Win Them Alone, Lose Them Together

Posted on September 6, 2016 | 2 comments

It was back in the 1990s, at Versant, when my old (and dearly departed) friend Larry Pulkownik first introduced me to the phrase:

Win Them Alone, Lose Them Together

And its corollary:

Ask for Help at the First Sign of Trouble

Larry told me this rule from the sales perspective:

“Look, if you’re working on a deal and it starts to go south, you need to get everyone involved in working on it.  First, that puts maximum resources on winning the deal and if — despite that effort — you end up losing, you want people saying ‘We lost the Acme deal,’ not ‘You lost the Acme deal.'”

It’s a great rule.  Why?  Because it’s simple, it engages the team on winning, and most of all — it combats what seems to be a natural tendency to hide bad news.  Bad news, like sushi, does not age well.

Twenty years later, and now as CEO, I still love the rule — especially the part about “the first sign of trouble.”  If followed, this eliminates the tendency to go into denial about bad news.

  • Yes, they’re not calling me back when they said they would, but I’m sure it’s no problem.
  • They did say they expected to be in legal now on the original timeline, but I’m sure the process is just delayed.
  • Yes, I know our sponsor seemed to have flipped on us in the last meeting, but I’m sure she was just having a bad day.
  • Well I’m surprised to hear our competitor just met with the CIO because they told us that the CIO wasn’t involved in the decision.
  • While the RFP does appear to have been written by our competitor, that’s probably just coincidence.

These things — all of them — are bad news.  Because many people’s first reaction to bad news is denial, the great thing about the “first sign” rule is that you remove discretion from the equation. We don’t want you to wait until you are sure there is trouble — then it’s probably too late.  We want you to ask for help at the first sign.

The rule doesn’t just apply to sales.  The same principle applies to pretty much everything:

  • Strategic partnerships (e.g., “they’ve gone quiet”)
  • Analyst relations (e.g., “it feels like the agenda is set for enemy A”)
  • Product development (e.g., “I’m worried we’ve badly over-scoped this”)
  • Financing (e.g., “they’re not calling back after the partner meeting”)
  • Recruiting (e.g., “the top candidate seemed to be leaning back”)
  • HR (e.g., “our top salesperson hated the new comp plan”)

I’ll always thank Larry for sharing this nugget of wisdom (and many others) with me, and I’ll always advise every manager I know to follow it.

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Posted in Leadership, Management, Startups

The Four Levers of SaaS

Posted on September 1, 2016 | 6 comments

There are a lot of SaaS posts out there with some pretty fancy math in them.  I’m a math guy, so I like to geek on SaaS metrics myself.  But, in the heat of battle running a SaaS company, sometimes you just need to keep it simple.

Here’s the picture I keep on my wall to help me do that.

It reminds me that new ARR in any given period is the product of four levers.

  • The MQL to stage 2 opportunity conversion rate (MTS2CR), the rate at which MQLs convert to stage 2, or sales-accepted, opportunities.  Typically they pass through a stage 1 phase first when a sales development rep (SDR) believes there is a real opportunity, but a salesperson has not yet agreed.
  • The stage 2 to close rate (S2TCR), the rate at which stage 2 opportunities close into deals, and avoid being lost to a competitor or derailed (e.g., having the evaluation project cancelled).
  • The annual recurring revenue average sales price (ARR ASP), the average deal size, expressed in ARR.

That’s it.  Those four levers will predict your quarterly new ARR every time.

Aside:  before diving into each of the four levers, let me note that sales velocity is omitted from this model.  That keeps it simple, but it does overlook a potentially important lever.  So if you think you have a sales velocity (i.e., sales cycle length) problem, go look at a different model that includes this lever and suggests ways to decrease it.

So now that we have identified the four levers, let’s focus on what we can do about them in order to increase our quarterly new ARR.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Getting MQLs is the domain of marketing, which should be constantly measuring the cost effectiveness of various marketing programs in terms of generating MQLs (cost/MQL).  This isn’t easy because most leads will require numerous touches over time in order to graduate to MQL status, but marketing needs to stay atop that complexity (e.g., by assigning credits to various programs as MQL-threshold points accumulate).

