Category Archives: Strategy

How To Get Your Startup a Halo

Posted on May 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

How would you like your startup to win deals not only when you win a customer evaluation, but when you tie — and even sometimes when you lose?

That sounds great.  But is it even possible?  Amazingly, yes — but you need have a halo effect working to your advantage.  What is a halo effect?  Per Wikipedia,

The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an observer’s overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that entity’s character or properties

There’s a great, must-read book (The Halo Effect) on the how this and eight other related effects apply in business.  The book is primarily about how the business community makes incorrect attributions about “best practices” in culture, leadership, values, and process that are subsequent to — but were not necessarily drivers of — past performance.

I know two great soundbites that summarize the phenomenon of pseudo-science in business:

  • “All great companies have buildings.” Which comes from the (partly discredited) Good To Great that begins with the observation that in their study cohort of top-performing companies that all of them had buildings — and thus that simply looking for commonalities among top-performing companies was not enough; you’d have to look for distinguishing factors between top and average performers.
  • “If Marc Benioff carried a rabbit’s foot, would you?”  Which comes from a this Kellblog post where I make the point that blindly copying the habits of successful people will not replicate their outcome and, with a little help from Theodore Levitt, that while successful practitioners are intimately familiar with their own beliefs and behaviors, that they are almost definitionally ignorant of which ones helped, hindered, or were irrelevant to their own success.

Now that’s all good stuff and if you stop reading right here, you’ll hopefully avoid falling for pseudo-science in business.  That’s important.  But it misses an even bigger point.

Has your company ever won (or lost) a deal because of:

  • Perceived momentum?
  • Analyst placement on a quadrant or other market map?
  • Perceived market leadership?
  • Word of mouth as the “everyone’s using it” or “next thing” choice?
  • Perceived hotness?
  • Vibe at your events or online?
  • A certain feeling or je ne sais quoi that you were more (or less) preferred?
  • Perceived vision?

If yes, you’re seeing halo effects at work.

Halo effects are real.  Halo effects are human nature.  Halo effects are cognitive biases that tip the scales in your favor.  So the smart entrepreneur should be thinking:  how do I get one for my company?  (And the smart customer, how can I avoid being over-influenced by them?  See bottom of post.)

In Silicon Valley, a number of factors drive the creation of halo effects around a company.  Some of these are more controllable than others.  But overall, you should be thinking about how you can best combine these factors into an advantage.

  • Lineage, typically in the form of previous success at a hot company (e.g., Reid Hoffman of PayPal into LinkedIn, Dave Duffield of PeopleSoft into Workday).  The implication here (and a key part of halo effects) is that past success will lead to future success, as it sometimes does.  This one’s hard to control, but ceteris paribus, co-founding (even somewhat ex post facto) a company with an established entrepreneur will definitely help in many ways, including halo effects.
  • Investors, in one of many forms:  (1) VC’s with a strong brand name (e.g., Andreessen Horowitz), (2) specific well known venture capitalists (e.g., Doug Leone), (3) well known individual investors (e.g., Peter Thiel), and to a somewhat lesser extent (4) visible and/or famous angels (e.g., Ashton Kutcher). The implication here is obvious, that the investor’s past success is an indication of your future success.  There’s no doubt that strong investors help build halo effects indirectly through reputation; in cases they can do so directly as well via staff marketing partners designed to promote portfolio companies.
  • Investment.  In recent years, simply raising a huge amount of money has been enough to build a significant halo effect around a company, the implication being that “if they can raise that much money, then there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.” Think Domo’s $690M or Palantir’s $2.1B.   The media loves these “go big or go home” stories and both media and customers seem to overlook the increased risk associated with staggering burn rates, the waste that having too much capital can lead to, the possibility that the investors represent “dumb money,” and the simple fact that “at scale” these businesses are supposed to be profitable.  Nevertheless, if you have the stomach, the story, and the connections to raise a dumbfounding amount of capital, it can definitely build a halo around your company.  For now, at least.
  • Valuation.  Even as the age of the unicorn starts to wane, it’s undeniable that in recent years, valuation has been a key tool to generate halos around a company.  In days of yore, valuation was a private matter, but as companies discovered they could generate hype around valuation, they started to disclose it, and thus the unicorn phenomenon was born.  As unicorn status became increasingly de rigeur, things got upside-down and companies started trading bad terms (e.g., multiple liquidation preferences, redemption rights) in order to get $1B+ (unicorn) post-money valuations.  That multiplying the price of a preferred share with superior rights by a share count that includes the number of lesser preferred and common shares is a fallacious way to arrive at a company valuation didn’t matter.  While I think valuation as a hype driver may lose some luster as many unicorns are revealed as horses in party hats (e.g., down-round IPOs), it can still be a useful tool.  Just be careful about what you trade to get it.  Don’t sell $100M worth of preferred with a ratcheted 2 moving to 3x liquidation preference — but what if someone would buy just $5M worth on those terms.  Yes, that’s a total hack, but so is the whole idea of multiplying a preferred share price times the number of common shares.  And it’s far less harmful to the company and the common stock.  Find your own middle ground / peace on this issue.
  • Growth and vision.  You’d think that industry watchers would look at a strategy and independently evaluate its merits in terms of driving future growth.  But that’s not how it works.  A key part of halo effects is misattribution of practices and performance.  So if you’ve performed poorly and have an awesome strategy, it will overlooked — and conversely.  Sadly, go-forward strategy is almost always viewed through the lens of past performance, even if that performance were driven by a different strategy or affected positively or negatively by execution issues unrelated to strategy.  A great story isn’t enough if you want to generate a vision halo effect.  You’re going to need to talk about growth numbers to prove it.  (That this leads to a pattern of private companies reporting inflated or misleading numbers is sadly no surprise.)  But don’t show up expecting to wow folks with vision. Ultimately, you’ll need to wow them with growth — which then provokes interest in vision.
  • Network.  Some companies do a nice and often quiet job of cultivating friends of the company who are thought leaders in their areas.  Many do this through inviting specific people to invest as angels.  Some do this simply through communications.  For example, one day I received an email update from Vik Singh clearly written for friends of Infer. I wasn’t sure how I got on the list, but found the company interesting and over time I got to know Vik (who is quite impressive) and ended up, well, a friend of Infer.  Some do this through advisory boards, both formal and informal.  For example, I did a little bit of advising for Tableau early on and later discovered a number of folks in my network who’d done the same thing.  The company benefitted by getting broad input on various topics and each of us felt like we were friends of Tableau.  While sort of thing doesn’t generate the same mainstream media buzz as a $1B valuation, it is a smart influencer strategy that can generate fans and buzz among the cognoscenti who, in theory at least, are opinion leaders in their chosen areas.

