Playing Bigger vs. Playing To Win: How Shall We Play the Marketing Strategy Game?

Posted on August 27, 2022 | 7 comments

“I’m an CMO and it’s 2018.  Of course I’ve read Play Bigger.  Duh.  Do you think I live under a rock?” — Anonymous repeat CMO

Play Bigger hit the Sand Hill Road scene in a big way after its publication in 2016.  Like Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm some 25 years earlier, VCs fell in love with the book, and then pushed it down to the CEOs and CMOs of their portfolio companies.  “Sell high” is the old sales rule, and the business of Silicon Valley marketing strategy books is no exception.

Why did VCs like the book?  Because it’s ultimately about value creation which is, after all, exactly what VCs do.  In extreme distillation, Play Bigger argues:

  • Category kings (companies who typically define and then own categories in the minds of buyers) are worth a whole lot more than runner-ups.
  • Therefore you should be a category king.
  • You do that not by simply creating a category (which is kind of yesterday’s obsession), but by designing a great product, a great company, and a great category all the same time.
  • So, off you go.  Do that.  See you at the next board meeting.

I find the book a tad simplistic and pop marketing-y (in the Ries & Trout sense) and more than a tad revisionist in telling stories I know first-hand which feel rather twisted to map to the narrative.  Nevertheless, much as I’ve read a bunch of Ries & Trout books, I have read Play Bigger, twice, both because it’s a good marketing book, and because it’s de rigeur in Silicon Valley.  If you’ve not read it, you should.  You’ll be more interesting at cocktail parties.

As with any marketing book, there is no shortage of metaphors.  Geoffrey Moore  had D-Day, bowling alleys, and tornados.  These guys run the whole something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue gamut with lightning strikes (old, fka blitzkreigs), pirates (new, to me if not Steve Jobs), flywheels (borrowed, from Jim Collins), and gravity (blue, in sense of a relentless negative force as described in several cautionary tales).

While I consider Play Bigger a good book on category creation, even a modernized version of Inside the Tornado if I’m feeling generous, I must admit there’s one would-be major distinction that I just don’t get:  category creation vs. category design, the latter somehow being not just about creating and dominating a category, but “designing” it — and not just a category, but a product, category, and company simultaneously.  It strikes me as much ado about little (you need to build a company and a product to create and lead a category) and, skeptically, a seeming pretense for introducing the fashionable word, “design.”

After 30 years playing a part in creating, I mean designing, new categories — both ones that succeeded (e.g., relational database, business intelligence, cloud EPM, customer success management, data intelligence) and ones that didn’t (e.g., XML database, object database) — I firmly believe two things:

  • The best way to create a category is to go sell some software.  Early-stage startups excessively focused on category creation are trying to win the game by staring at the scoreboard.
  • The best way to be a category king is to be the most aggressive company during the growth phase of the market.  Do that by executing what I call the market leader play, the rough equivalent of Geoffrey Moore’s “just ship” during the tornado.  Second prize really is a set of steak knives.

I have some secondary beliefs on category creation as well:

  • Market forces create categories, not vendors.  Vendors are simply in the right place (or pivot to it) at the right time which gives them the opportunity to become the category king.  It’s more about exploiting opportunities than creating markets.  Much as I love GainSight, for example, I believe their key accomplishment was not creating the customer success category, but outexecuting everyone else in exploiting the opportunity created by the emergence of the VP of Customer Success role.  GainSight didn’t create the VP of Customer Success; they built the app to serve them and then aggressively dominated that market.
  • Analysts name categories, not vendors.  A lot of startups spend way too much time navel gazing about the name for their new category.  Instead of trying to sell software to solve customer problems, they sit in conference rooms wordsmithing.  Don’t do this.  Get a good-enough name to answer the question “what is it?” and then go sell some.  In the end, as a wise, old man once told me, analysts name categories, not vendors.
  • Category names don’t matter that much.  Lots of great companies were built on pretty terrible category names (e.g., ERP, HCM, EPM, BTO, NoSQL).  I have trouble even telling you what category red-hot tech companies like Hashicorp and Confluent even compete in.  Don’t obsess over the name.  Yes, a bad name can hurt you (e.g., multi-dimensional database which set off IT threat radar vs. OLAP server, which didn’t).  But it’s not really about the name.  It’s about what you sell to whom to solve which problem.  Again, think “good enough,” and then let a Gartner or IDC analyst decide the official category name later.

