The 10-Year (And Longer) Customer
Salesforce likes to talk about “Customers for Life”, and while that’s sort of catchy, it’s a little hard to grok what it really means. It finally sunk in for me a bit the other day. At EchoSign, now Adobe Sign, there’s a large group of well-known customers that I closed, Back in The Day … […]
How Get Better at Recruiting. (We All Need To).
Recruiting is tough. I certainly don’t do it well enough. But to be a great CEO, you need to find a way to force yourself to be a great recruiter. Let me share some learnings, and what I do now to force myself to be a better recruiter. And what I wish I’d done better […]
Top Sales Lessons Scaling to $100m ARR: A Discussion with Zendesk, Atlassian and Optimizely at NextWorld Capital
The other day NextWorld Capital put on an outstanding event for SaaS founders and executives on Scaling to $100m ARR. I was asked to moderate a panel with three great speakers and SaaS companies — but with very different sales models. Atlassian is famously sort of traditional sales rep free (outside of its channel partners, and […]
Outbound Always Works
These days, it can really feel like the Old Bag of Sales Tricks is starting to just not work anymore: With maybe 500x the SaaS vendors of 10 years ago, there’s so much noise. Emails get blocked, spam filtered. No one even has voice mail anymore. 50 calls a day feels awfully dated. Everyone gets […]
7 Guidelines on Selling Some of Your Stock in a VC Round
These days, if you raise money at a >=$80m-100m valuation, and are oversubscribed, most bigger Silicon Valley VC firms will offer to provide some founder liquidity. It’s not out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s so they can buy more. Bigger funds want to own as much as they can, and if they can get another 2%-3% more […]
16 Rookie Errors Founders Make Pitching to VCs — And Passing the “20 Minute” Test
Pitching VCs is like anything. You’ll get better at it over time. Later, you’ll even get great at it. Once you know how it works, it’s not even that hard to knock it out of the park. But until then, so many founders make unforced errors. Rookie errors. Here are 16 that you can […]
BATNA – Why You are So Bad at Sales
The other day, a sales leader working out of the new SaaStr CoSellingSpace asked me how I got to be “so good at sales.” I’m not. You might think that after almost 3,000 answers on Quora, 300 blog posts, and 35,000 tweets. But I’m pretty bad at it. In fact, that’s why I have so […]
Why The Law of Large Numbers is Just an Excuse
Everyone has tough quarters, and usually, at least one tough year (more on that here). As we approach $10m, and then again as we approach $20m, and then again as we approach $X0m … we often blame a factor that I believe rarely is really real — The Law of Large Numbers. The Law of […]
The Top 10 Worst Pieces of SaaS Advice
Advice is very context sensitive, so take this post with a grain of salt. But for me, I thought I’d take a stab at the Top 10 Pieces of Classic SaaS Advice … that in my experience at least are usually Just Plain Wrong. The advice and thinking that leads you to make important mistakes there […]
Kristen Koh Goldstein (Scalus): 10 Things That Change When You Stop Bootstrapping (Video + Transcript)
(Less than 30 days to SaaStr Annual 2017. Do you have your tix yet?) You’ve finally done it – you received that big round of funding and you’re ready to say goodbye to your cash-starved bootstrapping days. But with all this new capital comes several hard truths you’ll have to face. Matt Holleran, General Partner […]