Before finishing the first part of this post, I need to provide a warning that halo effects are both powerful and addictive.  I seem to have a knack for competing against companies pursuing halo-driven strategies and the pattern I see typically runs like this.

  • Company starts getting some hype off good results.
  • Company starts saying increasingly aggressive things to build off the hype.
  • Analysts and press reward the hype with strong quadrant placements and great stories and blogs.
  • Company puts itself under increasing pressure to produce numbers that support the hype.

And then one of three things happens:

  1. The company continues delivering strong results and all is good, though the rhetoric and vision gets more unrelated to the business with each cycle.
  2. The company stops delivering results and is downgraded from hot-list to shit-list in the minds of the industry.
  3. The company cuts the cord with reality and starts inflating results in order to sustain the hype cycle and avoid outcome #2 above.  The vision inflates as aggressively as the numbers.

I have repeatedly had to compete against companies where claims/results were inflated to “prove” the value of bad/ordinary strategies to impress industry analysts to get strong quadrant positions to support broader claims of vision and leadership to drive more sales to inflate to even greater claimed results.  Surprisingly, I think this is usually done more in the name of ego than financial gain, but either way the story ends the same way — in terminations, lawsuits and, in one case, a jail sentence for the CEO.

Look, there are valid halo-driven strategies out there and I encourage you to try and use them to your company’s advantage — just be very careful you don’t end up addicted to halo heroin.  If you find yourself wanting to do almost anything to sustain the hype bubble, then you’ll know you’re addicted and headed for trouble.

The Customer View

Thus far, I’ve written this post entirely from the vendor viewpoint, but wanted to conclude by switching sides and offering customers some advice on how to think about halo effects in choosing vendors.   Customers should:

