Here are some of my personal favorite and/or generally most popular posts over the years grouped by topic, with my all-time favorites in bold.
Career Development
- The Key to Working with Senior 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
- Are You a Challenging or Simply Difficult Direct Report?
- Simplifiers Go Far; Complexifiers Get Stuck
- Eight Words That Can Limit Your Career: Let me Get Back to You on That
- What to Look For in a Software Startup
Strategy
- Review of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
- Congratulations, You’ve Created a Category. Now What?
- Hope and Agility: The Revlon Test
- The Opportunity Quality / Execution Quadrant
- The Simple, Definitive One-Step Hot Market Test
- How to Get Your Startup a Halo
- Rule of 40 Glideslope Planning
- The Two Dimensions of Startup Performance
- The Market Leader Play: How to Run It, How to Respond
- What is a Minimum Viable Product, Anyway?
CEO
- A Ten-Point Framework for Managing B2B SaaS Sales
- The Question that CEOs Too Often Don’t Discuss with the Board
- Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (SaaStr 2019 presentation)
- Are We Growing Fast Enough?
- Reacting to Feedback as CEO
- Good CEO Habits: Proactively Update your Board at Quarter’s End
- Startup CEOs and the Three Doors
- A Note to the CEO: Drive the Board of Directors
- Why Execution Matters
Marketing
- Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier
- How to Build a Marketing Machine
- How To Develop A Marketing Message
- Marketing Vision While Selling Product: The 3+1 Repositioning
- Managing the Fundamental Tension in Marketing
- Marketing is Too Important to be Left to the Marketing Department
- The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS
- Dear Marketing: Stop Putting the Template Ahead of the Story
- Talking Competition: Methinks Thou Protest Too Much
- The Two Archetypal Marketing Messages: “Bags Fly Free” and “Soup is Good Food”
- If Rebranding’s the Answer, What Was the Question?
- The Sales/Marketing Expense Ratio
- Things Not to Do: Declare your Category Dead
- ABM is Not B2B and Other Rants on Account-Based Marketing
- Branded Features: Resist the Temptation
Management
- 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
- You Can Never Fire Someone Too Early
- The Three Golden Rules of Feedback
- On Hiring: Promote Stars, Not Strangers
- Not in My Kitchen You Don’t: Leaders as Norm Setters
- Everything I’ve Learned About Recruiting
- On the Perils of Taking Advice from Successful Businesspeople
SaaS and SaaS Metrics
- Churn is Dead, Long Live Net Dollar Retention (NDR)
- The Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio: Another Subtle SaaS Metric
- You Can’t Analyze Churn by Analyzing Churn
- The Ultimate SaaS Metric: LTV/CAC
- CAC Payback Period: The Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric
- The Four Levers of SaaS
- SaaS Startup One-Slide Financials Dashboard
- The Two Engines of SaaS: QCRs and DEVs
- Ten Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS (SaaStr 2018 talk)
Sales
- 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) in Sales Analytics and Modeling
- Measuring Ramped and Steady-State Sales Productivity: The Rep Ramp Chart
Pipeline
- 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 and Improve Forecasting
- The Self-Fulfilling 3x Pipeline Coverage Prophecy
Board of Directors
- 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: D&O Insurance, Indemnification Agreements, and Charter Provisions
- How to be a Good Independent Board Member
Silicon Valley
- Is Silicon Valley Reproducible?
- Ingres: Can You Ever Go Back?
- Interest Misalignment in Silicon Valley Startups
- The Curse of the Megaround
Culture
Selected Podcast Appearances
- Strategy in Hot and Cold Markets with Crispin Read of PMM Hive
- SaaShimi on SaaS Metrics 101 (comprehensive overview)
- SaaS Product Power Breakfast with Stephanie McReynolds on Category Creation
- B2B SaaS Metrics 2020 Benchmark Report: A Discussion with Ray Rike and The SaaS CFO
- The Private Equity Funcast with Jim Milbery (VC vs. PE)
- AI and the Future of Work with Dan Turchin (multi-topic romp)
- Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings (metrics)
- Yes, And Marketing with Steve Pockross
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Hi Dave,
I have a quick suggestion for you vis-a-vis ‘Best of Kellblog’:
Instead of listing just short titles of the posts above, can you not also include a brief description (and/or, may be, tags) corresponding to each post?
That way, readers (myself included) would be able to judge the topic of each post more accurately and can quickly get to the ones of their interest.
I truly value (and enjoy) reading this blog but since you write on many; fairly diverse topics, I’m sure implementing something like what I’ve suggested above would be quite useful (not just to me but to many others also, I’m sure).
Nice idea. Might help with SEO as well to be honest.
Also, Dave, the post (link) above with the title:
How To Develop A Marketing Message
returns your custom ‘Page not found’ (404 error) page – I guess you might want to fix that.
Thanks, fixed.
Trata de delegar la gestión de las redes en un personal muy formado en las mismas.