About three years ago, I had a conversation with an old friend that led to a post, Ten Pearls of Enterprise Software Startup Wisdom from My Friend Mark Tice.  In that (quite popular) post, I shared Mark’s top ten list of mistakes that enterprise software startups make in sales and go-to-market.  If you’ve not read it, take a look — particularly (in today’s environment) with an eye toward mistakes five through ten. I enjoy talking with Mark because our skills and experience are complementary.  My core is marketing.  Mark’s is partners.   While we’ve both done bigger thi ..read more

Just a quick post to highlight a recent podcast appearance I did on the Exit Five podcast, which is produced by the Exit Five community for B2B marketers, led by veteran marketer Dave Gerhardt. In the episode we touch on the following topics: My background and career path and my positioning of such: 10 years a CMO, 10 years a CEO, and independent director at 10 companies. The origin of Kellblog, which was originally called The MarkLogic CEO Blog, created so I could walk in the footsteps of my media customers. My early experiment with ChatGPT, see the comments on the post for an example that a ..read more

A funny thing can happen with startups. Sometimes, the reasons customers love the product end up not being the same reasons that the founder wants them to love the product. This may sound bad or scary, but it’s not. It’s actually an opportunity, provided you recognize it, understand it, and take advantage of it. I’ve blogged previously on the difference between selling solutions and selling product and on the difference between selling product and selling vision. In today’s post, the distinction [1] we’ll draw is between selling the reasons customers actually love the product and selling the r ..read more

Just a quick post to invite you to register for a Balderton-hosted, public webinar on June 28th where Michael Lavner and I will discuss the SaaS Metrics That Matter in 2023. This webinar will based on the slides that we used last week in London at a Balderton portfolio company breakfast event, which in turn were based on the presentation I did at KiwiSaaS last month. The point of the presentation is to discuss the metrics that matter now, given the change in the business and funding environment. The slides are available on Slideshare (or Drive) if you want to get a clear sense for what we’ll b ..read more

With the able help of Michael Lavner, we did a special, live presentation and discussion of my KiwiSaaS talk, Metrics That Matter in 2023, for Balderton portfolio executives. These slides are largely the same as the KiwiSaaS ones, with the notable exception that European companies may find some of the data more relevant because Michael was able, in several cases, to replace my largely US-based benchmarks with data from Balderton’s universe of European SaaS companies. We had a great discussions with those who attended and dove into the more advanced topics of: Growth-weighted rule of 40 scores ..read more

This is a post to highlight a recent podcast appearance I made on The Growth Hub podcast with Seija Lappalainen and Reeta Westman, who are both based out of Finland, and with whom I had a lot of fun talking. So much fun, in fact, that we ran long and they ended up splitting the episode in two parts: one focused on founder sales knowledge (material derived from the Balderton Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales that I wrote and about which I’ve blogged here) and the other focused on sales & marketing alignment. In the podcast episode we address questions including: Which role I most preferred in m ..read more

Since there is much talk of AI replacing workers, including writers, I thought I’d give ChatGPT a crack at writing a Kellblog post. Here’s what it came up with (and I’ll post some thoughts on its work down below): Sure, here’s a blog post on the role of marketing, written in the style of Dave Kellogg: Title: The Indispensable Role of Marketing in the Age of the Customer If there is one thing that all successful companies have in common, it’s a deep understanding of their customers. But how do you gain that understanding? The answer is simple: through marketing. Marketing is the lifeblood of an ..read more

Let’s say you’re a CEO.  You don’t come from a marketing background.  At every quarterly business review (QBR) and board meeting, your marketing head presents a chart like this: What happens next?  More than likely, after 10 or 15 minutes of effectively random probes into this minefield of numbers, you do what any good CEO would under the circumstances.  You say: “Next slide, please.” To paraphrase Thoreau, the mass of CEOs lead lives of quiet marketing desperation. Slides like this are why. What’s wrong with this slide? [1] Well, to get this out of my system, there are a ..read more

Just a quick post to let you know that I’ll be presenting at SaaStr’s Workshop Wednesdays this week, on 5/3/23 at 10am Pacific. Our topic will be The Seven Things Founders Need to Know About Sales, which non-coincidentally happens to be the first section of the Balderton Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales that I wrote and we published last November. I’ve not done one of these sessions before, but the format looks to be pretty intimate in terms of size and pretty interactive in terms of content (i.e., some lecture but a lot of time allocated for Q&A). Registraton is free. You can register here. H ..read more

As long as the country’s in a censorship mood, I figured that I could jump on the bandwagon and propose that we ban discussion of one of my pet-peeve SaaS metrics: ending ARR. Wait, but aren’t you the guy who said that if you only knew two things about a SaaS company and needed to value it, one would be ending ARR and the other would be its growth rate? Yes. That’s true. But the primary business of a SaaS company isn’t valuing itself. And, as an operational metric, ending ARR stinks. I dislike talking about ending ARR for the same reason I dislike talking about revenue. In a SaaS company, reve ..read more