On the heels of this post about What Really is Go-To-Market?, I have had a ton of discussions about the constant tussle between product management and product marketing, especially at later stage growth businesses or divisional teams at large companies. Between Kahuna (startup) and at SuccessFactors/SAP as GM (ginormous largeco) I’ve seen this play out […]
The single most bastardized, watered-down term in the business of enterprise tech is “Go-to-Market”. Go-to-Market (GTM) gets bandied about as the cure-all to everything from missing 2 sequential quarters to losing critical deals to a single competitor, to seeing a tepid uptick in demand, to my least favorite – a one-time effort to coordinate activities […]
Mark Andreessen coined the term product-market fit, defined as being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. Whilst getting to product market fit is job #1 for a CEO at the early stages, product market fit alone leaves gaps that you need to fill to drive sales velocity. There are some fabulous perspectives about these gaps already. Brian Balfour […]
Last year, Jeff Clavier asked me to present at Uncork Capital’s (formerly SoftTech VC) CEO summit on how to do BD deals with large software companies. I was then CEO of an Uncork portfolio company, but the content here draws on my prior experience as GM at largeco (in this case, SuccessFactors/SAP) when I was […]
A giant caveat: this post is focused on high growth SaaS. Not on mature businesses where you are trying to coordinate the build, sale and adoption of a large portfolio of products. In the world of high growth SaaS, all too often we tend to believe that it is our functional or technical inferiority that will […]
The single most common pitfall I see in 90% of earlier stage product plans is a lethal misconception that aspiring to sell software to the highest levels of the organization, is better. This is blatantly obvious to many product leaders but foreign to equally as many. Trust me. It isn’t necessarily all that. It’s expensive: the […]
After building, marketing and selling lots of software, I’m convinced that the single most underutilized component to driving growth is your roadmap. In SaaS or consumer products monetized via an enterprise budget, you make your numbers because of your current feature set. But you blow out your quarter because your product and sales teams present […]