Here is the slide deck that I presented last night at the Boston Lean Startup Circle.
The slide deck describes how to build a Sales & Marketing Machine that is predictable, scalable, automated, well instrumented, and cost efficient.
Many entrepreneurs have a strong suspicion that there is an opportunity in a particular market, but lack the detailed understanding of customer pain needed to design an appropriate solution. The following guest post by John Raguin, ex-CEO, and co-founder of Guidewire Software, describes how he and his co-founders tackled this problem. Continued…
We have just gone through the time of year when startups present their 2011 plans to their boards for approval. In many ways, these meetings are very similar to the meetings we have with new startups that have projections for how they believe their revenue will grow.
What I always find interesting in this process is looking at how the management team came up with the bookings forecast, and what steps they took to validate the number. In a lot of cases, the bookings target is determined using some rough top down logic like “We should be able to easily double the business this year” or “We’re similar to successful startup XYZ, and they hit $8m revenue in their third year, so we should be able to do the same.” What is surprising is how few companies do the work to validate their top down forecasts. Not surprisingly these are usually the companies that miss their forecast.
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 ended being acquired by Sun (now Oracle) for approx. $1 billion. Making money in Open Source businesses is a lot harder than it may appear on the outside. Lesley tells the story of how she and Zack Urlocker, running marketing partnered to solve the sales and marketing challenges that the company faced when trying to monetize MySQL. Continued…
Slides and video on “Building a Sales and Marketing Machine”, with a discussion on how to optimize your sales & marketing funnel. Presented as a HubSpot Webinar last week together with Mike Volpe, the VP of Marketing at HubSpot. Continued…
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, churn, lifetime value of the customer, etc. The slides also looks in detail at what drives growth. Continued…
This is the second part of a 2 part series that 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. These kinds of SaaS businesses face a cash flow problem in the early days, because they have to invest up front in sales and marketing expenses to acquire customers, and only get payments from those customers over a delayed period of time. Continued…
This post provides SaaS entrepreneurs with an Excel spreadsheet model and graphs that show the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS, or other subscription/recurring revenue businesses that use a sales organization. These kinds of SaaS businesses face a cash flow problem in the early days, because they have to invest up front in sales and marketing expenses to acquire customers, and only get payments from those customers over a delayed period of time. I refer to this phenomenon as the the SaaS Cash Flow Trough. The model also compares the cash flows of businesses that charge monthly to those that are able to charge their customers for a year’s payment in advance. Continued…
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. Continued…
This blog post focuses on how B2B companies can optimize their customer acquisition funnels using a customer-centric methodology to analyze and remove blockage points.
Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with the goal of converting prospective customers into paying customers. The process is often thought of as a funnel (see diagram above) where you pour in suspects at the top, and various steps in the process, some percentage of prospects successfully convert to the next stage, making the funnel narrower as the process evolves. Continued…
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 of this post). It inspired me to write about my own experiences as an entrepreneur that relate to his message: Continued…
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. Continued…
There is no question that success for the entrepreneur starts with a breakthrough (or at the very least great) product or service. Yet too often, entrepreneurs fall into the “field of dreams” mentality (in the words of Terence Mann, AKA James Earl Jones: “build it and they’ll come”). But the truth is that defining the product is just the beginning. Entrepreneurs must spend significant time thinking about the complexity of their sales process and the cost of customer acquisition, as these factors will strongly impact a company’s ability to make money and attract investors. Continued…
This blog post looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down layer by layer to expose the key metrics that will help drive success. Metrics for metric’s sake are not very useful. Instead the goal is to provide a detailed look at what management must focus on to drive a successful SaaS business. For each metric, we will also look at what is actionable. Continued…
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 most, and how to design them in such a way as to drive behavior that will lead to the results that you want. Continued…