It’s Never Too Late to Go Upmarket
The other day put out a post on SaaStr about “How to Build a $100 Billion SaaS Company”. While Salesforce is the only $100b+ SaaS company today, there are ~15 more gunning for $100b in valuation, which means $100b isn’t “outlier” status anymore. It’s achievable. Check it out here: How to Build a $100 Billion […]
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 The Downturn Will Probably Look Like in SaaS
So, despite SaaS multiple and the public markets being at near record highs, we’ve seen things start to … wobble a bit overall in tech: The WeWork IPO simply failed, and the Peloton and Direct Smile IPOs were broken. No one really expected this. Having a high profile IPO like this fail is a bit […]
Stopping Inception Churn: The Prospective Customer Success Review
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had flat refused to implement. (Huh?) […]
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% […]
If Your Enterprise Customers Want An SLA — Just Give It To Them. You Owe Them That Much.
Many start-ups and even larger SaaS customers are reluctant to provide a Service Level Agreement — an SLA — that says they will, well, stay up. It’s not our fault, they think. What if Amazon goes down? Or our email provider? That’s not our fault. The lawyers tell you to try to not to do […]
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 […]
My head’s SPINning with storytelling acronyms
Sam Sethi’s podcast A few days ago I was the latest victim on Sam Sethi’s Marlow FM 97.5 radio show and podcast – Sam Talks Technology (and there’s a Facebook group here). Sam and I go way back to the start of the London social media scene in the mid 2000s and it was a […]