To hear an interesting conversation on category creation,  listen to Thomas Otter, Stephanie McReynolds, and me discuss the topic for 60 minutes.  Stephanie ran marketing at Alation, which successfully created (or should I say seized on the market-created opportunity to define and dominate) the data catalog category.  (It’s all the more interesting because that category itself is now morphing into data intelligence.)

Since we’re talking about the marketing strategy game, I want to introduce another book, less popular in Silicon Valley but one that nevertheless deserves your attention: Playing to Win.  This book was written not by Silicon Valley denizens turned consultants, but by the CEO of Proctor & Gamble and his presumably favorite strategy advisor.  It’s a very different book that comes from a very different place, but it’s right up there with Blue Ocean Strategy, Inside the Tornado, and Good Strategy, Bad Strategy on my list of top strategy books.

Why?

  • Consumer packaged goods (CPG) is the major league of marketing.   If they can differentiate rice, yogurt, or face cream, then we should be able to differentiate our significantly more complex and inherently differentiated products.  We have lots to learn from them.
  • I love the emphasis on winning.  In reality, we’re not trying to create a category.  We’re trying to win one, whether we happened to create it or not.  Strategy should inherently be about winning.  Strategy, as Roger Burgelman says, is the plan to win.  Let’s not dance around that.
  • I love the Olay story, which opens the book and alone is worth the price of the book.  Take an aging asset with the wrong product at the wrong price point in the wrong channel and, instead of just throwing it away, build something amazing from it.  I love it.  Goosebumps.
  • It’s practical and applied.  Instead of smothering you in metaphors, it asks you to answer five simple questions.  No pirates, no oceans, no tornados, no thunderstorms, no gorillas, no kings, no beaches.

Those five questions:

  • What is your winning aspiration? The purpose of your enterprise, its motivating aspiration.
  • Where will you play? A playing field where you can achieve that aspiration.
  • How will you win? The way you will win on the chosen playing field.
  • What capabilities must be in place? The set and configuration of capabilities required to win in the chosen way.
  • What management systems are required? The systems and measures that enable the capabilities and support

Much as I love metaphors, I’d bury them all in the backyard in exchange for good answers to those five questions.  Strategy is not complex, but it is hard.  You need to make clear choices, which business people generally resist.  It’s far easier to fence sit, see both sides of the issue, and keep options open (which my old friend Larry used to call the MBA credo).  That’s why most strategy isn’t.

Strategy is about answering those questions in a way that is self-consistent, consistent with the goals of the parent organization (if you’re a brand or general manager in a multi-product company), and with the core capabilities of the overall organization.

In our view, Olay succeeded because it had an integrated set of five strategic choices that fit beautifully with the choices of the corporate parent. Because the choices were well integrated and reinforced category-, sector-, and company-level choices, succeeding at the Olay brand level actually helped deliver on the strategies above it.

I won’t summarize the entire book, but just cherrypick several points from it:

  • As with Burgelman, playing to win requires you to define winning for your organization in your context.  How can we make the plan to win if we don’t agree on what winning is?  (How many startups desperately need to have the “what is winning” conversation?)
  • Playing to win vs. playing to play.  Which are you doing?  A lot of people are doing the latter.
  • Do think about competition.  Silicon Valley today is overloaded with revisionist history:  “all we ever focused on was our customers” or “we always focused only on our vision, our north star.”  Ignoring competition is the luxury of retired executives on Montana ranches.  Winning definitionally means beating the competition.  You shouldn’t be obsessed with the competition, but you can’t ignore them either.
  • While they don’t quite say it, deciding where you play is arguably even more important than deciding what you sell.  Most startups spend most of their energy on what (i.e., product), not where (i.e., segment).  “Choosing where to play is also about choosing where not to play,” which for many is a far more difficult decision.
  • The story of Impress, a great technology, a product that consumers loved, but where P&G found no way to win in the market (and ultimately created a successful joint venture with Clorox instead), should be required reading for all tech marketers.  A great product isn’t enough.  You need to find a way to win the market, too.
  • The P&G baby diapers saga sounds similar to what would have happened had Oracle backed XQuery or when IBM originally backed SQL — self-imposed disruptions that allowed competitors entry to the market.  IBM accidentally created Oracle in the process.  Oracle was too smart to repeat the mistake.  Tech strategic choices often have their consumer analogs and they’re sometimes easier to analyze in that more distant light.
  • The stories of consumer research reveal a depth of desired customer understanding that we generally lack in tech.  We need to spend more time in customers’ houses, watching them shave, before we build them a razor.  Asking them about shaving is not enough.
  • I want to hug the person who described the P&G strategy process as, “corporate theater at its best.”  Too much strategy is exactly that.

