
Future of SAP and SuccessFactors Consulting 2016 – SuccessFactors Talent Management (Part 3)
It has been another very eventful year in HR Technology and last year at this time, a group of friends and I collaborated to write The Future of SAP HCM and SuccessFactors Consulting – 2015. This year we split the report into a three-part series with the Future of SAP HCM On Premise Consulting – […]

Future of SAP and SuccessFactors Consulting 2016 – SuccessFactors Core HR, Payroll, Analytics, Platform, Concur (Part 2)
It has been another very eventful year in HR Technology and last year at this time, a group of friends and I collaborated to write The Future of SAP HCM and SuccessFactors Consulting – 2015. This year we split the report into a three-part series with the recently released Future of SAP HCM On Premise […]

SAP and SuccessFactors HR2016 and a Special Discount Code
The 15th Annual SAP HR2016 Conference will be held in Las Vegas from February 23 – 26 at the Las Vegas Wynn hotel. It is regularly considered, along with SuccessConnect, one of premier events for SAP and SuccessFactors professionals, consultants and customers. There are more than 130 sessions, 50 exhibitors, 20 case studies, 32 hours […]

SaaS Marketing | SaaS Customer Aligment Ebook!
When your SaaS business is well aligned, your SaaS customers consistently take positive actions that lead to positive business outcomes: they try, they buy, they upgrade and they refer you to a friend. When you are poorly aligned, your SaaS customers consistently take negative actions that lead to negative business outcomes: they bounce, they negotiate, […]

The Missed Opportunity of Agile SaaS
As the launch date approaches for Markodojo, my agile marketing SaaS startup, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my SaaS experiences have shaped my thinking on agile management, and visa versa. SaaS and agile present complementary aspects that enable a uniquely symbiotic relationship. Agile aims to help businesses increase responsiveness to customer needs, while […]

Finding SaaS Product-Market Fit
Finding product-market fit is a central, early stage challenge of every startup. SaaS startups, however, have unique advantages. Unlike consumer Internet products, SaaS products are essential business tools. SaaS customers take them very seriously. SaaS customers want to provide feedback and they want to see that feedback acted upon in a timely fashion. In other […]

Aligning SaaS Customer Success
SaaS businesses develop intimate, long term relationships with their SaaS customers. Keeping that relationship positive and aligned over the years is a real challenge. In fact, many public SaaS companies have yet to turn a profit. If they don’t keep their customers around for years, then all that capital invested in customer acquisition will have […]

Dirty Consulting Secrets and Tips to be a Smart Customer
This is a topic I have felt very passionate about over the years and was glad that Bill Kutik gave Luke Marson and I an opportunity to share our thoughts. Would love to hear your thoughts as a customer, vendor or consulting firm on your experiences. (Cross-posted @ SCN)

David Sacks (Yammer) Stewart Butterfield (Slack): Unicorns or Bust
Missed the 2015 SaaStr Annual? We’ve got you covered! We’re publishing the full series of both the videos and transcripts from all of the 2015 sessions. Today we’ve got David Sacks, Co-founder of PayPal and Yammer, now COO at Zenefits, and Stewart Butterfield, President/Co-founder of Slack, where we had a wide-ranging, 40 minute discussion on […]

Aligning SaaS Customer Acquisition
SaaS businesses can be overwhelmingly complex. If the multi-tenant, cloud-based technology isn’t enough, there’s the recurring revenue model which creates all kinds of challenges from accounting to sales compensation to funding. Then, there’s the marketing. Getting noticed on the Internet gets harder every year and almost every SaaS product category has a crowded field of […]

“Everyone’s Freaking Out About Quarterly Quotas”
In SaaS companies in the very wide band from ~$1m to $40m ARR or so, the debate over Quarterly vs. Monthly Quotas comes up all the time. And it especially comes up when you hire your First VP of Sales, because odds are, he or she will want to move from Monthly to Quarterly Quotas. And […]

We All Get To Our First 50 Customers Our Own Way. Then It’s All The Same.
Recently I was fortunate enough to moderate the founders panel at BoxDev ’15. We had 5 great founder-CEOs on the panel, all post-Initial Traction (all 50+ employees), but with very diverse backgrounds and stories. Everyone got to $1m in ARR a different way. Some were first timers, several were second timers. I don’t think […]

It’s time to reconsider, Google
Almost a year ago, Google made an apparently small change to Google Calendar. They started automatically adding Google Hangout video links to every new appointment. And it was bad. I’m sure you’ve all seen appointments like this pop up in your calendar. How do you join the meeting? Do you dial the phone number, or […]

5 Tips to Grow 10-20% Faster Than Plan in ’15
It’s time to do a series of posts on SaaSt to sort of … kick your arse a bit. What I mean by that, is that no matter how well you are doing post-Initial Traction in SaaS … you can almost always do at least 10-15% better. Pretty much almost always. Because there’s almost always more […]

Negative Churn
In a board meeting yesterday, we had a brief discussion around “negative churn”. Negative churn is a catchy phrase and apparently a hot-topic in some SaaS circles. I like some of the concepts and disciplines that an understanding of negative churn implies, but I also think it is an unnecessary concept that actually makes it […]