How To Get Your Startup a Halo
How would you like your startup to win deals not only when you win a customer evaluation, but when you tie — and even sometimes when you lose? That sounds great. But is it even possible? Amazing, yes — but you need have a halo effect working to your advantage. What is a halo effect? Per […]
How Do You Beat a VC’s Best Companies?
I read a great article by Tomasz Tunguz recently called, “The Best Content Marketers In The World.” Content Marketing is literally the engine that powers my bootstrapped business: CNCCookbook. It provides me with a very nice living (income on par with public company executives not counting their stock sales) and has grown quickly and consistently […]
Don’t Start a Customer Relationship with a Lie
As a manager, I like to make sure that every quarter that each of my direct reports has written, agreed-to goals. I collect these goals in a Word document, but since that neither scales nor cascades well, I’ve recently been looking for a simple SaaS application to manage our quarterly Objectves and Key Results (OKRs). […]
The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was to use the chart to […]
It’s Time to Transform ERP into a Systems of Engagement
The IT industry has steadily been moving beyond its roots in data management and record keeping for a few decades now, approximately since the advent of corporate e-mail. As I’ve tracked over the years, this trend is more broadly known as the shift from systems of record to systems of engagement. Over the years, we’ve […]
Seven Universal Factors Why Technology Firms Fail
Hubris Drives Most Tech Firm Failures After observing the technology industry for two decades, one can’t help but identify a recurring theme – the beginning of the end of a technology vendor. While most firms do not endure a mass failure and come back to life like Apple did with Steve Jobs or transform business […]
Dynamic Leadership – A Responsive And Responsible Approach #Davos17 #WEF
Today’s Leadership Models Fail To Address Responsive And Responsible Leadership The World Economic Forum kicks off January 17th to 20th in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. As the global theme for the annual meeting, responsive and responsible leadership begins a lofty conversation about the qualities required to bring generations together, create inclusiveness in growth opportunities, and to bridge […]
Using Online Community for Digital Transformation
Driving successful change in a large organization has always been one of the most difficult activities in business. But for those who are principally tasked with carrying their organizations forward into the digital future, they are currently facing perhaps the single most challenging large-scale enterprise activity of our time. One has only to look at […]
EPM: Now More Than Ever
The theme of my presentation at past spring’s Host Analytics World was that EPM is needed in fair, foul, or uncertain weather. While EPM is used differently in fair and foul weather scenarios, it is a critical navigational instrument to help pilot the business. For example, in tougher times: You’re constantly re-forecasting You’re doing expense reduction modeling […]
How to Manage Your First Sales VP at a Startup
One of the hardest hires — and one of the hardest jobs — is to be the first VP of sales at a startup. Why? There is no history / experience Nobody knows what works and what doesn’t work The company may not have a well defined strategy so it’s hard to make a go-to-market […]