Overall, it’s a well-written, well-structured book.  Almost all of it applies directly to tech, with the exception of the brand/parent-company intersection discussions which only start to become applicable when you launch your second product, usually in the $100M to $300M ARR range.  If you don’t have time for the whole book, the do’s and don’ts at the end of each chapter work as great summaries.

To wrap this up, I’d recommend both books.  When thinking about category creation, I’d try to Play Bigger.  But I’d always, always be Playing to Win.

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Posted in Management, Marketing, SaaS, Startups, Strategy, VC

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How Quickly Should You Grow to Key ARR Milestones? The Rule of 56789

Posted on August 21, 2022 | 1 comment

Question:  what do you call a 10-year old startup with $10M in ARR?
Answer:  a small business [1].

When you make a list of key SaaS metrics, you’ll rarely find age listed among them.  That’s correct in the sense that age by itself tells you little, but when size is measured against age, you get a rough measure of velocity.

It’s a lot like people.  Tell me you can play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 and I’ll be impressed [2].  Tell me you can play it at age 12, and I’ll think you’re an absolute prodigy.  Tell me you have $10M in ARR after 10 years and I’ll be impressed [3].  Tell me you have it after 3 and I’ll run for my checkbook.

All this begs the question of growth velocity:  at what age is a given size impressive?  Towards that end, and working with my friends at Balderton Capital, I’ve come up with what I’m calling the Rule of 56789.

  • 5 years to break $10M
  • 6 years to break $20M
  • 7 years to break $50M
  • 8 years to break $75M
  • 9 years to break $100M

Concretely put, if you walk through the doors to Balderton’s London offices with $54M in ARR after 7 years, you’ll be in the top quartile of those who have walked before you.

Commentary

  • I’m effectively defining “impressive” as top quartile in the Balderton universe of companies [4].
  • Remembering 56789 is easy, but remembering the milestones is harder.  Once you commit the series {10, 20, 50, 75, 100} to memory, it seems to stick [5].
  • Remember that these are milestones to pass, not ending ARR targets, so this is not equivalent to saying grow 100% from $10M to $20M, 150% from $20 to $50M, and so on.  See note [6] before concluding {100%, 150%, 50%, 33%} is an odd growth trajectory.
  • For example, this is a 56789-compliant growth trajectory that has no whipsawing in growth rates.

Three Situtions That Break The Rule
Rules are made to be broken, so let’s talk about three common situations which confound the Rule of 56789.

  • Bootstraps, which are capital constrained and grow more slowly.  Bootstraps should largely ignore the rule (unless they plan on changing their financing strategy) because they are definitionally not trying to impress venture capitalists [7].
  • Platforms, that require years of time and millions of dollars before they can go to market, effectively resetting the starting clock from company inception to beta product release [8].
  • Pivots, where a company pursues strategy A for a few years, abandons it, and takes some salvage value over to a new strategy B. This effectively resets the starting clock from inception to pivot [9].

Alternative Growth Velocity Rules
Let’s compare the trajectory we showed above to similar one generated using a slightly different rule, which I’ll call the 85% Growth Retention Rule, which says to be “impressive” (as defined above), you should:

  • Pass $1M in ARR at a high growth rate (e.g., above ~180%)
  • Subsequently retain 85% of that growth rate every year

I view these as roughly equivalent rules, or more precisely, alternate expressions of nearly the same underlying rule.  I prefer 56789 because it’s more concrete (i.e., do X by Y), but I think 85% growth retention is somewhat more general because it says no matter where you are and how you got there, try to retain 85% (or more) of your growth rate every year.  That said, I think it stops working at 8-10 years because the asymptote on great company growth is somewhere around 40% [10] and some would argue 60% [11].  It also fails in situations where you need to reaccelerate growth.

There’s one well-known growth velocity rule to which we should also compare.  The triple/triple/double/double/double (T2D3) rule, which says that once you hit $2M in ARR, you should triple to $6M, triple again to $18M, then double three times to $36M, $72M, and $144M.

Let’s compare the 56789 and the 85% Growth Retention rules to the T2D3 rule:

Clearly T2D3 is more aggressive and sets a higher bar.  My beef is that it fails to recognize the law of large numbers (by failing to back off on the growth rates as a function of size across considerable scale), so as an operator I’m more intuitively drawn to the 85% Growth Retention rule.  That said, if you want to be top 5% to 10% (vs. top 25%), then go for T2D3 if you can do it [12].  You’ll clearly be creating a lot more value.