  • Be aware of halo effects.  The first step in dealing with any problem is understanding it exists. While supposedly technical, rational, and left-brained, technology can be as arbitrary as apparel when it comes to fashion.  If you’re evaluating vendors with halos, realize that they exist for a reason and then go understand why.  Are those drivers relevant — e.g., buying HR from Dave Duffield seems a reasonable idea.  Or are they spurious —  e.g., does it really matter that one board member invested in Facebook?  Or are they actually negative — e.g., if the company has raised $300M how crazy is their burn rate, what risk does that put on the business, and how focused will they stay on you as a customer and your problem as a market?
  •  Stay focused on your problem.  I encourage anyone buying technology to write down their business problems and high-level technology requirements before reaching out to vendors.  Hyped vendors are skilled at “changing the playing field” and trained to turn their vision into your (new) requirements.  While there certainly are cases where vendors can point out valid new requirements, you should periodically step back and do a sanity check:  are you still focused on your problem or have you been incrementally moved to a different, or greatly expanded one.  Vision is nice, but you won’t be around solve tomorrow’s problems if you can’t solve today’s.
  • Understand that industry analysts are often followers, not leaders.  If a vendor is showing you analyst support for their strategy, you need to figure out if the analyst is endorsing the strategy because of the strategy’s merits or because of the vendor’s claimed prior performance.  The latter is the definition of a halo effect and in a world full of private startups where high-quality analysts are in short supply, it’s easy to find “research” that effectively says nothing more than “this vendor is a leader because they say they’re performing really well and/or they’ve raised a lot of money.” That doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t know already and isn’t actually an independent source of information.  They are often simply amplifiers of the hype you’re already hearing.
  • Enjoy the sizzle; buy the steak.  Hype king Domo paid Alec Baldwin to make some (pretty pathetic) would-be viral videos and had Billy Beane, Flo Rida, Ludacris, and Marshawn Lynch at their user conference.  As I often say, behind any “marketing genius” is an enormous marketing budget, and that’s all you’re seeing — venture capital being directly converted into hype.  Heck, let them buy you a ticket to the show and have a great time.  Just don’t buy the software because of it — or because of the ability to invest more money in hand-grooming a handful of big-name references.  Look to meet customers like you, who have spent what you want to spend, and see if they’re happy and successful.  Don’t get handled into meeting other customers only at pre-arranged meetings.  Walk the floor and talk to regular people.  Find out how many are there for the show, or because they’re actual successful users of the software.
  • Dive into detail on the proposed solution.  Hyped vendors will often try to gloss over solutions and sell you the hype (e.g., “of course we can solve your problem, we’ve got the most logos, Gartner says we’re the leader, there’s an app for that.”)  What you need is a vendor who will listen to your problem, discuss it with you intelligently, and provide realistic estimates on what it takes to solve it.  The more willing they are to do that, the better off you are.  The more they keep talking about the founder’s escape from communism, the pedigree of their investors, their recent press coverage, or the amount of capital they’ve raised, the more likely you are to end up high and dry.  People interested in solving your problem will want to talk about your problem.
  • Beware the second-worst outcome:  the backwater.  Because hyped vendors are actually serving Sand Hill Road and/or Wall Street more than their customers, they pitch broad visions and huge markets in order to sustain the halo.  For a customer, that can be disastrous because the vendor may view the customer’s problems as simply another lily pad to jump off on the path to success.  The second-worst outcome is when you buy a solution and then vendor takes your money and invests it in solving other problems.  As a customer, you don’t want to marry your vendor’s fling.  You want to marry their core.  For startups, the pattern is typically over-expansion into too many things, getting in trouble, and then retracting hard back into the core, abandoning customers of the new, broader initiatives.  The second-worst outcome is when you get this alignment wrong and end up in a backwater or formerly-strategic area of your supplier’s strategy.
  • Avoid the worst outcome:  no there there.  Once in awhile, there is no “there there” behind some very hyped companies despite great individual investors, great VCs, strategic alliances, and a previously experienced team.  Perhaps the technology vision doesn’t pan out, or the company switches strategies (“pivots”) too often.  Perhaps the company just got too focused on its hype and not on it customers.  But the worst outcome, while somewhat rare, is when a company doesn’t solve its advertised problem. They may have a great story, a sexy demo, and some smart people — but what they lack is a core of satisfied customers solving the problem the company talks about.  In EPM, with due respect and in my humble opinion, Tidemark fell into this category, prior to what it called a “growth investment” and what sure seemed to me like a (fire) sale, to Marlin Equity Partners.  Customers need to watch out for these no-there-there situations and the best way to do that is taking strong dose of caveat emptor with a nose for “if it sounds too good to be true, then it might well possibly be.”

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Posted in Analyst Relations, Bubble, Gartner, Halo Effect, Leadership, Management, Silicon Valley, Social, Startups, Strategy, Unicorn, Venture Capital

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Don’t Start a Customer Relationship with a Lie

Posted on March 12, 2017 | 8 comments

As a manager, I like to make sure that every quarter that each of my direct reports has written, agreed-to goals.  I collect these goals in a Word document, but since that neither scales nor cascades well, I’ve recently been looking for a simple SaaS application to manage our quarterly Objectves and Key Results (OKRs).

What I’ve found, frankly, is a bit shocking.

Look, this is not the world’s most advanced technical problem.  I want to enter a goal (e.g., improve sales productivity) and associate 1-3 key results with that goal (e.g., improve ARR per salesrep from $X to $Y).  I have about 10 direct reports and want to assign 3-5 OKRs per quarter.  So we’re talking 30-50 objectives with maybe 60-100 associated key results for my little test.

I’d like some progress tracking, scoring at the end of the quarter, and some basic reporting.  (I don’t need thumbs-ups, comments, and social features.)  If the app works for the executive team, then I’ll probably scale it across the company, cascading the OKRs throughout the organization, tracking maybe 1,200 to 1,500 objectives per quarter in total.

This is not rocket science.

Importantly, I figure that if I want to roll this out across the entire team, the app better be simple enough for me to just try it without any training, presentations, demos, or salescalls. So I decide to go online and start a trial going with some SaaS OKR management providers.

Based on some web searches, PPC ads, and website visits, I decide to try with three vendors (BetterWorks, 15Five, and 7Geese).  While I’m not aiming to do a product or company comparison here, I had roughly the same experience across all three:

  • I could not start a free trial online
  • I was directed to an sales development rep (SDR) or account exec (AE) before getting a trial
  • That SDR or AE tried to insist on a phone call with me before giving me the trial
  • The trial itself was quite limited — e.g., 15 or 30 days.

