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About David Skok
How to make sure your sales forecast has been properly validated so it will stand up to test of time (and investor scrutiny). This blog post looks at the process that I would use as a board member or investor to validate a bookings forecast, checking to see if the key elements that are needed to support that forecast have been thought through properly.
An interview with Lesley Young, who was the VP of worldwide Sales for MySQL, and then head of sales for the MySQL division within Oracle. Few products are as well known as the ubiquitous MySQL database. The company behind the database was also one of the great success stories in the Open Source world, and [...]
Slides and video on “Building a Sales and Marketing Machine”, with a discussion on how to optimize your sales & marketing funnel.
I presented the following set of slides to the Mass TLC group as the keynote for the “SaaS Business Model Update — Creating and Managing Revenues” event. The slides should be useful for anyone interested in learning about the key drivers for a SaaS business, including the SaaS cash flow trough, cost of customer acquisition, [...]
Discusses the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS, or other subscription/recurring revenue businesses when they decide to scale their business by ramping sales and marketing. Provides an Excel spreadsheet model and PowerPoint slide deck that can be used by readers to model their own data.
Provides SaaS entrepreneurs with an Excel spreadsheet model and graphs that show the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS or subscription businesses that use a sales organization
Startups frequently make one of two mistakes: spending too much money, or spending too little money. A key job of the CEO is knowing where to set the startup accelerator pedal. In a recent series of three blog posts published in GigaOm, I discuss the three key phases of a startup lifecycle, and how each phase requires a different focus, and approach to spending.
Almost every sales and marketing funnel has blockage points where the conversion rates are lower than hoped, or the process cannot be scaled. This blog post talks about how to solve those blockage points using an intense study of the customer’s concerns, and brainstorming to see what motivations can be used to over come the friction that comes from these concerns.
If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.” I recently watched an outstanding presentation called “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek (embedded at the bottom [...]
Readers of this blog will likely really enjoy the following two presentations that discuss lessons learned by the founders of both DropBox and Xobni. There are lots of great lessons to be learned here.
This post looks at how sales complexity impacts the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) in B2B software and hardware companies. It also introduces a zone system for evaluating different startup sales models.
Looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down to expose the key metrics. Provides a detailed look at what management must focus on to drive a successful SaaS business.
Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. And great management teams know that the only way to improve a process is to start by measuring it. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In this post I hope to help show how to figure out which metrics matter the [...]
How Solidworks evolved its VAR management program into arguably the best in the world, by Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks
In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup [...]