I like all of these rules because they help give you a sense for how quickly you should be getting to a certain size.  Growth conversations (e.g., trying to get a CRO to sign up for a number) are never easy.  Rules like these help by providing you with data not about what the average companies are doing, but what the great ones are.  The ones you presumably aspire to be like.

The limitation, of course, is that none of these rules consider the cost of growth.  There’s a big difference between a company that gets to $100M in 9 years on $100M in capital vs. one that does so on $400M in capital.  But that’s why we have other metrics like cash conversion score.  Different metrics measure different things and these ones are focused solely on size/growth vs. age.

A big tip of the hat to Michael Lavner at Balderton Capital for working with me on this post.

# # #

Notes

[1] See the definition of small business, which is somewhat broader than I’d have guessed.

[2] Even though it’s only classified as “less difficult” on this rather amazing scale from less difficult to difficult, very difficult, extremely difficult, ridiculously difficult, and extraordinarily difficult.  (Perhaps CEO’s can use that scale to classify board members.)

[3] It’s not as if just anybody can do either.  Founding a company and building it to $10M is impressive, regardless of the timeframe.

[4] Balderton universe = European SaaS startups who wanted to raise venture capital, who were sufficiently confident to speak with (what’s generally seen as) a top-tier European firm, and who got far enough into the process to submit performance data.

[5] I remember it by thinking that since it’s still pretty early days, jumping from $10M+ to $20M+ seems more reasonable than from $10M to $25M+.

[6] Don’t equate this rule with a growth vector of {100%, 150%, 50%, 33%} in years 5 through 9.  For example, years in which companies break $10M often don’t conclude with $10.1M in ARR, but more like $15M, after having doubled from a prior year of $7 to $8M.

[7] The rule would probably be more useful in projecting the future of VC-backed competitor.  (I think sometimes bootstrapped companies tend to underestimate the aggressiveness of their VC-backed competition.)  This could help you say, “Well, in N years, BadCo is likely to be a $50M business, and is almost certainly trying to be.  How should that affect our strategy?”

[8] That said, be sure you’re really building a mininum viable product and not overengineering either because it’s fun or it allows you to delay the scary of moment of truth when you try to sell it.

[9] Financings after a pivot sometimes require a recapitalization, in which case the company’s entire lifeclock, from strategy to product to cap table, are all effectively reset.

[10] Current median growth in Meritech Public Comps is 32% at median scale $657M in ARR.

[11] 0.85^10 = 0.2 meaning you’ll cut the starting growth rate by 80% after ten years.  So if you start at 200% growth, you’ll be down to 40% after 10 years with 85% growth retention.

[12] I’ll need to take a homework assignment to figure out where in the distribution T2D3 puts you in my data set.

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Posted in Growth, Metrics, Rule of 40, SaaS, Sales, Startups, VC

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The More Cons than Pros of the Backdoor Search

Posted on August 19, 2022 | 5 comments

You’ve decided you need to replace one of your executives.  Hopefully, the executive already knows things aren’t going great and that you’ve already had several conversations about performance.  Hopefully, you’ve also already had several conversations with the board and they either are pushing for, or at least generally agree with, your decision.

So the question is how to do you execute?  You have two primary options:

  • Terminate and start search.  Arguably, the normal order of operations.
  • Start search and then terminate.  This is commonly known as a backdoor search, I guess because you’re sneaking out the back door to interview candidates.  More formally, it’s known as a confidential search.

Yes, there are a lot of sub-cases.  “Search” can mean anything from networking with replacement CXOs referred by your network up to writing a $100K+ check to Daversa, True, and the like.  “Terminate” can mean anything from walking the CXO out the door with a security escort to quietly making an agreement to separate in 60 days.

As someone who’s recruited candiates, been recruited as a candidate, and even once hired via a backdoor search, let me say that I don’t like them.  Why?

  • They make a bad impression on candidates.  Think:  so, this company is shooting their CMO and that person doesn’t even know it yet?  (Sure, I’d love to work for them.)
  • They tie the recruiter’s hands behind their back.  Think:  I have this great opportunity with a high-growth data workbench company — but I can’t tell you who it is.  (Call me when you can.)
  • They erode trust in the company culture.  The first rule of confidential search is there are no confidential searches.  Eventually, you get busted; the question is when, not if.  And when you do, it’s invariably a bad look for everyone involved.
  • They are super top-down.  Peers and employees are typically excluded from the process, so you neither build consensus around the final candidate nor let them meet their team.
  • You bypass your normal quality assurance (QA) process.  By involving fewer people you disregard a process that, among other things, helps vet the quality of candidates.  If the candidate turns out a mishire you are going to feel awfully alone.
  • If you somehow manage to pull one off, the candidate gets off to a rough start, typically never having had met with anyone on their team.