At BetterWorks, after getting stuck with the SDR, I InMailed the CEO asking for an SDR-bypass and got one (thanks!) — but I found the application not intuitive and too hard to use.  At 7Geese, I got directed to an AE who mailed me a link to his calendar and wanted to me to setup a meeting.  After grumbling about expectations set by the website, he agreed to give me a trial.  At 15Five, I got an SDR who eventually yielded after I yelled at him to let me “follow my own buyer journey.”

But the other thing I noticed is that all three companies started our relationship with a lie of sorts.  What lie?  In all three cases they implied that I’d have easy access to a free trial.  Let’s see.

If you put a Free Trial button on your website, when I press it I expect to start an online process to get a free trial — not get a form that, once filled, replies that someone will be in touch.  That button should be called Contact Us, not Free Trial.

7Geese was arguably more misleading.  While the Get Started button down below might imply that you’re starting the process of getting access to a trial, the Get Started Now button on the top right says, well, NOW.

Worse yet, if you press the Get Started Now button on 7Geese, you get this screen next.

Tailored tour?  I pressed a button called Get Started Now.  I don’t want to setup a demo.  I want to get started using their supposedly “simple” OKR tracking app.

15Five was arguably the most misleading.

When you write “14 days free. No credit card needed.” I am definintely thinking that when I press Get Started that I’ll be signing up for a free 14-day trial on the next screen.  Instead I get this.

I didn’t ask to see if 15Five was right for my company.  I pressed a button that advertised a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

Why, in all three cases, did these companies start our relationship by lying to me?  Probably, because in all three cases their testing determined that the button would be clicked more if it said Get Started or Frial Trial than if it said something more honest like Contact Us or  Request Free Trial.

They do get more clicks, I’m sure.  But those clicks start the relationship on a negative note by setting an expectation and immediately failing to meet it.

I get that Free Trials aren’t always the best way to market enterprise software.  I understand that the more complicated the application problem, the less a Free Trial is effective or even relevant.  That’s all fine.  If you haven’t built a viral product or work in a consumer-esque cateogry, that’s fine.  Just don’t promise a Free Trial on your website.

But when you’re in a category where the problem is pretty simple and you promise a Free Trial on your website, then I expect to get one.  Don’t start our relationship with a lie.  Even if your testing says you’ll get more clicks — because all you’ll be doing is telling more lies and starting more customer relationships on the wrong foot.

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Posted in CRM, OKR, SaaS, Startups, Strategy, Venture Capital

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The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS

Posted on February 9, 2017 | 1 comment

I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers.  The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions:  renewal rate and retention rate.  The idea was to use the chart to plot customers and then identify patterns (e.g., industries) so marketing could identify the best overall customers in terms of lifetime value as the mechanism for deciding marketing segmentation and targeting.

Here’s what it looked like:

saas-strategic-value

While I think it’s a great chart, what really struck me was the thinking behind it and how that thinking reflects a dramatic evolution in the role of marketing across my career.

  • Back two decades ago when marketing was measured by leads, they focused on how to cost-effectively generate leads, looking at response rates for various campaigns.
  • Back a decade ago when marketing was measured by opportunities (or pipeline), they focused on how to cost-effectively generate opportunities, looking at response and opportunity conversion rates.
  • Today, as more and more marketers are measured by marketing-sourced New ARR, they are focused on cost-effectively generating not just opportunities, but opportunities-that-close, looking all the way through the funnel to close rates.
  • Tomorrow, as more marketers will be measured on the health of the overall ARR pool, they will be focused on cost-effectively generating not just opportunities-that-close but opportunities that turn into the best long-term customers. (This quadrant helps you do just that.)

As a company makes this progression, marketing becomes increasingly strategic, evolving in mentality with each step.

  • Starting with, “what sign will attract the most people?” (Including “Free Beer Here” which has been used at more than one conference.)
  • To “what messages aimed at which targets will attract the kind of people who end up evaluating?”
  • To “who are we really looking to sell to — which people end up buying the most and the most easily – and what messages aimed at which targets will attract them?”
  • To “what are the characteristics of our most successful customers and how can we find more people like them?”

The whole pattern reminds me of the famous Hubspot story where the marketing team was a key part forcing the company to focus on either “Owner Ollie” (the owner of a <10 person business) or “Manager Mary” (a marketer at a 10 to 1000 person business).  For years they had been serving both masters poorly and by focusing on Manager Mary they were able to drive a huge increase in their numbers that enabled cost-effectively scaling the business and propelling them onto a successful IPO.

hubspot

What kind of CMO does any CEO want on their team?  That kind.  The kind worried about the whole business and looking at it holistically and analytically.

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Posted in IPO, Management, Marketing, SaaS, Startups, Strategy, Venture Capital

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Kellblog’s 2017 Predictions  

Posted on January 2, 2017 | 1 comment

New Year’s means three things in my world:  (1) time to thank our customers and team at Host Analytics for another great year, (2) time to finish up all the 2017 planning items and approvals that we need to get done before the sales kickoff (including the one most important thing to do before kickoff), and time to make some predictions for the coming year.