The best marketers understand the demand is variable and have designed their programs mix so they can scale spending quickly in response to increased needs.  Nothing is worse than an MQL shortage and a marketing department that’s not ready to spend incremental money to address it.

The general rule is to constantly A/B test your programs and nurture streams and do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.

MQL to Stage 2 Opportunity Conversion Rate

Increasing the MQL to stage 2 opportunity conversion rate (MTS2CR) requires either generating better MQLs or doing a better job handling them so that they convert into stage 2 opportunities.

Generating better MQLs can be accomplished by analyzing past programs to determine which generated the best-converting MQLs and increasing them, putting a higher gate on what you pass over to sales (using predictive or behavioral scoring), or using buyer personas to optimize what you say to buyers, when, and through which channels.

Do a better job handling your existing MQLs comes down ensuring your operational processes work and you don’t let leads fall between the cracks.  Basic activity and aging reports are a start.  Establishing a formal service-level agreement between sales and marketing is a common next step.

Moving up a level and checking that your whole process fits well with the customer’s buying journey is also key.  While each step of your process might individually make sense, when assembled the process may not — e.g., are you irritating customers by triple-qualifying them with an SDR, a salesrep, and a solution consultant each doing basic discovery?

The Stage 2 to Close Rate

Once created, one of three things can happen to a stage 2 opportunity:  you can win it, you can lose it, or it can derail (i.e., anything else, such as project cancellation or “slips” to the distant future).

Increasing your win rate can be accomplished through better product positioning, sales tools, and sales training, improved competitive intelligence, improved buzz/aura, improved case studies and customer references, and better pricing and discounting strategy.  That’s not to mention more strategic approaches via improved sales methodology and process or product improvements, in terms of functionality, non-functional requirements, and product design.

Decreasing your loss rate can be accomplished through better up-front sales qualification, better sales tools and training, improved competitive strategy and tactics, and better pricing and discounting.  Improved sales management can also play a key role in catching in-trouble deals early and escalating to get the necessary resources deployed to win.

Reducing your derail rate is hard because project slips or cancellations seem mostly out of your control.  What’s the best way to reduce your derail rate?  Focus on velocity — take deals off the table before the company has a chance to prioritize another project, do a reorganization, or hire a new executive that kills it.  The longer a deal hangs around, the more likely something bad happens to it.  As the adage goes, time kills all deals.

ARR ASP

The easiest way to increase ARR ASP is to not shrink it through last-minute discounting.  Adopt a formal discount policy with approvals so that, in the words of one famous sales leader, “your rep is more afraid of his/her sales manager than the customer” when it comes to speaking about discounts.

Selling value and product differentiation are two other discount reduction strategies.  The more customers see real value and a concrete return for their business the less they will focus on price.  Additionally, the more they see your offering as unique, the less price pressure you will face from the competition.  Conversely, the more they see your product as a cost and your company as one of several suppliers from whom they can buy the same capabilities, the more discount pressure you will face.

Up-selling to a higher edition or cross selling (“fries with your burger?”) are both ways to increase your ASP as well.  Just be careful to avoid customers feeling nickled and dimed in the process.

For SaaS businesses, remember that multi-year deals typically do not help your ARR ASP (though, if prepaid, they do help with year-one cash).  In fact, it’s usually the opposite — a small ARR discount is typically traded for the multi-year commitment.  My general rule of thumb is to offer a multi-year discount that’s less than your churn rate and everybody wins.

Conclusion

Hopefully this framework will make it easier for you to diagnose and act upon the problems that can impede achieving your company’s new ARR goals.  Always remember that any new ARR problem can be broken down into some combination of an MQL problem, an MQL to stage 2 conversion rate problem, a stage 2 to close rate problem, or an average sales price problem.  By focusing on these four levers, you should be able to optimize the productivity of your SaaS sales model.