That said, the advantages of confidential searches are generally seen as:

  • No vacant seat.  There’s no awkward period where the CXO’s seat is empty and/or temporarily filled by one of their direct reports.
  • Short transition period.  You elminate the possibility of an extended period of ambiguity for the CXO’s team.  Colloquially, you rip off the band-aid.
  • One transition, not two.  Some positions (e.g., CFO, CMO) have active fractional (or rent-a-CXO) markets.  If you terminate first, hire an interim replacement, and then search for a permanent replacement, you end up putting the team through two transitions.

I’d argue that for conflict-averse CEOs, there’s one bad “advantage” as well — they get to put off an unpleasant conversation until it’s effectively irreversible.  Such avoidance is unhealthy, but I nevertheless believe it’s a key reason why some CEOs do backdoor searches.

All things considered, I remain generally against backdoor searches because the cost of breaking trust is too high.  Lady Gaga puts it well:

“Trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it’s broken, but you can still see the crack in that mother f*cker’s reflection.”

So what can you do instead of a backdoor search?  You have three options:

  1. Run the standard play, appointing an interim from the CXO’s directs or doing it yourself.  (If you have the background, it’s relatively easy and sometimes it’s even better when you don’t —  because it helps you learn the discipline.  I’ve run sales for 18 months across two startups in this mode and I learned a ton.)
  2. Run with an interim.  In markets where you can do this, it’s often a great solution.  Turns out, interim CXOs are typically not only good at the job, but they’re also good at being interim.  Another option I like:  try-and-buy.  Hire an interim, but slow starting your search.  This de-risks the hire for both sides if you end up hiring the interim as permanent.  (Beware onerous fees that interim agencies will charge you and negotiate them up front.)
  3. Agree to a future separation.  This is risky, but a play that I think best follows the golden rule is to tell the CXO the following:  “you go look for a job, and I’ll go look for a new CXO.”  A lot can go wrong (e.g., undermining, hasty departure, mind changing) and you can’t really nail it all down legally (I’ve tried several times), so you can only do this option with someone you really trust.  But it allows you to treat the outgoing CXO with respect and enables them to not have to ask you for a reference (as they’re still working for you).  You’re basically starting a search that is “quiet” (i.e., unannounced internally), but not backdoor because the CXO knows it’s happening.

Hat tip to Lance Walter for prompting me to write on this topic.

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Posted in Management, People, Recruiting, Silicon Valley, Startups

Crowdsourced Marketing:  Hey, We Can Put on a Show!

Posted on August 3, 2022 | 1 comment

The plot of so-called backstage musicals usually centers around the production of a show, often created to avoid imminent financial peril, as you’d find in many of the depression-era Our Gang movies.  Invariably, as the characters realize their predicament, someone shouts the solution, “Hey, we can put on a show!”  (The ticket sales from which presumably generate enough money to save the day.)

The purpose of this post is to discuss one of the more serious forms of software marketing desperation, which I refer to variously as a backstage musical, a bake sale, or what one might more contemporaneously call crowdsourced marketing.

Since I’m mixing more metaphors than someone burning the midnight oil on both ends, let me quickly elaborate on each:

  • Backstage musical. Think: “Jimmy can tap dance, Mary can sing, and John plays the trumpet.  We can put on a show!”
  • Bake sale. Think: “You make the brownies, I’ll make the cookies, and Anne can make the cupcakes.  We can have a bake sale!”
  • Crowdsourced marketing. Think: “We can have a Sales town hall, set up a Slack channel, and call a meeting with Product to figure out how to generate sales.  We can crowdsource marketing!”

In all three cases, the presumption is basically, if only we had professional performers, bakers, or marketers, they’d know what to do, but since we don’t – well, let’s throw it together the best we can.  For the Our Gang financial dilemma or the classroom fundraiser, that might be good enough.  For your marketing department, it’s not.

I’ve spoken to CEOs who ask:

If we have all the performance data and conversion rates by (marketing) channel, and we understand that things aren’t purely linear but opportunity generation happens over time in response to numerous touches, and we can test the effectiveness of a various messages used in various segments, then how are we supposed to take all that information and decide what to do?

