Startup school: How to get unicorn money from a VC
For the right team, raising venture capital money can seem fast, simple, and easy. Here’s why it’s not that simple.
I Hired My VP of Marketing at $20k MRR. It Wasn’t a Week Too Early.
One of the starkest differences I see between First Timers in SaaS and Second Timers is when they hire their VP of Marketing. At BoxDev the other week (our post here), the contrast was especially vivid. Second-timer Shan Sinha, now CEO of Highfive hired his first head of marketing a year before first revenue. A […]
Your VP Sales Has a Sales Quota. Your VP Marketing Needs a Lead Quota. Period.
A ways back, we did an extremely popular post entitled, Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them. The basic idea was to help folks who haven’t hired a VP or Director of Marketing hire the right one for a […]
Is social media really a waste of time? Harvard professor gets it wrong
A prominent author tells brands that social media will not help their bottom line. Marketing leaders think differently.
Alignment: Your VP Sales and VP Marketing Should Be Your Mom and Dad of Revenue
A little while ago, Amanda from Lattice Engines interviewed SaaStr on Sales and Marketing Alignment and related topics. While I hate the term “alignment” from my days as a F500 VP, if the term every were to be used in a useful way in a SaaS start-up, it’s the way your VP Sales and VP […]
Fake Testimonial Tweets Teach an Enterprise Lesson
In an effort to boost its ad marketing platform aimed at television advertisers, Twitter fabricated positive comments from several users. The company apologized, but only after the SF Gate newspaper outed these fake testimonials. As Twitter well knows, user testimonials occupy a significant role in the worlds of both enterprise and business-to-business marketing. For technology vendors, […]
How to Solve the Biggest Frustration Marketers Have With Social
When polled 88% of marketing professionals said they couldn’t accurately measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and the majority said lack of ROI measurement is their single greatest frustration with social media (Forbes). If you look at the left side of the graphic you’ll see the easy, traditional measurement of followers, RTs, FAVs & […]
SaaS Marketing | Accelerating Customer Acquisition
Tweet Me! SaaS marketing professionals know that customer acquisition is the name of the game. What they generally don’t know is that sustainable SaaS growth requires accelerating customer acquisition. In the long run, acquiring more customers is not enough. Your SaaS marketing strategy must aim to acquire more customers, faster. Otherwise, churn wins and you […]
How Much Can You Really Spend on Marketing? (And The “Problem” With The S+M=ACV Axiom)
We recently put together a strawman First Sales Rep Comp Plan. Use it, modify it (or of course, ignore it) as you see fit. If you use a sales comp plan like ours, you’ll get one big benefit for planning purposes — you’ll know with a decent sense of precision what % of first year […]
Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks
Creating awareness for your brand and products is one of the lifebloods of technology startups yet in a world where so many companies are being created it becomes difficult to rise above the noise. Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled […]
CxO Talk episode 1: Guy Kawasaki on influence for APEs
CxO Talk, my new talk show with co-host Vala Afshar, debuted with a conversation on marketing and influence with author and investor Guy Kawasaki. Guy’s most recent book, titled APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, is a practical handbook for self-publishing a book and using social media to get the word out and sell copies. CxO Talk is […]
The Law of Attach Rates, And Why Partners Can’t Really Move the Needle For You (Directly)
I want to spend a little time on some learnings about Strategic Partners in SaaS. First, let me be clear — to make it in SaaS, you’re probably going to need to achieve real success with Strategic Partners. Because it takes a Village. And because your partners will likely, through integrations in particular, make your […]
A Little Less About Pricing. A Little More About Deal Size. Please.
It’s not that this is rocket science. It isn’t. But if you haven’t lived it, understand that Deal Size is the single most important factor in your SaaS business model. Because it will completely define how you do sales and marketing, and to a just somewhat lesser extent, prioritize feature development and product/engineering.
rPath Press Release: False Promise of PaaS and Impact on Businesses
To add context to the discussion and why I perceive rPath’s use of the term PaaS is actually a misuse of the term, I am posting a press release I got from them on May 9th 2012 with the above title and the content below. ################################################################## Is PaaS (Platform as a Service) an all-encompassing solution […]
Two Years Of OpenStack: Looking From The Other Side
Yesterday I wrote a post about OpenStack and talked about the concerns among the developers that there is too much emphasis given to marketing than engineering. Yesterday, we publicly came to know about how OpenStack developers from the original Anso Labs team are quitting Rackspace to Nebula, it raises some troubling questions. OpenStackers dismiss this […]
