Tag Archives: Podcasts

Appearance on the SaaS Revolution Podcast

SaaStock recently released an interview with me on their podcast, The SaaS Revolution Show.  The interview, conducted by SaaStock founder and CEO Alex Theuma, was notionally about the Balderton Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales that I published late last year.  While we ended up discussing that, we also covered a whole lot more, including:

  • My background as a CMO, CEO, and independent director
  • My work with Balderton as an EIR 
  • Which job I prefer, and why:  CEO or CMO
  • Why we made the Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales
  • Key takeaways from the guide
  • The transition from founder-led sales (FLS) to sales-led (SLS)
  • When to hire your first sales executive or leader
  • Why it’s important to define process (and metrics) early — before you need to
  • The Holy Grail of a repeatable sales process
  • Why salespeople are like airplanes (they only make money when they’re in the air)

If you’re interested in listening to the episode, you can find it here.

I’ll see you at SaaSstock USA in Austin this June where I’ll be talking about conversation intelligence, inspired by my work with Jiminny, a UK-based startup where I sit on the board.

Appearance on the Precursive Podcast: The Role of Services in Today’s SaaS Market

A few weeks back, I sat down with Jonathan Corrie, cofounder and CEO of Precursive — a Salesforce-native professional services (PS) delivery cloud that provides PS automation, task, and resource management — to discuss one of my favorite topics, the role of professional services in today’s SaaS businesses.

Jonathan released the 48-minute podcast today, available on both Apple and Spotify.

Topics we discussed included:

  • The Hippocratic oath and executive compensation plans (do no harm).
  • How to frame the sales / services working relationship (i.e., no chucking deals over the fence).
  • Why to put an andon cord in place to stop zero-odds-of-success deals early in the sales process.
  • How to package services, including the risks of tshirt-sized QuickStart packages.
  • How to market methodology instead of packages to convince customers of what matters:  success.
  • The myth of services cannibalization of ARR.  (This drives me crazy.)
  • The alternatives test:  would a customer pay someone else to be successful with your software?
  • Selling mistake-avoidance to IT vs. selling success to line-of-business executives.
  • How and why to bridge “air gaps” between functions (e.g., sales, customer success, services).
  • How to position the sales to CSM “handoff” as à la prochaine and not adieu.
  • The perils of checklist-driven onboarding approaches.
  • The beauty of defining organizational roles with self-introductions (e.g., “my name is Dave and my job is to get your renewal”).
  • The three types of CSMs — the best friend, the seller, and the consultant — and how to blend them and build career paths within the organization.
  • Top professional services metrics.  Caring about (versus maximizing) services margin via compensation plan gates.
  • The loose coupling between NPS and renewal.

Thanks again to Jonathan for having me, and the episode is available here.

Named To Top 25 All-Time SaaStr Podcast, Twice

I’m revising this post because I learned today that I’ve been named not once (as I thought yesterday) but twice to the SaaStr All-Time Top 25 List of podcast episodes (see Top 1-12 and Top 13-25).  Apologies for the confusion, but wow, what an honor.  This puts me in the company of legends like David Skok, Mark Suster, Nick Mehta, and Tomasz Tunguz — and dare I say that by my quick tally only two people made the list twice:  David Skok and me.

Thank you to everyone who listened and helped drive my episodes to the top of the charts!

Here are the two episodes that made the list:

In both episodes the interviewer was the ever-dynamic Harry Stebbings of 20VC fame.

Appearance on the “Yes, And Marketing” Podcast

A few days ago, Steve Pockross released a new episode of his Yes, And Marketing podcast on which he interviews a series of “eclectic and enlivening” marketers where “your weird shower thoughts and disparate liberal arts references take a road trip.” I was last week’s featured guest, and I don’t think the episode fails to deliver on its rather unusual promise.

Steve posted a nice summary of the session which lays out the topics we discussed including:

  • A rambling introduction where we talked about the Grateful Dead as related to marketing and business models, the philosophy of math and Russell’s paradox, the linkage between mysticism and quantum mechanics, the art of the proper French dinner, an unlikely similarity between geophysics and marketing (inverse problems), the quote from A Christmas Carol that most applies to upwardly mobile CMOs (“mankind was my business”), Gad Elmaleh, The Three-Body Problem trilogy, and stuff like that.
  • Imposing simplicity, a critical duty for all marketers
  • The two archetypal marketing messages, Bags Fly Free and Soup is Good Food.
  • Long vs. short copy and how to correctly apply David Ogilvy’s “long copy sells” adage.
  • Content marketing, and when to write C+ deliverables vs. A+ deliverables, and how to be explicit about that in planning.  (Lest you end with straight Bs.)
  • What to look for in a CMO for a startup, particularly if they’re potentially joining from a large company and you’re worried they may struggle in a startup environment.
  • Aligning sales and marketing, a perennial favorite topic, but this time both from the CMO and the individual marketer perspective.
  • The importance of rigorous definitions in messaging, and how you can use them to turn gray messages into black-and-white messages.
  • Walking the benefits stack by repeatedly asking “so what?” and not being afraid to do so.
  • Never forgetting the kiss, i.e., the ultimate benefit from the point of view of the customer, in your marketing.

Thanks to Steve for having me, to Crispin Read for referring me (his episode is well worth a listen), and to all of you who find the time to listen.  While I’ve been doing a  lot of podcast interviews of late, like the Grateful Dead, I promise that each show is different.  And this one’s a barn burner.

Core SaaS Metrics Interview at SaaSBoomi Now Available on the Orbit Shift Podcast

I recently gave a presentation at SaaSBoomi, an India-based SaaS founder community, which was structured as an interview by Evangelist at Freshworks for Startups, Jayadevan P K (aka, JPK).

In the interview I answer the following questions:

  • How do you look at ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) and its relation to the valuation of a company?
  •  What else is a company’s valuation dependent on?
  • You place a lot of importance on NDR (Net Dollar Retention). Why is that?
  • What’s a good way to look at NDR for early-stage companies? Anything below 100 is bad, but what’s a good thing?
  • Talk to us about NPS (Net Promoter Score). Why is it important? When should you start tracking it? And what are some of the pros and cons of tracking NPS?
  • Talk to us about the culture of metrics. What are some of the best practices, and what are some things you should avoid while tracking metrics?
  • What’s your view on churn? What’s healthy? Any benchmarks that you can talk to us about?
  • Do you take into account all marketing spend in CAC or only cost for campaigns that worked? Do you exclude the experimental campaigns from CAC?
  • What’s a good way to follow your work?  (Hint:  Twitter and the blog)

Both an audio version and transcript excerpts are available here.  The session is packaged as an episode of The Orbit Shift podcast.