The Key to Branding Success: Staying in Character
Decades ago I had the pleasure of watching a branding video, created by a San Francisco ad agency, narrated by an advertising executive with a familiar voice who’d narrated scores of commercials [1]. It was, I believe, entitled Staying in Character and while I’ve searched the internet for it many times over the years — […]
5 Interesting Learnings from Slack at $1B in ARR
So this 5 Interesting Learnings post is a bit bittersweet. We’ve recently checked in with a bunch of our Cloud and SaaS favorites as they cross $1B in ARR: 5 Interesting Learnings from Zendesk. As It Crosses $1B in ARR 5 Interesting Learnings from HubSpot as It Approaches $1 Billion in ARR 5 Interesting Learnings […]
Marketing Targeting: It’s Not Just Where You Fish, It’s What You Put on the Hook
Back in the day I was taught that marketers do three things, memorized via the acronym STP: segment, target, position. Divide the audience into different segments. For example, dividing consumers by demographics or dividing businesses by size or industry. Select the segments that the company wishes to target for its marketing. For example, choosing small […]
Centrify’s New CEO Has A Compelling Vision For The Future Of Cybersecurity
Bottom Line: Flint Brenton’s vision for the future of Centrify and cybersecurity, in general, prioritizes the need for privileged access management to become core to the multi-cloud architectures and DevOps environments he sees pervading customers’ enterprises today. Every new cybersecurity company CEO is writing their vision of the future by their decisions and the priorities […]
On the Perils of Taking Advice from Successful Business People
One of the hardest things about running startups is you’re never sure who to listen to. Your board members own big stakes in the company, but that doesn’t automatically align them with you. Your late-stage investors want low multiples on big numbers. Your early-stage investors want big multiples on small numbers. And they have their […]
Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier
Many moons ago when I was young product marketing manager, I heard a new VP of Marketing speak at a marketing all-hands meeting. He spoke with a kiwi accent and his name was Chris Greendale. What he said were six words that changed my career: Marketing exists to make sales easier While this has clearly […]
Machines Protecting Themselves Is The Future Of Cybersecurity
Bottom Line: Existing approaches to securing IT infrastructure are proving unreliable as social engineering and breach attempts succeed in misdirecting human responses to cyber threats, accentuating the need for machines to protect themselves. Any nations’ digital infrastructure and the businesses it supports are its most vital technology resources, as the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear. Cybercriminal […]
Monday’s Musings: Inside The Five Levels Of Autonomous Enterprises
Cognitive Apps Power The Future Of Autonomous Enterprises Cognitive applications run mission-critical business systems in a continuous, self-driving, self-learning, auto-compliant, self-securing, and self-healing approach. These AI driven systems intelligently automate transactional systems and processes such as campaign to lead, order to cash, procure to pay, incident to resolution, concept to market, and hire to retire. […]
Personal Log: Understanding Case Fatality Rates For #COVID19 #CoronaVirus
Data In Early Case Fatality Rates Are Naturally Biased To Show Massive Fatality While there’s nothing wrong with an abundance of caution for high case fatality rates we are seeing for the COVID-19 coronavirus, the data is not accurate. We keep hearing 3.5% or 4% of the population is going to die. Why is the […]
Does Enterprise SaaS Need a Same-Store Sales Metric?
Enterprise SaaS and retailers have more in common than you might think. Let’s think about retailers for a minute. Retailers drive growth in two ways: They open new stores They increase sales at existing stores Opening new stores is great, but it’s an expensive way to drive new sales and requires a lot of up-front […]
