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
- 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
CEO
- The Question that CEOs Too Often Don’t Discuss with the Board
- Five Questions SaaS CEOs Wrestle With (SaaStr 2019 presentation)
- 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
- The First Three Slides of Your SaaS Board Deck
Marketing
- How To Develop A Marketing Message
- Things Not to Do: Declare your Category Dead
- Marketing Tip of the Day: Never Say “Very”
- 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?
Management
- The Great Dysfunctional Corporate Budgeting Process
- Veterans vs. Up-and-Comers in Startups
- Defending Weak People
- 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
- Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Moving Into Management
- Not in My Kitchen You Don’t: Leaders as Norm Setters
SaaS and SaaS Metrics
- The Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio: Another Subtle SaaS Metric
- You Can’t Analyze Churn by Analyzing Churn
- Don’t Be a Metrics Slave
- 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
- A Fresh Look at How to Measure SaaS Churn Rates
- The Two Engines of SaaS: QCRs and DEVs
- Ten Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS (SaaStr 2018 talk)
- Bookings vs. Billings in a SaaS Company
- The Big Mistake You Might be Making in Calculating Churn
- My Final Verdict on Multi-Year Prepaid Deals
Sales
- The Self-Fulfilling 3x Pipeline Coverage Prophecy
- 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
- Using Pipeline Conversation Rates as Triangulation Forecasts
- Quota Overassignment and Culture
- How to Walk from a Deal
- The Use of Ramped Rep Equivalents (RREs) in Sales Analytics and Modeling
- How To Present a Quarterly Sales Forecast to Your SaaS Company Board
- Measuring Ramped and Steady-State 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
Culture
Podcast Appearances
- The Private Equity Funcast with Jim Milbery (VC vs. PE)
- SaaShimi on SaaS Metrics 101 (comprehensive overview)
- AI and the Future of Work with Dan Turchin (multi-topic romp)
- Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings #2 (financing and PE exits)
- Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings #1 (metrics)
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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.