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?
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.
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