 

 

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Posted in Metrics, SaaS, Sales, Startups, VC

Tagged

On Hiring: Promote Stars, Not Strangers

Posted on August 25, 2016 | 1 comment

“Well, he’s never been a sales development rep (SDR) manager before, but he has been an SDR for 3 years at another company. The chance to be a manager is why he’d come here.” — Famous Last Words

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard something akin to the above in hiring processes.

Of course he’d come here to get the chance to be a manager.  The question is why his current employer won’t make him one?  They’re the ones who know him.  They’re the ones who’ve worked with him for three years.  What do they know that we don’t?

As a general rule, startups are not the place to learn how to do your job.  At startups, you should hire people who already know how to do the job.  Running the startup, in a high-growth, frenetic environment, is hard enough; you don’t need to be learning how to do your job at the same time.  A key reason startups offer stock options is precisely this:  to incent people who already know how to do the job to do it again by participating in the upside.

This is not to say, reductio ad absurdum, that startups should have no entry-level jobs, never take a bet on inexperienced people, and never promote anyone into management.  That’s a recipe for losing your best people when they decide the company has no interest in their personal development or career path.  The best startup teams are a mix of veterans and up-and-comers, but since — particular for management hires — you need to have a mix, you need to be very careful to whom you give that first-time in-the-job slot.

This is why I made the Star/Stranger Promotion Quadrant.

star promotion

The two axes are simple:  is the person a known star (at this company, i.e., do we all know her and do we all think she’s a star, here) and has the person done the job before (i.e., the actual job, SDR manager in this case, not SDR).

One of the easiest things you can do is to appoint known stars.  This means the person works today at your company in a different role, but wants to do a new job that’s opened up, and has already done that exact job before.  It doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes your director of product management has been director of product marketing before and wants to get back to it.  Awesome.  I call this “appointing” known stars because while the move may involve a titular promotion, in reality it’s more of an appointment than a promotion.  It’s great to let people move around the organization and there should be no shame in ever wanting to move back to something that someone particularly likes doing (or that the company really needs).  I shade this green because it’s low risk.

One of the nicest things you can do is to promote known stars.  For example, take a top-performing SDR who has management potential (an elusive concept, I know, but a whole post unto itself) and give them the chance to run a piece of the SDR team.  I prefer to do this — especially for first-time promotions into management — on a reversible basis.  Since neither side is certain it’s going to work, I believe it’s best to make someone a “team lead” for six months and then assess how it’s going.  If it’s going great, promote them to SDR manager and give them a raise.  If it’s not going well, you haven’t burned the ships on making the person a regular SDR again, working on some skills, and trying again in the future.  I shade this purple because there is some risk involved, but it’s a good risk to take.  People in the organization want see others given the chance to succeed as well as to safely fail in taking on new challenges.

If you lack existing team members with management potential or if your current team has too many first-time (and too few experienced) managers, then your best move is to hire qualified strangers.  While the stranger might want a career step-up, the reality is that most companies hire new people to do jobs they already know how to do.  Cross-company promotions are rare and candidates offered them should be somewhat wary.  Why again are these people willing to make me a CMO for the first time?  Sometimes the reasons are good — e.g., you’ve been a divisional marketing VP at a larger company and move into a startup.  Sometimes the reasons are bad.  Think: why won’t any qualified CMO (who knows this space) take this job?  But, moving back to the employer perspective, I shade this square purple because external hiring is always risky, but you can minimize that risk by hiring people who have done the job before.

This takes us back to the start of this post.  While depending on the kindness of strangers may have worked for Blanche Dubois, as a hiring manager you should not be extending such kindness.  Hiring qualified people is risky enough.  New hires fail all the time — even when they are well qualified for job with lots of relevant prior experience.  Don’t compound the risks of cultural fit, managerial relations, attitude/urgency, and a hundred other soft factors with the risk of not knowing how to do the job in question.  What’s more, do you have time to teach one of your managers to do their job?  Especially when what’s needed is teaching in basic management?  As I often say, VCs are risk isolators more than risk takers, and hiring managers should think the same way.  That’s why you should almost never promote strangers.  (And, as a corollary why strangers should be wary of those willing to promote them.)

