Career Growth & Advice, Growth, Q&A, Sales, Sales StrategyUrgency. Urgency does not really exist in 95%+ of deals. There really is no burning need for most customers to buy today, this month, or often even, this quarter. The…
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Growth, Leadership, Other, Q&AI don’t think so. Not until the paradigm changes. Here’s why. Quora has a unique combination of: The largest on-point audience, and By far — by far — the best…
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Roughly for me, for as long as it’s about a 10-hour a week job. Or often, maybe only up to $3m-$5m in ARR or so. In SaaS at least, founders…
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Q&AMaybe. A few thoughts: First, conflicts are somewhat fluid and even subjective and not AS big of a deal as some make it out to be. I know this is…
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Career Growth & Advice, Exit, Exit Strategy, Leadership, Q&AMuch better the first time than the second. The first time we sold, I had far exceeded any expectations I had as a founder. First, I barely believed I could…
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Career Growth & Advice, Hiring, Leadership, Q&A, ScaleI try to work with (and invest in) CEOs that are better than me. I found, when I was a SaaS CEO, that the CEOs that complained about needed a…
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Career Growth & Advice, Growth, Leadership, Q&AI try to spend about 20 minutes a day. I really enjoy writing on focused questions, it sharpens the mind and more specifically, helps me collect and “succinct-ify” my thoughts…
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Career Growth & Advice, Growth, Q&A, Sales, Sales StrategyThe one thing I do strongly recommend is letting each VP you hire pick her core tools and system of record. Forcing a VP of Sales to use a CRM…
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If you are in B2B/SaaS, you’re welcome to work from the 18,000 sq ft SaaStr CSS in SF/SOMA. A bunch from the last batch did, all of whom got funded…
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Career Growth & Advice, Early, Featured Q&A, Q&A, Sales, Sales StrategyAdd value. Most new salespeople focus a lot on the transaction. What’s your budget? Do you need a discount? How big a discount? Can I give you a bigger discount?…
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Goodness. Congratulations on the IPO! But what and how to sell is really a tough one. If you’d sold shares in almost any SaaS/Cloud IPO in the past 7 years,…
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Q&AThere are 500+ new sub $200m funds raised since 2011, and my guess is 200+ in the past 2.5 years: VC funds at / below $200M in size (new funds…
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My first entrepreneurial adventure was in the crazy days of Web 1.0: I joined one of my clients as a Director of Corporate Development in 1998. This was my first…
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Fundraising, Growth, Leadership, Q&AI didn’t when I raised my first fund. I was in Sell mode. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for the LPs to buy. I sent a…
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Career Growth & Advice, Featured Q&A, Growth, Hiring, Leadership, Q&AThe biggest structural difference is you have to hire all the VPs by employee 50–100. You won’t be able to scale this far without a full management team — VPs…
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