Aaron Ross and I are putting together “The Predictable Revenue Guide to Tripling Your Sales”. Aaron created and led the original outbound sales team at Salesforce and is well known to most SaaS entrepreneurs and executives. His last book on Predictable Revenue has become the key handbook for most SaaS founders […]
Burn Baby Burn: A Look at the Box S-1
I’m pretty busy this week so I was hoping not to dive into the Box S-1, but David Cummings’ excellent summary served only to whet, as opposed to satiate, my appetite. Perhaps it was the $168M FY14 operating loss. Maybe it was the $380M in financing raised during the last three years. Or the average quarterly burn rate […]
The Order to Cash Subscription Process
Subscription companies face many of the same challenges that more conventional companies face but the nature of these businesses puts an entirely different spin on the challenges. All companies have to acquire new customers, make products and price them attractively without leaving money on the table. Also, once a product is purchased, a company needs […]
Prisoners, And Why It Doesn’t Really Matter Your App Is So Hard to Rip Out
There are two things I see SaaS entrepreneurs who are post-Traction and post-Scale say again and again: We’re So Sticky. Once we’re in, it’s so hard to rip us out. Our Churn is Basically Zero in the Enterprise. We’re doing great because No One Leaves. If you’re coming from a Freemium background, or B2C, that […]
