AI
More data, more GPUs, more everything: scaling is driving AI progress, but it doesn’t solve for efficiency. Why the brute-force era may evolve into a second phase where cost, architecture, and system design determine who captures the economic value.
Career
Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat. The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With, and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it
Customer Success
The concept of an ideal customer profile (ICP) has been around for a long time, but like its cousin, the minimum viable product (MVP), it is often misunderstood. In this post, I'll offer some background commentary on the ICP concept and then build into one of my favorite
Boards
I remember how silly the board looked that day. Reviewing the slide with performance by salesrep, an alpha board member impatiently shouted the seemingly obvious conclusion: "Look, only one rep -- Joe Schmedley -- is performing. Everyone else is struggling. The solution to our problem is quite simple: we need more
Demandgen
My marketing professor once said, The answer to every marketing question is, "It depends." Thus, the important part is knowing on what. So, how do you calculate the cost/opportunity? Well, it depends! On what? On the specific question you're trying to answer. When people ask
Demandgen
Why is it that when we want to add an account executive (AE) to the plan, we always think about some ratios but not others? For example, most people think: Boom! Then we're going to need: * 2/3rds of an sales consultant (SC) * 1/3rd of a sales
Entrepreneurship
Organization design seems a popular topic these days. Maybe it's the downturn. Maybe it's just planning season. But either way, many people are asking me questions about how to design their organizations for 2025 and beyond. Questions like: * Should marketing report into sales? * Should engineering and
Growth
Back in 2018, Rory O'Driscoll, a VC at Scale and the inventor of the SaaS magic number, came up with another important SaaS concept: the Mendoza line for SaaS growth. Taking an idea from baseball, the Mendoza line is a measure of "offensive futility" named after
Metrics
I was reading a SaaS benchmark report the other day and encountered this line: "Win rates declining [over the two-year period] from 23% to 19% might not seem all that significant. But in terms of required pipeline, it represents a dramatic shift from 4.3x to 5.3x
Boards
I'll be speaking next month in Barcelona on the first day of SaaStr Europa, held at the International Convention Center on June 7th and 8th. My presentation is scheduled at 11:25AM on June 7th and entitled The Top 5 Scale-Up Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.
SaaS
I think two demo practices are nearly universal these days and I'm not a big fan of either: * Using a demo as the primary call-to-action on a website [1] * Using demo as a sales cycle stage I discussed using demo as the primary website CTA in
Growth
In my new capacity as an EIR at Balderton Capital, I recently gave a presentation to a leadership meeting at a high-growth, Balderton-backed startup offering my perspectives on growth and the challenges that come with it. I discussed these five challenges: 1. Next-levelitis, an obsessive focus on