Before looking at 2017, let’s see how I did with my 2016 predictions.

2016 Predictions Review

  1. The great reckoning begins. Correct/nailed.  As predicted, since most of the bubble was tied up in private companies owned by private funds, the unwind would happen in slow motion.  But it’s happening.
  2. Silicon Valley cools off a bit. Partial.  While IPOs were down, you couldn’t see the cooling in anecdotal data, like my favorite metric, traffic on highway101.
  3. Porter’s five forces analysis makes a comeback. Partial.  So-called “momentum investing” did cool off, implying more rational situation analysis, but you didn’t hear people talking about Porter per se.
  4. Cyber-cash makes a rise. Correct.  Bitcoin more doubled on the year (and Ethereum was up 8x) which perversely reinforced my view that these crypto-currencies are too volatile — people want the anonymity of cash without a highly variable exchange rate.  The underlying technology for Bitcoin, blockchain, took off big time.
  5. Internet of Things goes into trough of disillusionment. Partial.  I think I may have been a little early on this one.  Seems like it’s still hovering at the peak of inflated expectations.
  6. Data science rises as profession. Correct/easy.  This continues inexorably.
  7. SAP realizes they are a complex enterprise application company. Incorrect.  They’re still “running simple” and talking too much about enabling technology.  The stock was up 9% on the year in line with revenues up around 8% thus far.
  8. Oracle’s cloud strategy gets revealed – “we’ll sell you any deployment model you want as long as your annual bill goes up.”  Partial.  I should have said “we’ll sell you any deployment model you want as long as we can call it cloud to Wall St.”
  9. Accounting irregularities discovered at one or more unicorns. Correct/nailed.  During these bubbles the pattern always repeats itself – some people always start breaking the rules in order to stand out, get famous, or get rich.  Fortune just ran an amazing story that talks about the “fake it till you make it” culture of some diseased startups.
  10. Startup workers get disappointed on exits. Partial.  I’m not aware of any lawsuits here but workers at many high flyers have been disappointed and there is a new awareness that the “unicorn party” may be a good thing for founders and VCs, but maybe not such a good thing for rank-and-file employees (and executive management).
  11. The first cloud EPM S-1 gets filed. Incorrect.  Not yet, at least.  While it’s always possible someone did the private filing process with the SEC, I’m guessing that didn’t happen either.
  12. 2016 will be a great year for Host Analytics. Correct.  We had a strong finish to the year and emerged stronger than we started with over 600 great customers, great partners, and a great team.

Now, let’s move on to my predictions for 2017 which – as a sign of the times – will include more macro and political content than usual.

  1. The United States will see a level of divisiveness and social discord not seen since the 1960s. Social media echo chambers will reinforce divisions.  To combat this, I encourage everyone to sign up for two publications/blogs they agree with and two they don’t lest they never again hear both sides of an issue. (See map below, coutesy of Ninja Economics, for help in choosing.)  On an optimistic note, per UCSD professor Lane Kenworthy people aren’t getting more polarized, political parties are.

news

  1. Social media companies finally step up and do something about fake news. While per a former Facebook designer, “it turns out that bullshit is highly engaging,” these sites will need to do something to filter, rate, or classify fake news (let alone stopping to recommend it).  Otherwise they will both lose credibility and readership – as well as fail to act in a responsible way commensurate with their information dissemination power.
  1. Gut feel makes a comeback. After a decade of Google-inspired heavily data-driven and A/B-tested management, the new US administration will increasingly be less data-driven and more gut-feel-driven in making decisions.  Riding against both common sense and the big data / analytics / data science trends, people will be increasingly skeptical of purely data-driven decisions and anti-data people will publicize data-driven failures to popularize their arguments.  This “war on data” will build during the year, fueled by Trump, and some of it will spill over into business.  Morale in the Intelligence Community will plummet.
  1. Under a volatile leader, who seems to exhibit all nine of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, we can expect sharp reactions and knee-jerk decisions that rattle markets, drive a high rate of staff turnover in the Executive branch, and fuel an ongoing war with the media.  Whether you like his policies or not, Trump will bring a high level of volatility the country, to business, and to the markets.
  1. With the new administration’s promises of $1T in infrastructure spending, you can expect interest rates to raise and inflation to accelerate. Providing such a stimulus to already strong economy might well overheat it.  One smart move could be buying a house to lock in historic low interest rates for the next 30 years.  (See my FAQ for disclaimers, including that I am not a financial advisor.)
  1. Huge emphasis on security and privacy. Election-related hacking, including the spearfishing attack on John Podesta’s email, will serve as a major wake-up call to both government and the private sector to get their security act together.  Leaks will fuel major concerns about privacy.  Two-factor authentication using verification codes (e.g., Google Authenticator) will continue to take off as will encrypted communications.  Fear of leaks will also change how people use email and other written electronic communications; more people will follow the sage advice in this quip:

