Selling To Enterprise – Power Struggle Between IT And Line Of Business
During my several interactions with – CIOs, senior IT leaders, and Line of Business (LoB) heads – I have firsthand observed the power struggle between LoB and IT and a slow but continuous tarnish in their relationship due to cloud and SaaS offerings. IT and LoB work for the same company but they build their [...]
Cloud Channel Challenges – SaaS Channel Compensation
The SaaS subscription model shifts risk from the customer to the vendor. Shifting risk back onto SaaS channel partners can put them between a rock and hard place.
VC’s Gone Wild: Yes, Sometimes it is the Product
It’s not easy disagreeing with one of the most respected VC’s. In fact a lot of what Mark Suster writes in his Salespeople excuses post (also featured at TechCrunch) is accurate. But it’s what I call a Swiss cheese article. It looks good but is full of holes. Blaming the sales team is usually the [...]
Improving Sales: The Excuse Department is Closed
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales [...]
Ask not what your company can do for you, …?
John F Kennedy to me was one of the finest presidents of the US. Shot and killed before I was even born, but still. During his inaugural address on January 20th 1961, one of his now famous quotes was: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for [...]
SaaS Startup Strategy – Three SaaS Sales Models
Choosing the right go-to-market sales model for your SaaS startup can be a make it or break it decision. Choose right and you grow smoothly from seed funding to A round to B round and beyond. Choose wrong and you spend precious cycles chasing your tail as cash runs out. While most B2B SaaS startups [...]
Sales 2.0: The Swiss Army Knife Needs to be Expanded
Normally I leave the sales punditry to those trying to sell telemarketing services or the next greatest sales methodology. At times these sales to Sales pitches feel like the latest management fads I so often witnessed while working at A.T. Kearney. But occasionally a “sales” strategy” article motivates me to act. As he often does, [...]
Give Your Teams Swiss Army Knives
There is a transition in every company from a “seat of the pants” kind of entrepreneurial company to a “process driven” mechanized one. Many people who are successful in the former fare less well in the latter. Frankly, I’m much more of the former kind of guy and I tire of the routine process & [...]
Scaling Sales: Arming & Aiming – Objection Handling
This is part of a series on sales & marketing. The original post of this article on appeared on GigaOm in a more concise version here. I previously covered how early phase sales teams should be “evangelical” and consultative in nature. As a tech startup grows it needs to develop more process & management if [...]
Scaling Sales: Arming & Aiming – A’s, B’s & C’s
This article was originally posted in a much more concise version over GigaOm if you prefer the shorter version. This is part of my ongoing Sales & Marketing Series. In the first part of this post I talked about how sales in a startup is often evangelical, requires as consultative sale and needs constant adjustments based on [...]
Startup Sales – Why Hiring Seasoned Reps May Not Work
A while back I wrote a bunch of posts on Sales & Marketing and have been meaning to get back to that theme for a while. Even if you don’t have “direct” sales I would tell you that “everything is a sale” including fund raising, hiring, getting press and doing business development. So I hope [...]
Facebook: The Greatest CRM Platform in the World?
Ok, so it’s not exactly a fully fledged CRM system (yet) but when you compare the information you have on a client or lead in Salesforce with the information that Facebook has on the same person the difference and quality of information is mind-boggling. Not only that but Facebook permeates across the online world like [...]
Getting Past Passive
Okay, this is a bit of a rant, but here goes… I was reading this article this morning, and one sentence stood out: “Peter Drucker once said that ‘the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.’” The purpose of a business is to *create* a customer. As in actively bring to [...]
SaaS Product Marketing – Upgrade and Upsell Strategy
I think it would be hard to overemphasize the importance of upgrades and upsells in SaaS product marketing. In an industry where free trials, freemium versions, bargain basement subscription prices and simply hoping to recover customer acquisition cost with first year revenue are the norm, few things are sweeter than a customer that actually [...]
How Many Times Should You Tweet Your Blog Post?
Last September I was on a panel with Guy Kawasaki talking about Twitter. He said at the time that he Tweeted 4 times for every story that he wrote. FOUR TIMES! The exact same Tweet. I couldn’t believe it. His rationale was that he found that his audience was tuning into Twitter at several different [...]
