Inside Sales Best Practices: HubSpot – A Case Study
Best practices for inside sales managers. An interview with Mark Roberge, VP of Sales at HubSpot, discussing how he blends science and process with the art of selling.
HubSpot is a SaaS company selling Inbound Marketing software. HubSpot has grown …
When Selling is the Worst Way to Win Customers
Customers hate being sold to.
Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy something. But much of the time they are not ready to buy, and one of the most irritating things …
Scalable Pricing: A Key Tool For SaaS Success
Scalable pricing is a powerful tool to grow revenue in a SaaS or software business. It allows you to capture more of the revenue that your customers are willing to pay, without putting off smaller customers that are not able …
Measure Customer Engagement: Increase Conversion and Lower Churn
The goal of a SaaS CEO should be to increase the profit they make from each customer (LTV), and lower the costs in sales and marketing that it takes to acquire each customer (CAC). Measuring Customer Engagement is a key …
The Science behind Viral Marketing
The Science behind Viral Marketing is a look at the key factors that drive growth in viral marketing. (Hint, the most important factor is not the one everyone expects.) It also looks at what is needed to get virality to …
Brainstorming for New Startup Ideas: A Framework to Spur Creative Thinking
If you are a serial entrepreneur starting to look for an idea for your next startup, you are likely to want a way to stimulate your brain to come up with as many good ideas as possible. This blog post …
Cash is King: 8 tips to Optimize Fundraising Strategy
Introduction
This post aims to help startup CEOs optimize their funding strategy by examining how investors value startups, and explaining how to avoid the common cash management pitfalls.…
Slides on Building a Sales & Marketing Machine
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.
…A Case Study: Up Close and Personal for Product/Market Fit
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 …
How Investors Validate Your Bookings Forecast
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 MySQL solved their Sales & Marketing challenges
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 …
Building a Sales and Marketing Machine Webinar
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.…
SaaS Business Models – Slide Deck
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 …
SaaS Economics – Part 2: Scaling the Business
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 Economics – Part 1: The SaaS Cash Flow Trough
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 …
