“Always Scrubbing the Pipeline” Means “Never Scrubbing the Pipeline.”
Perhaps you’ve seen this movie: CEO: “Wow the quarterly pipeline dropped 20% this week. What’s going on sales VP?” Sales VP: “Well, that’s because we cleaned it up this week.” CEO: “That sounds great, but you said that last week.” VP of Sales: “Well, that’s because we scrubbed it then, too.” CEO: “So shouldn’t it […]
Beyond CRM
We should start discussing what’s beyond CRM. I chose the word beyond advisedly. CRM is far, far from dead or even in decline so after would be completely incorrect. But CRM has already changed so much that it may be time for a rethink. Also, many of the tangential technologies that have turbocharged CRM in […]
Can You Scale Sales in the Bay Area? $30k ACV is Probably The Cut-Off
Silicon Valley / SF has gotten incredibly expensive. Rents, salaries, and perhaps most importantly, turnover. I’ve invested in 5 French start-ups. SF costs 2x Paris, fully burdened. It’s crazy. And sales teams have gotten particularly expensive, because they don’t quite scale the same way engineers do. You can pay great engineers a ton, eventually, because […]
How to Walk From a Deal
Like it or not, once in a while it’s appropriate for a vendor to walk away from a prospective deal. Why might you want to do that? You think your product is a poor fit with the customer’s needs. You believe there is insufficient budget to achieve success on the project. You feel like the […]
Quota Over-assignment and Culture
Here’s a great slide from the CFO Summit at Zuora’s 2017 annual flagship Subscribed event. Since they talk about this as under-assignment, since people aren’t great at flipping fractions in their head, and since I think of this more intuitively as over-assignment, I’m going to invert this and turn it into a pie chart. So, here you […]
Using Pipeline Conversion Rates as Triangulation Forecasts
In this post we’ll examine how we to use pipeline conversion rates as early indicators of your business performance. I call such indicators triangulation forecasts because they help the CEO and CFO get data points, in addition to the official VP of Sales forecast, that help triangulate where the company is going to land. Here […]
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 […]
Win Rates, Close Rates and Milestone vs. Flow Analysis
Hey, what’s your win rate? It’s another seemingly simple question. But, like most SaaS metrics, when you dig deeper you find it’s not. In this post we’ll take a look at how to calculate win rates and use win rates to introduce the broader concept of milestone vs. flow analysis that applies to conversion rates […]
Field Sales: When Domain Expertise Does Matter. Just Don’t Over-index.
Imagine you are selling a $100,000+ product and you yourself as CEO/founders have limited knowledge selling to the customer base. You’ll be very tempted to hire someone with a seemingly magical rolodex. What doesn’t work for sure is hiring someone with (x) no domain expertise who also (y) has also only sold small (e.g, $10k) […]
Jennifer Tejada (CEO, PagerDuty): How Selling Sunny Delight and Software are Similar 5 Truths of B2B2C (Video + Transcript)
Who knew that selling Sunny D would help Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, learn how to sell software? Jennifer shares a humorous story about a grocery store, her grumpy customer, and five truths that will help you sell better regardless of your market. One thing you should definitely try to avoid is getting caught with […]
