Lost and Founder: A Painful Yet Valuable Read
Some books are almost too honest. Some books give you too much information (TMI). Some books can be hard to read at times. Lost and Founder is all three. But it’s one of the best looks I’ve seen when it comes to giving the reader a realistic look at the inside of Silicon Valley startups. […]
How To Present a Quarterly Sales Forecast to Your SaaS Company Board
While most companies put real thought into how they present numbers in their post-quarter board decks and other management reports, one area in which you’ll find a lack of discipline is in how they present quarterly sales forecasts to the board. They’re typically done as a quick update email to the board. They’ll usually mention […]
Using “Win Themes” to Improve Your Sales Management and Increase Win Rates
At most sales review meetings what do you hear sales management asking the reps? Questions like these: What stage is this opportunity in? What value do you have it at in the pipeline? Is there upside to that value? What forecast category is it in? In what quarter will it close? What competitors are in […]
Reflections
I woke up early on Saturday – and sat with a cup of coffee in our backyard, and saw this beautiful reflection. Of course I had to take a photo Friday was an incredibly busy day. I had to wake up at 4AM EST in NY to catch a flight home. I hadn’t slept much […]
The Three Types of Customer Success Manager
Since we’re now officially in 2019 planning season, I’ve been thinking about — among other things — our Customer Success model for next year and talking with friends in my network about that. Since Customer Success is (sadly, perhaps) still a relatively new discipline in enterprise software companies, I’d say the whole field is evolving […]
Why doesn’t anyone act on your ideas?
One of the top reasons people get frustrated at work – and sometimes leave their current role – is that they have bright ideas on what their company should do, and yet no one in their leadership does anything about it. I have been on several sides of this problem over my career – I […]
Towards Progressive Delivery
At RedMonk we generally try to avoid coming up with new terms for technologies and trends – after all, where there is an available term in common use why not just adopt it?. The pragmatic approach means we often end up using terms that seem kind of silly (Ajax, noSQL, Serverless, Cloud even) , but […]
Some thoughts on Docker post DockerCon 2018
Some impressions from DockerCon. It’s been a month or so since the event, but I didn’t need to be first with coverage. Docker is increasingly a context for business to get done. It struck me for example was how busy the exhibition hall was. Vendors I spoke to with booths were very happy with the […]
The Big Mistake You Might Be Making In Calculating Churn: Failing to Annualize Multi-Year ATR Churn Rates
Most of thinking, definitions, and formulas regarding SaaS unit economics is based on assumptions that no longer reflect the reality of the enterprise SaaS environment. For example, thinking in terms of MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is outdated because most enterprise SaaS companies run on annual contracts and thus we should think in terms of ARR […]
The Use of Ramped Rep Equivalents (RREs) in Sales Analytics and Modeling
How many times have you heard this conversation? VC: how many sales reps do you have? CEO: Uh, 15. But not really. VC: What do you mean, not really? CEO: Well, some of them are new and not fully productive yet. VC: How long does it take for them to fully ramp? CEO: Well, to […]