That’s why I’ve colored this square red.  Companies should hire outsiders to do jobs that candidates already know how to do.  Promotions are reserved for promising insiders.

Put differently, and from a career planning viewpoint:  “rise up, jump across.”

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Posted in Hiring, Management, Startups

The Three Golden Rules of Feedback

Posted on August 22, 2016 | 5 comments

I was speaking to my executive coach the other day and we had a great conversation about feedback.  I’m going to adapt what she said into some pithy advice for managers on how to give feedback.

Here are the three golden rules of feedback:

  • It has to be honest
  • It has to be kind
  • It has to be timely

Honest Feedback
When you give someone feedback it has to be authentic.  It has to be what you really feel.  It can’t be candy coated.  It has to be what you honestly feel about the situation, tempered by the humility that you may not necessary be “right” — or that right and wrong may not even have meaning in a given situation.

Example:  “I felt disrespected when you arrived late at my meeting.”

I provided a concrete situation in which something happened; I am not generalizing or pattern-matching.  I indicated a specific behavior that I observed.  I described the impact on me — how I felt about it (which is incontrovertible) — without trying to speculate why you did it or what you intended.

This form of feedback is called situation-behavior-impact, and it’s a great template for giving honest feedback.

It’s quite hard to do and (given how things went when I was trained) comes naturally to few people.  While I would never claim to be a great SBI feedback-giver, I nevertheless continue to aspire to be one — because it does work.

Always be honest.

Kind Feedback
While not something I’m necessarily known for, I love my coach’s second rule of feedback.  If you’re like me, the honest part of feedback isn’t hard.  Example:

That’s the worst proposal I’ve ever seen.  You never said what you wanted to do, what it would cost, or why we should do it.  Other than omitting the three key elements of a proposal it was great.

Or, as Larry Ellison was reputed to have often said:  “that’s the stupidest f**king idea I’ve ever heard in my life,” sometimes rather amazingly followed by, “say it again!”  (The latter addition being a tell-tale that you were likely out of the building by 5 PM.)

While “honest” comes naturally to me, I really like the “kind” principle.  I stand behind the vast majority of feedback I’ve given over the years.  It’s always been honest and usually been accurate.  I’ve been unafraid to put hard issues on the table that other managers were afraid to confront.  I am proud that I have helped people identify and eliminate weaknesses that would have otherwise limited them and/or developed strengths that helped propel them.

But I am equally certain that I could almost always have found a better way of expressing my feedback had I known about and applied the kind principle.

Being kind forces the feedback giver to focus not just on the validity of his/her feedback, but on the appropriate timing and expression of it.  It provides a second, important test — particularly for well-intentioned managers too blunt for their own good.

To be clear, being kind doesn’t mean avoiding hard issues or candy-coating conversations.  It does mean that you should challenge yourself, even during very difficult conversations, to find a way to communicate such that the other person leaves feeling respected and with their dignity intact.

Even the ultimate hard conversation — terminating someone — can be conducted in a way that leaves feeling respected as a person and with their dignity intact.  While many fearful mangers bungle termination into a personal tear-down, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Before a comment-outcry develops, I’m the first to admit that I’m not the king of kind feedback.  I am, however, going to work on it for three reasons:

  • It’s nicer.  I’d like people to want to work for me because of my feedback — not despite it.
  • It’s a challenge, that will make me a better manager.
  • It’s more effective.  I can’t tell you how frustrated I get when people spend more time reacting to how I said something than what I said.

You can generate big distractions and waste hours by giving feedback without adequate consideration for its impact on the recipient.  It’s far more effective to think up front for 30 minutes about both what to say and how to say it than to hastily offer feedback only to spend hours in damage control afterwards, simply working your way back to zero on the relationship — with most of the actual feedback long-forgotten in the process.  It happens.  I’ve been there.

