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There are approximately 500+ unicorn companies globally so there is a slim chance that one gets to work at one of them. I’ve had the opportunity to be part of two great unicorns and it has provided me with incredible learning experiences that are unique to such high growth companies. Based on my journey and observing the best in the business, these are some of the key ways to succeed at a unicorn: Get sh*t done Even if it sounds obvious, it’s incredibly important at a unicorn to execute and punch above your weight class. If you see a problem, try to solve it. It’s better to apologize than ask ..read more

Channel? Alliances? It’s where bad sales reps get hired. This is what the historical perception of those teams have been. While it’s foolish to generalize every person in that role, truth is most of them relied on resellers to push their product. This worked great in legacy businesses since they wanted to procure new products through resellers that they had built long lasting relationships with to cut risk. But…this buying process has since been disrupted by SaaS and Cloud products. From the person with the hands on keyboard to the CIO, everyone is purchasing solutions collectively as well as ..read more

Public Cloud is here to stay. Cloud Revenue Projection in 2020 for Amazon AWS is $44B, Microsoft Azure $19B and Google Cloud Platform $17B. Haters gonna hate and smart enterprises are already adopting cloud to cut costs and time to market. In order for organizations to migrate their applications to public cloud, there are three paths: Lift & shift – exactly what it sounds like, the approach is migrating applications to the cloud without any code changes. While it’s the least time intensive, it lacks cost benefits by not taking advantage of dynamic cloud capabilities. Refactoring – involve ..read more

1) Embrace uncertainty I’ve always considered my impatience a strength because it’s forced me to learn things quickly but it’s not a great trait for BD. You need to be professionally persistent. Calling or emailing someone everyday makes you look desperate and guarantees a way to be moved to the spam folder. 2) Love the grind The thought of figuring out the stakeholders at the target account and how we can get their attention gets me fired up. If you treat this like a day job, you’ll be mediocre or fail miserably. 3) Know your workflow Productivity is key to working smart. Since I’m a mo ..read more

Prospectors make things happen. This quote by Aaron Ross speaks volumes: If you’re in a prospecting role, your success and salary both depend on getting your foot in the door. This puts us in a tough spot because you start seeing people as numbers that you need to dial or an email that your need to send so you can get through your list. When I first started in business development, I used to get emotional when I’d see prospects open my emails but not reply or when they said yes to a meeting but asked to reschedule which never happened after. It took me a couple months and then I finally real ..read more

There’s plenty written about “showing up” and increasing your luck surface area. It’s a great first step to getting what you want because if you don’t put in the effort, you can’t expect to get anything in return. That said, people miss out on the next important step – “following-up.” Let say that you sent an email to someone for a job and they didn’t reply so you assumed that they hired someone else. Think about the million other possibilities that could’ve happened. What if they were on vacation? What if they saw your email, but they were planning to reply to you later and forgot? What if th ..read more

The first piece of advice that I can recall getting is “Advice is like a**holes, everyone has one and they all stink.” At the time, it felt a bit funny to me but it all makes sense now based on life experiences so far. As humans, we always know what we want to do but we go to friends, mentors and family to get “advice.” We just want to hear from their mouths that we are doing is right. When someone gives you advice that is similar to what you really want to do, you think it’s good advice. There’s no such thing as “good advice.” The people who are really helpful are the ones that ask you the ri ..read more

“I have analytics(Mixpanel/KISSmetrics) up and running but I’m not sure if I’ve set it up correctly or if it’s actually helping us.” That’s ok. Handling growth at a SaaS company can be daunting since the discipline is brand new and evolving rapidly. One of the major steps to understand how your app is growing or how to make it grow is to have your analytics setup, *correctly*. How to pick events There are several great analytics frameworks out there and most of them emphasize one key lesson: *Don’t measure everything.* Any event that you track should be tied to a goal like “Increase signups ..read more

Take a deep breath and look at the chart below from ChiefMarTech. This is not a joke. Marketing is getting more tech savvy than ever and more messier than ever. A modern marketer probably has at least 5-10 tools in their “Marketing Stack” and that’s just the beginning. The overflow of data from each application is already a problem and hence companies like Segment are popping up to integrate it all. The major problem with new tools that this is causing is education. There’s only so much time in the day of a marketer to learn new tools, efficiently. So what’s the solution? Firstly a company co ..read more