Best of Kellblog

Revised 2/5/23

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.

Boards

• Did Your Board Order a Proposal or Discussion?
• 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

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
• Eight Words That Can Limit Your Career
• What to Look For in a Software Startup

CEO

• A CEO’s Guide to Marketing
• The Question that CEOs Too Often Don’t Discuss with the Board
• A Ten-Point Framework for Managing B2B SaaS Sales 
• Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With
• Are We Growing Fast Enough?
• Reacting to Feedback as CEO
• Startup CEOs and the Three Doors
• Why Execution Matters

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

• Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier
• How to Build a Marketing Machine
• 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
• ABM is Not B2B
• 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
• Not in My Kitchen You Don’t:  Leaders as Norm Setters

Podcasts

• Cash and Burn with Brendon Brandon Metcalf on CEO challenges
• SaaS Product Power Breakfast on category creation
• AI and the Future of Work 2023 Predictions with Dan Turchin
• Strategy in Hot and Cold Markets with Crispin Read
• SaaShimi on SaaS Metrics 101 with Aznaur Midov
• Metric Stack on cash conversion score and related metrics
• Demandgen Visionaries on making sales easier
• The Private Equity Funcast with Jim Milbery on PE vs. VC
• Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings on metrics
• Metrics That Measure Up with Ray Rike

Pipeline

• 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)

• 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
• You Can’t Analyze Churn by Analyzing Churn
• 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 talk)

Sales

• The Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales
• 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

• 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
• The Two Dimensions of Startup Performance
• What is a Minimum Viable Product, Anyway?