Always be kind.  (Hey, I’m working on it.)

Timely Feedback
The last rule is that feedback needs to be timely.  Feedback, like sushi, does not get better with age.

Timeliness matters for several reasons:

  • Both sides are in a better position to discuss recent events than ancient history.  Memories fade and the best feedback is usually quite specific.
  • Letting feedback get old tends to bottle up anger or dissatisfaction on the part of the giver.  The manager might start treating someone differently — e.g., being curt, assigning core projects to others — without them having any understanding of what’s going on.
  • Delaying feedback often leads to “pattern matching,” where instead of discussing specific situations (e.g., when you were late to my staff meeting on Tuesday) the giver generalizes to patterns (e.g., you are always late to my staff meetings) which wrecks the SBI process and results in factual disputes (e.g., no I’m not) instead of impact discussions (e.g., it made me feel disrespected).

Being timely doesn’t mean delivering a real-time stream of constant criticism.  (I’ve tried that too and it doesn’t work!)  Nor does it mean confronting hot issues immediately when tempers may still be high.  But it does mean giving feedback within a timeframe when memories are still fresh and when the recipient doesn’t feel like “why did you wait so long to tell me this?”

Finally, if you’re going to start giving periodic constructive feedback you better get ready to give a lot more positive feedback if you want to preserve the overall quality of the relationship.  Research shows that the ideal ratio of praise to criticism is 5 to 1.  This applies not only at work, but also at home —lasting marriages have a 5 to 1 ratio of praise to criticism while marriages ending in divorce have a 0.7 to 1 ratio.

I better go buy some flowers on the way home tonight.  I love you guys.

Always be timely.

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Posted in Leadership, Management

How I Got One Marketing VP Job: A Quick Lesson

Posted on August 19, 2016 | 3 comments

I think great learning can come from studying what cost your predecessor his/her job (on the assumption they weren’t promoted out of it onto greener pastures).  While such matters are invariably complex (“oh, there were a lot of factors, boss relationship, objectives attainment, sales confidence, …”), if you poke around hard enough you can almost always find a high-level, simple explanation of what went wrong (“in the end, it all came down to this.”)

Studying those simple explanations can teach you a lot.

How I Got One Product Marketing Job

I remember my first day at the company.  It was two weeks before my official start date, but I was invited to attend the quarterly business review, so I did.  The team was great.  The company was doing well.  The vibe was positive.

Then the marketing guy stood up to deliver his quarterly update.  The crowd turned aggressive.  They hit the presenter with rapid-fire questions.  He appeared off-balance, under-attack, and at times a bit deer-in-the-headlights.  It wasn’t pretty to watch.

I remember thinking that no matter what happens here, I don’t want to be that guy.  I never want to be in that situation.  I never want to be attacked by sales, put on the defensive, and bobbing and weaving for answers.  I want to be data-driven, confident, and educational.  I want to inform sales of our plans, up-front, get their buy-in on the program, go execute it, and then clearly share past results and future objectives.  Sales considers itself the most accountable corporate function.  If I show accountability before them, they will respect me.

After the corporate lynching ended, I figured this dynamic was what caused his downfall.  But when I went asking around, it wasn’t.  The performance may well have been a symptom of the problem, but it turned out the last straw was simple.

We launched version 6 of the product and a month later all we still had was version 5 data sheets.

Boom.  Basic execution.  That’s what will get you knocked out.  While you may be so busy doing 1000 things — and most marketers are — it’s not the bad article or the average presentation or the blown objective that will get you killed.

It’s the basics:  if the company launches version 6 of the product and a month later marketing is still only providing version 5 content, there’s a problem.  It’s black and white, de facto, proof that something is wrong.  It’s like handing sales a loaded gun and daring them to fire.

The moral:  prioritize your work.  Use a Maslow pyramid or concentric circles to understand what is core, what is next layer, and what’s after that.  And never miss on core.

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Posted in Management, Marketing, Startups