Dance like no one’s watching; E-mail like it will be read in a deposition

  1. In 2015, if you were flirting on Ashley Madison you were more likely talking to a fembot than a person.  In 2016, the same could be said of troll bots.  Bots are now capable of passing the Turing Test.  In 2017, we will see more bots for both good uses (e.g., customer service) and bad (e.g., trolling social media).  Left unchecked by the social media powerhouses, bots could damage social media usage.
  1. Artificial intelligence hits the peak of inflated expectations. If you view Salesforce as the bellwether for hyped enterprise technology (e.g., cloud, social), then the next few years are going to be dominated by artificial intelligence.  I’ve always believed that advanced analytics is not a standalone category, but instead fodder that vendors will build into smart applications.  They key is typically not the technology, but the problem to which to apply it.  As Infer founder Vik Singh said of Jim Gray, “he was really good at finding great problems,” the key is figuring out the best problems to solve with a given technology or modeling engine.  Application by application we will see people searching for the best problems to solve using AI technology.
  1. The IPO market comes back. After a year in which we saw only 13 VC-backed technology IPOs, I believe the window will open and 2017 will be a strong year for technology IPOs.  The usual big-name suspects include firms like Snap, Uber, AirBnB, and Spotify.  CB Insights has identified 369 companies as strong 2017 IPO prospects.
  1. Megavendors mix up EPM and ERP or BI. Workday, which has had a confused history when it comes to planning, acquired struggling big data analytics vendor Platfora in July 2016, and seems to have combined analytics and EPM/planning into a single unit.  This is a mistake for several reasons:  (1) EPM and BI are sold to different buyers with different value propositions, (2) EPM is an applications sale, BI is a platform sale, and (3) Platfora’s technology stack, while appropriate for big data applications is not ideal for EPM/planning (ask Tidemark).  Combining the two together puts planning at risk.  Oracle combined their EPM and ERP go-to-market organizations and lost focus on EPM as a result.  While they will argue that they now have more EPM feet on the street, those feet know much less about EPM, leaving them exposed to specialist vendors who maintain a focus on EPM.  ERP is sold to the backward-looking part of finance; EPM is sold to the forward-looking part.  EPM is about 1/10th the market size of ERP.  ERP and EPM have different buyers and use different technologies.  In combining them, expect EPM to lose out.

And, as usual, I must add the bonus prediction that 2017 proves to be a strong year for Host Analytics.  We are entering the year with positive momentum, the category is strong, cloud adoption in finance continues to increase, and the megavendors generally lack sufficient focus on the category.  We continue to be the most customer-focused vendor in EPM, our new Modeling product gained strong momentum in 2016, and our strategy has worked very well for both our company and the customers who have chosen to put their faith in us.

I thank our customers, our partners, and our team and wish everyone a great 2017.

# # #

 

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Posted in BI, Big Data, Bubble, change, Content, Data Science, Decision Making, Disruption, Enterprise Software, EPM, Host Analytics, IPO, Predictions, Silicon Valley, Startups, Unicorn, Venture Capital

EPM: Now More Than Ever

Posted on November 12, 2016 | 1 comment

The theme of my presentation at past spring’s Host Analytics World was that EPM is needed in fair, foul, or uncertain weather.  While EPM is used differently in fair and foul weather scenarios, it is a critical navigational instrument to help pilot the business.

For example, in tougher times:

  • You’re constantly re-forecasting
  • You’re doing expense reduction modeling
  • You might do a zero-based budget (particularly popular among recently PE-acquired firms)
  • You’re likely to try and reduce capex (unless you see a quick rebound)
  • You’re probably making P&L, budget, and spend authority more centralized in order to keep tighter reins on the company.

In better times:

  • You model and compare new growth opportunities
  • You often build trended budgets more than bottom-up budgets
  • You adopt rolling forecasts
  • You increase capital investment and build for the future
  • You do more strategic initiatives planning
  • You decentralize P&L responsibility

These (and others) are all capabilities of a complete EPM suite.  The point is that you use that suite differently depending on the state of the business and the economy.

Well, now with the surprise election of our 45th President, Donald Trump, we can be certain of one thing:  uncertain times.

  • Will massive investments in infrastructure (including but not limited to, The Wall) happen and what effect will that have on economic growth and interest rates?
  • Will Trump deliver the promise 4% GDP growth that he’s promised or will the economy grow slower?
  • Will promised deregulation happen and if so will it accelerate economic growth?  What effects will deregulation have on key industries like financial services, energy, and raw materials?
  • What, as a result of this and foreign policies, will be the price of a barrel of oil in one year?  What effect will that have on key industries such as transportation?
  • Will Trump spark a trade war, increasing the price imports and reducing the purchasing power of low and middle-income consumers?  What effect might a trade war have on GDP growth?
  • What impact will all this have on financial markets and the cost and availability of capital?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions.  I do know, however, that there is uncertainty about all of these questions– and dozens of others — that will directly impact businesses in their performance and planning.

If you cannot predict the future, you should at least be able to respond to it in agile way.

If your company takes 6 months to make a budget that gets changed once a year, you will be very exposed to surprise changes.  If you run on rolling forecasts, you will be far more agile.  If you have good EPM tools you will able to automate tasks like reporting, consolidation, and forecasting in order to free up time for the now much more important tasks of scenario planning and modeling.

