Infor’s Vertical Journey
Five years ago, I wrote a note titled Infor: a grown-up sleath startup. I wrote about investments Charles Phillips and his team were making including those in ION middleware and in beautification its captive design agency Hook and Loop was bringing to the product, to its events and real estate. But I was particularly excited about […]
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 […]
A subdued SuccessConnect
Vegas has way of making people, how do you say it, exuberant. On one day there was the CHRO of SAP, Stefan Reis presenting to the press corps about moving his workforce systems to the cloud to manage the giant 90,000+ global employee base. The next day he is in god-awful trousers with planet Mars […]
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 […]
When Will We See an Open Platform to Connect People & Work?
I recently wrote about the difference between an application and a platform. As I wrote, “…most SaaS vendors are not platforms but merely providers of feature-rich applications”. I’ve noticed first hand two of the biggest challenges most enterprise SaaS vendors face today: 1) making it easy to integrate with and to third party applications and […]
What is the Difference Between an Application and a Platform and Why it Matters?
“Platform in King’s Cross train station under an arched glass roof” by Michał Parzuchowski Practically every SaaS vendor talks about their “platform”. Truth be told, most SaaS vendors are not platforms but merely providers of feature-rich applications. Why does this matter? Simply put, without an extensible, open platform, it will become increasingly difficult for application-only […]
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)
The Big Mistake You Might Be Making In Calculating Churn: Failing to Annualize Multi-Year ATR Churn Rates
Most of thinking, definitions, and formulas regarding SaaS unit economics is based on assumptions that no longer reflect the reality of the enterprise SaaS environment. For example, thinking in terms of MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is outdated because most enterprise SaaS companies run on annual contracts and thus we should think in terms of ARR […]
The Use of Ramped Rep Equivalents (RREs) in Sales Analytics and Modeling
How many times have you heard this conversation? VC: how many sales reps do you have? CEO: Uh, 15. But not really. VC: What do you mean, not really? CEO: Well, some of them are new and not fully productive yet. VC: How long does it take for them to fully ramp? CEO: Well, to […]
Tis the season for software lawsuits
By Vinnie Mirchandani on August 16, 2018
Oracle, SAP and Workday have all been hit with lawsuits in the last few weeks for very different reasons as I describe below. But first a preface – lawsuits draw a lot of attention but it’s usually wrong to extrapolate too much from them. Couple of perspectives on that: – A vendor once asked their […]
Posted in Business, Featured Posts | Tagged Cloud Computing, Enterprise Software (IBM, Industry Commentary, microsoft, oracle, SaaS, sap