Combining functions in a SaaS business is a terrible idea
Ok, here is the punch line: No two SaaS functions should be coupled together. Any combination forces conflicts of interest and while you and the board are busy charting out your world domination strategy, this dysfunctional org design will eat the company from the inside out. The long form: Combining Product and Engineering Why it’s a […]
The third decade at Salesforce
Congrats to Marc Benioff and team for twenty glorious years. $1 billion in annual revenues by end of first decade, $ 16 billion forecast bt the end of the second – what a rocket ship! He is also one heck of a generous, big hug kind of leader. I have enjoyed cataloging him and the […]
What It Takes to Make a Great SaaS Company
I’ve been making a few presentations of late, so I thought I’d share the slides to this deck which I presented earlier this week to the All Hands meeting of a high-growth SaaS company as part of their external speaker series. This one’s kind of a romp — it starts with some background on Kellblog […]
Are You Counting Payments as Renewals?
Enterprise SaaS has drifted to a model where many, if not most, companies do multi-year contracts on annual payment terms. How did we get here? Most enterprise SaaS products are high-consideration purchases. Buyers typically perform a thorough evaluation process before purchasing and are quite sure that the software will meet their needs when they deploy. […]
The coming Enterprise Software Hurricane
In interviewing SAP customers for the upcoming book, I ended up classifying them broadly into four groups. I termed the first three: a) Risk-takers who are trying out new Leonardo ML or IoT projects, developing new functionality with its Cloud Platform, moving to S/4HANA in the cloud; b) Modernizers who are moving to S/4 on […]
Price Qualification: The Tiffany Way
Most salespeople are familiar with so-called BANT qualification: does the prospect have Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe in order to make a purchase? While Solution Selling purists dislike BANT (arguing that it’s great way to find existing deals that have been already rigged for the competition), most sales organizations today use BANT, or some form of […]
Slides from My SaaStr Annual 2019 Presentation (5 Questions CEOs Struggle With)
Thanks to everyone who attended my session yesterday at the amazing — and huge — SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose. In this post, I’ll share the slides from my presentation, Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (and some thoughts on how to answer them). The folks at SaaStr recorded the session, so at […]
Rule of 40 Glideslope Planning
Enterprise SaaS companies need a lot of money to grow. The median company spends $1.32 to acquire $1.00 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) [1]. They need to make that investment for 14 years before getting to an IPO. It all adds up to a median of $300M in capital raised prior to an IPO. With such vast amounts […]
SaaStr 2019 Presentation Preview: Five Questions SaaS CEO Wrestle With
I’m super excited for the upcoming SaaStr Annual 2019 conference in San Jose from February 5th through the 7th at the San Jose Convention Center. I hope to see you there — particularly for my session from 10:00 to 10:30 on Tuesday, February 5th. Last year they ended up repeating my session but that won’t be […]
Signs of Spring in Enterprise Software
By Vinnie Mirchandani on February 4, 2019
The country is seeing a welcome break from the polar vortex. Temperatures remind us of Spring. Well, may not quite – winter is not done, but there is clear hope. It’s easy when you look at Wall Street’s reaction to Workday or ServiceNow results to forget reality. The reality is that there are over a […]
Posted in Trends & Concepts | Tagged Cloud Computing, Enterprise Software (IBM, Industry Commentary, microsoft, oracle, SaaS, sap