Again, if you can’t know whether oil will be $40, $50, or $70 — you can at least have modeling out all three scenarios in advance so you can react quickly when it moves.

I’ve always been a big believer in planning and EPM.  And, in this uncertain environment, companies need EPM now more than ever.

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Posted in Budgeting, EPM, Modeling, Planning, Strategy

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How to Manage Your First Sales VP at a Startup

Posted on October 27, 2016 | 2 comments

One of the hardest hires — and one of the hardest jobs — is to be the first VP of sales at a startup.  Why?

  • There is no history / experience
  • Nobody knows what works and what doesn’t work
  • The company may not have a well defined strategy so it’s hard to make a go-to-market strategy that maps to it
  • Any strategy you choose is somewhat complex because it needs to leave room for experimentation
  • If things don’t work the strong default tendency is to blame the VP of sales and sales execution, and not strategy or product.  (Your second VP of sales gets to blame product or strategy — but never your first.)

It’s a tough job, no doubt.  But it’s also tough for a founder or new CEO to manage the first sales VP.

  • The people who sign up for this high-risk duty are often cocksure and difficult to manage
  • They tend to dismiss questions with experienced-based answers (i.e., well we did thing X at company Y and it worked) that make everything sound easy.
  • They tend to smokescreen issues with such dismissals in order to give themselves maximum flexibility.
  • Most founders know little about sales; they’ve typically never worked in sales and it’s not taught in (business) school.

I think the best thing a founder can do to manage this is to conceptually separate two things:

  • How well the sales VP implements the sales model agreed to with the CEO and the board.
  • Whether that model works.

For example, if your team agrees that it wants to focus on Defense as its beachhead market, but still opportunistically experiment horizontally, then you might agree with the sales VP to build a model that creates a focused team on Department of Defense (DoD) and covers the rest of the country horizontally with a enterprise/corporate split.  More specifically, you might decide to:

  • Create a team of 3 quota carrying reps (QCRs) selling to the DoD who each have 10+ years experience selling to the DoD, ideally holding top secret clearances, supported by 2 sales consultants (SCs) and 2 business development reps (BDRs) with the entire team located in a Regus office in McLean, VA and everyone living with a one-hour commute of that office.
  • Hire 2 enterprise QCRs, one for the East and one for the West, the former in McLean and the latter in SF, each calling only on $1B+ revenue companies, each supported by 1 local SC, and 2 BDRs, where the BDRs are located at corporate (in SF).  Each enterprise QCR must have 10+ years experience selling software in the company’s category.
  • Hire 2 corporate reps in SF, each sharing 1 SC, and supported by 2 BDRs calling on sub $1B revenue companies.  Each corporate rep must have 5+ years experience selling software in the category.

In addition, you would create specific hiring profiles for each role ideally expressed with perhaps 5-10 must-have and 3-5 nice-to-have criteria.

Two key questions:

  • Do we know if this is going to work?  No, of course not.  It’s a startup.  We have no customers, data, or history.  We’ve taken our best guess based on understanding the market and the customers.  But we can’t possibly know if this is going to work.
  • Can we tell if the sales VP is executing it?  Yes.  And you can hold him/her accountable for so doing.  That’s the point.

At far too many startups, the problem is not decomposed in this manner, the specifics are not spelled out, and here’s what happens instead.  The sales VP says:

The plan?  Yes, let me tell you the plan.  I’m going to put boots down in several NFL cities, real sales athletes mind you, the best.  People I’ve worked with who made $500K, $750K, or even $1M in commissions back at Siebel or Salesforce or Oracle.  The best.  We’re going to support those athletes with the best SCs we can find, and we’re going to create an inside sales and SDR team that is bar none, world-class.  We’re going to set standard quotas and ramps and knock this sonofabitch out of the park.  I’ve done this before, I’m matching the patterns, trust me, this is going to be great.

Translation:  we’re going to hire somewhere between 4 and 8 salespeople who I have worked with in the past and who were successful in other companies regardless of whether they have expertise in our space, the skills required in our space, are located where out strategy indicates they should be.  Oh, and since I know a great pharma rep, we’re going to make pharma a territory  and even though he moved to Denver after living in New Jersey, we’ll just fly him out when we need to.  Oh, and the SDRs, I know a great one in Boise and one in Austin.  Yes, and the inside reps, Joe, Joey, Joey-The-Hacksaw was a killer back in the day and even though he’s always on his bass boat and living in Michigan now, we’re going to hire him even though technically speaking our inside reps are supposed to be in SF.

This, as they say in England, is a “dog’s breakfast” of  a sales model.  And when it doesn’t work — and the question is when, not if — what has the company learned?  Precisely and absolutely zero.

If you’re a true optimist, you might say we’ve learned that a bunch of random decisions to hire old cronies scattered across the country with no regard for strategy, models, or hiring profiles, doesn’t work.  But wait a minute — you knew that already; you didn’t need to spend $10M in VC to find out.  (See my post, If We Can’t Have Repeatable Success Can We At Least Have Repeatable Failure?)

