Best of Kellblog

Revised 1/23/26

Here are some of my personal favorite and/or most popular posts over the years grouped by topic, with my all-time favorites in bold.  Sorry it's so long, but I'm plucking from nearly 800 posts here!

Boards

• How to Present an Operating Plan to Your Board
• How To Present a Quarterly Sales Forecast to Your Board
• The First Three Slides of Your SaaS Board Deck
• How to Lead a Strategic Board Discussion
• The Triangle of Director Protections
• How to be a Good Independent Board Member
• The Board/Boss Delusion
• The Proper Role of a Board Observer

Career

• Six Principles to Optimize Your Results and Your Career
• The Key to Working with Execs:  Answer the Question
• If Marc Benioff Carried a Rabbit's Foot, Would You?
• Some High-Tech Career Counseling Tips
• What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP
• Simplifiers Go Far; Complexifiers Get Stuck

CEO

• A CEO's Guide to GTM Troubleshooting
• The CEO's Job Description in Reductionist Form
• A CEO's Guide to Marketing
• A Ten-Point Framework for Managing B2B SaaS Sales
• Are We Growing Fast Enough?
• Reacting to Feedback as CEO
• Startup CEOs and the Three Doors
• Why Execution Matters
• What Founders Need to Understand About Product Marketing
• Three Ways to get Fired as CEO

Culture (and People)

• A Short Missive on Culture
• Let's Take the Cult out of Culture
• How to Know if you Have the Right Execs on Your Team
• Everything I've Learned About Recruiting
• The Three Golden Rules of Feedback
• On Hiring:  Promote Stars, Not Strangers
• Eleven Words to Reduce Politics in Your Organization

Marketing

• Navigating the Mythical Sea of Sameness
• Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier
• How to Build a Marketing Machine
• Does Your Marketing Pass the Duck Test?
• How To Develop A Marketing Message
• Marketing Vision While Selling Product
• Managing the Fundamental Tension in Marketing
• Marketing is Too Important to be Left to the Marketing Department
• The Evolution of Marketing
• The Decomposition of Marketing
• Dear Marketing:  Stop Putting the Template Ahead of the Story
• The Two Archetypal Marketing Messages
• If Rebranding's the Answer, What Was the Question?
• The Sales/Marketing Expense Ratio
• Branded Features:  Resist the Temptation

Management

• Design Your Organization for the Conflicts you Want to Hear About
• Veterans vs. Up-and-Comers in Startups
• The Mythical World-Class Manager
• Sayings to Beware:  The Future of the Company
• Management and Bill Walsh's Three Types of Players
• Conflict Avoidance Causes Conflict
• I Don't Want to Talk to You Anymore
• Whose Team is it Anyway?  The 90 Day Rule
• Not in My Kitchen You Don't:  Leaders as Norm Setters

Pipeline

• Why Great Marketers Look at Pipeline Coverage
• What Does Pipeline Coverage Mean with a 30-day Sales Cycle?
• Target Pipeline Coverage is not the Inverse of your Win Rate
• The Pipeline Progression Chart
• The Four Sources of Pipeline and the Balance Across Them
• The Pipeline Chicken or Egg Problem
• What to do When You Need Pipeline in a Hurry
• Using Pipeline Conversation Rates as Triangulation Forecasts
• Using To-Go Coverage to Better Understand Pipeline
• The Self-Fulfilling 3x Pipeline Coverage Prophecy

SaaS (and Metrics)

• How to Calculate Cost per Opportunity
• Aligning Product and GTM with Metrics
• The Mental Mapping from Annual to Monthly SaaS Metrics
• The Top 7 Marketing Metrics for a QBR or Board Meeting
• You Can't Fix a CAC Payback Period
• Churn is Dead, Long Live Net Dollar Retention (NDR)
• The Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio:  Another Subtle SaaS Metric
• SaaS Startup One-Slide Financials Dashboard
• The Ultimate SaaS Metric:  LTV/CAC
• CAC Payback Period:  The Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric
• The Two Engines of SaaS:  QCRs and DEVs
• Ten Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS (SaaStr 2018)
• The Strategic Use and Abuse of SaaS Metrics (SaaStr 2023)

Sales

• Your ICP Starts as an Aspiration and Becomes a Regression
• Who to Hire as the First Salesperson in your Startup
• The Founder's Guide to B2B Sales
• GTM Troubleshooting: Let's Take it from the Top
• Do You Need a Sales Playbook or Just a Few Plays?
• How to Use a Steady-State Funnel to Fix a Broken GTM Motion
• How to Make and Use a Proper Bookings Capacity Model
• The Holy Grail of Enterprise Sales:  The Repeatable Sales Process
• The Two High-Level Questions About Sales
• How to Train Your Sales VP to Think About the Forecast
• Can You Solution Sell without Selling Solutions?
• Win Rates, Close Rates, and Milestone vs. Flow Analysis
• The Use of Ramped Rep Equivalents (RREs)
• Measuring Sales Productivity: The Rep Ramp Chart

Silicon Valley

• Is Silicon Valley Reproducible?
• Ingres: Can You Ever Go Back?
• Interest Misalignment in Silicon Valley Startups
• The Curse of the Megaround

Strategy

• Playing to Win vs. Playing to Make Plan
• Please God, Don't Run your own Race
• Strategy as a Series of Beliefs
• How to Detect if Your Startup has a Faux Focus
• Fighting Envelopment Strategies
• Review of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
• Playing Bigger vs. Playing to Win
• Congratulations, You've Created a Category.  Now What?
• Hope and Agility: The Revlon Test
• The Market Leader Play:  How to Run It, How to Respond
• The Simple, Definitive One-Step Hot Market Test
• What is a Minimum Viable Product, Anyway?