If only, I think, you had a strong head of marketing.  That is their job.  In most marketing organizations, it’s not their only job and they may have delegated a lot of it to the head of demandgen, but wafting through all that data and all those ideas, building a plan, getting buy-in to that plan from sales, selling it to the CEO, and maybe the board — well, that’s what of head of marketing is supposed to do.

You can’t hire an agency to decide it for you.  You can’t decide it in a board meeting or a call.  The CEO can’t decide it after looking at some reports.  The CEO and/or board can and should question any proposed plan, but making that plan is the head of marketing’s job.

And, let me be clear, it’s hard.  Which is precisely why no one else can really do it.   It’s a mix of art and science.  It’s a mix of re-running proven campaigns while testing new hypothesis.  It’s a mix of proven messaging and new messaging to address new trends, products, or partnerships.  It’s knowing the channel performance data cold, but also knowing the limitations on its interpretation and the scaling opportunity and cost per channel going forward (think:  exhaustion of low hanging fruit).  It’s hard.

There are zillions possible combinations.  There is no one right answer.  No report will ever tell you or John Wanamaker which half of the marketing budget is wasted.  Attribution throws a drowning victim an anvil, not a buoy; the best we can likely do is to make attribution suck less.

Believe it or not, I’m actually a big believer in crowdsourcing certain aspects of marketing – but not the plan.  The plan needs to be made by someone who understands the market and who is immersed in the data of the business.  If you don’t trust your marketing head to make the plan, you need a new marketing head.  Period.

When it comes to crowdsourcing and marketing, I believe there’s a time and a place for it.

  • It is extremely effective for review. Share a draft logo and you might learn it’s too close to an indirect competitor’s.  Share a draft name to learn it’s a bad word in another language.  Share a draft webpage to find errors.   Share a draft white paper to get your arguments torn apart.   Many marketers (and most agencies) are afraid of this because such feedback can interrupt your timeline.  But it can also help you catch mistakes, before they go live.  The great thing about marketing is that everyone is going to get a chance to review your work anyway.  You may as well find problems before the launch, not after.  Don’t be an unveiler.
  • It’s great for brainstorming. It’s great to sit down with a bunch of sellers and say, “tell me what would make your lives easier.”  Or, “I noticed we’re having troubles with our demo-to-close rate, what can we do to help improve that?”  Be ready for the usual answers and bring data to address them – e.g., “no one’s ever heard of us.”  Whip out your recent awareness study to present the actual state of relative awareness and then describe your plan to address it.  Some marketers develop a fear of ideas because they see each new idea as work.  Don’t be that person.  Love ideas.  Get as many as you can and then pick the best ones.
  • It’s great for guerilla marketing. We’ve got no more budget, but we still have a problem.  What can we do, on the cheap, to help solve it?  This often comes up in the context of field and/or regional marketing.  It’s arguably a form of brainstorming, but not the kind where you are at the start of an exercise, generating ideas.  Here, you’re in the middle of it, things aren’t going according to plan, and people need help.  What we can we do (given our constraints)?  The best marketers will go sixty minutes after the official end of the day, wringing brains, asking:  any more ideas, anything else anyone can think of?   Sometimes you get the best ideas on the third wring.

In this post, I’ve tried to convince CEOs to not turn their marketing into a bake sale.  If you’re a CMO and you feel like your CEO or CRO is trying to do just that, then you need sit down and have a talk.  You are a professional, you’re immersed in the data, and you understand the business.  Ask them to work with you to make a plan, explain in detail why you’re proposing what you’re proposing, and listen carefully to their ideas and concerns.

Then, as depression-era Grandpa Kellogg would say, “plan your work, and work your plan.”

If everyone else nevertheless insists on a bake sale, you probably have a bigger problem.

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Posted in Management, Marketing, Sales, Startups

Official Video of my SaaStr Europa Presentation

Posted on July 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Just a quick post to highlight that SaaStr has posted the official video of my SaaStr Europa 2022 presentation entitled, The Top 5 Scale-Up Mistakes, that I gave in Barcelona in June.  They also published a blog on the session and packaged it into a podcast episode.

The video includes a 30-minute delivery of the presentation followed by a open-mike Q&A for another 30 minutes.  Note that I’ve since re-recorded the presentation into a slightly more relaxed 45-minute delivery that is posted on the Balderton Build site.

So, if you want the live version with Q&A, watch this.  If you want the studio version, here it is on the Balderton site.

Thanks to everyone who attended and thanks to SaaStr for having me.

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Posted in SaaS, SaaStr, Sales, Startups, Strategy, VC