By making the model clear — and quite specific as in my example above — you can not only flush out any disagreements in advance, but you can also hold the sales VP accountable for building the model they say they are going to build.  With a squishy model, as my other example shows, you can never actually know because it’s so vague you can’t tell.

This approach actually benefits both sides

  • The CEO benefits because he/she doesn’t get pushed around into agreeing to a vague model that he/she doesn’t understand.  By focusing on specifics the CEO gets to think through the proposed model and decide whether he/she likes it.
  • The Sales VP benefits as well.  While he/she loses some flexibility because hiring can’t be totally opportunistic, on the flip side, if the Sales VP implements the agreed-to model and it doesn’t work, he/she is not totally alone and to blame.  It’s “we failed,” not “you failed.”  Which might lead to a second chance for the sales VP to implement a new model.

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Posted in Hiring, Startups, Strategy, Venture Capital

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Aligned to Achieve: A B2B Marketing Classic

Posted on September 26, 2016 | 6 comments

Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin’s Aligned to Achieve came out today and it’s a great book on an important and all too often overlooked topic:  how to align sales and marketing.

I’m adding it to my modern SaaS executive must-read book list, which is now:

So, what do I like about Aligned to Achieve?

The book puts a dead moose issue squarely on the table:  sales and marketing are not aligned in too many organizations.  The book does a great job of showing some examples of what misalignment looks like.  My favorites were the one where the sales VP wouldn’t shake the new CMO’s hand (“you’ll be gone soon, no need to get to know you”) and the one where sales waived off marketing from touching any opportunities once they got in the pipeline.  Ouch.  #TrustFail.

Aligned to Achieve makes great statements like this one:  “We believe that pipeline is absolutely the most important metric for sales and marketing alignment, and that’s a major cultural shift for most companies.”  Boom, nothing more to say about that.

The book includes fun charts like the one below.  I’ve always loved tension-surveys where you ask two sides for a view on the same issue and show the gap – and this gap’s a doozy.

sm gap

Aligned to Achieve includes the word “transparency” twenty times.  Transparency is required in the culture, in collaboration, in definitions, in planning, in the reasons for plans, in process and metrics, in data, in assessing results, in engaging customers, and in objectives and performance against them.  Communication is the lubricant in the sales/marketing relationship and transparency the key ingredient.

The book includes a nice chapter on the leadership traits required to work in the aligned environment:  collaborative, transparent, analytical, tech savvy, customer focused, and inspirational.  Having been a CMO fifteen years ago, I’d say that transparent, analytical, and tech savvy and now more important than ever before.

Aligned to Achieve includes a derivative of my favorite mantra (marketing exists to make sales easier) in the form of:

Sales can’t do it alone and marketing exists to make sales easier

The back half of that mantra (which I borrowed from CTP co-founder Chris Greendale) served me well in my combined 12 years as a CMO.  I love the insertion of the front half, which is now more true than ever:  sales has never been more codependent with marketing.

The book includes a fun, practical suggestion to have a bi-monthly “smarketing” meeting which brings sales and marketing together to discuss:

  • The rolling six-week marketing campaign calendar
  • Detailed review of the most recently completed campaigns
  • Update on immediately pending campaigns
  • Bigger picture items (e.g., upcoming events that impact sales and/or marketing)
  • Open discussion and brainstorming to cover challenges and process hiccups

Such meetings are a great idea.

Back in the day when Tracy and I worked together at Business Objects, I always loved Tracy’s habit of “crashing” meetings.  She was so committed to sales and marketing alignment – even back then – that if sales were having an important meeting, invited or not, she’d just show up.  (It always reminded me of the Woody Allen quote, 80% of success is showing up.)  In her aligned organization today, the CEO makes sure she doesn’t have to do that, but by hook or by crook the sales/marketing discussion must happen.

Aligned to Achieve has a nice discussion of the good old sales velocity model which, like my Four Levers of SaaS, is a good way to think about and simplify a business and the levers that drive it.

Unsurprisingly, for a book co-authored by the CMO of a company that sells market data and insights, Aligned to Achieve includes a healthy chapter on the importance of data, including a marketing-adapted version of the DIKW pyramid featuring data, insights, and connections as the three layers.  The nice part is that the chapter remains objective and factual – it doesn’t devolve into an infomercial by any means.

The book moves on to discuss the CIO’s role in a sales/marketing-aligned organization and provides a chapter reviewing the results of a survey of 1000 sales and marketing professionals on alignment, uncovering common sources of misalignment and some of the practices used by sales/marketing alignment leaders.

Aligned to Achieve ends with a series of 7 alignment-related predictions which I won’t scoop here.  I will say that #4 (“academia catches up”) and #6 (“account-based everything is a top priority”) are my two favorites.

Congratulations to my long-time friend and colleague Tracy Eiler on co-authoring the book and to her colleague Andrea Austin.

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Posted in Marketing, SaaS, Sales, Startups, Strategy, Uncategorized, Venture Capital

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