Have you ever looked at all of the reports, dashboards, and data presented across your company and felt overwhelmed and under-informed? Today's data-driven world far too often results in a lot of data but not better decision-making or company performance. Scott Stouffer founded his first company in 1993 and has lived the reality of how Go-to-Market Strategy is not a one-time thing, but a series of iterations over time. Scott compares today's need to continuously evolve your GTM strategy much as ...
Oct 25, 2022•35 min
Bill Binch has led revenue teams at highly successful B2B SaaS category creators, including Marketo and Pendo. Having real-life, applied experience and success at scaling high-growth companies, while also having broad insights into several Battery Ventures portfolio companies provides Bill with a unique perspective on how Chief Revenue Officers use metrics to inform their journey. Bill's journey over 29 years has informed how his use of metrics to lead a revenue team has evolved, alongside the a...
Oct 17, 2022•31 min
It's hard to imagine being a key part of three industry-defining product categories, which is exactly what Bruce Cleveland has experienced in his Silicon Valley software career. First, Bruce was an early executive leader at Oracle (first 100+ employees) as they re-defined relational databases, then on to Apple where he led the object-oriented engineering division, next he led the business development and alliances team at Siebel Systems before he took over products as they defined Customer Relat...
Oct 12, 2022•34 min
You may have heard the acronym FP&A many times, but always wondered what it stood for? Financial Planning and Analysis is the function, typically present in more mature companies responsible that is responsible for financial planning, modeling and analysis. Paul has a summarized view of what FP&A professionals are responsible for which is: "FP&A is responsible to maximize shareholder return by helping businesses to best deploy and allocate future dollars". Where does FP&A start a...
Sep 13, 2022•28 min
How has Customer Success evolved over the past ten years? What better place to start than discussing the latest Customer Success Benchmarking Index with Kellie Capote, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. Kellie has invested the last five years developing her perspectives on Customer Success at Gainsight in a broad array of Customer Success leadership roles, including becoming the Chief Customer Officer in 2021. What were some of the top findings from the 2022 CS Benchmarking Index? Kellie first...
Aug 09, 2022•37 min
How vibrant is the SaaS industry in Canada? Who better to ask that question and discuss how the SaaS industry is trending in Canada other than Lauren Thibodeau, founder and CEO SaaSCan. Saadian is the leading market research and benchmarking company for the SaaS industry across Canada. There are 38 Million people in Canada. Leading SaaS companies like Shopify, OpenText, and Constellation Software are all headquartered in Canada. There is also a growing ecosystem in Canada with 3,170 VC-backed Sa...
Jul 26, 2022•31 min
Venture Capital - a hallmark of the B2B SaaS start-up industry has evolved over the past twenty years - but how have the primary value and responsibilities evolved? Marcelino Pantoja has had a front-row seat in many positions, starting as an analyst at the investment office at Stanford University. Then Marcelino worked with Greg Sands to help stand-up Costanoa Ventures. These views provided insights over six years from over 500 start-ups founded by Stanford alumni. The most surprising component ...
Jul 18, 2022•30 min
Cash Management is not one of the top subjects B2B SaaS founders want to discuss, but critical to start-up survival and success. Brandon Metcalf learned the in's and out's of Cash Management as a multiple-time founder and CEO. As a result, he recently founded Place Technology to help early-stage CEOs and CFOs use automation and technology to better manage cash across every stage of growth and every function in a company. "Cautious Capital" is a reality of any capital market that has experienced ...
Jul 12, 2022•32 min
Incentive Compensation and Sales Performance Management - two key ingredients to scaling a successful B2B SaaS company. Is Intelligent Revenue the next key ingredient to growth? Chris Cabrera, founder, and CEO of Xactly, built a very successful company by helping companies to automate and optimize those two disciplines. The result was an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2015 and a $564M acquisition by Vista Equity in 2017...but Chris's and Xactly's story did not stop there and continues to evolv...
Jul 06, 2022•29 min
How should we price our new SaaS product? How does our pricing model compare to our competitors? Are there other pricing models that would increase revenue and margin for our SaaS product? These are all some of questions that can be answered by analyzing B2B SaaS industry pricing benchmarks. This is the world that Bryan Belanger lives in everyday, so who better to ask. Bryan has been conducting pricing research for over 10 years at the Technology Business Research company. One of the challenges ...
Jun 29, 2022•25 min
Does being data-driven result in better decision-making and performance results? That was a question we asked Allan Willie, co-founder and CEO of Klipfolio which is enabling thousands of companies to do just that through the dashboards they enable. What are the primary challenges with data-driven decision-making? It starts with the data quality going into the metrics used for decisions. Once the quality, integrity, and even amount of data can drive statistically significant insights, it's import...
Jun 15, 2022•32 min
Marketing as an AMPLIFIER to Sales productivity!!! The quote above was the primary focus of my discussion with Mark Stouse - the CEO of Proof Analytics. Mark self-identifies as a communicator turned marketer turned SaaS CEO. Over this journey, Mark has developed a strong perspective on how to prove ROI, especially for marketing investment. What are the metrics that matter to a Chief Marketing Officer? Mark says this is very straightforward: "Marketing's mission is to help Sales sell more product...
Jun 07, 2022•35 min
Sam Baker, Principal at Scale Venture Partners, has been a venture capitalist for six years. Before that, he gained operational experience at Box in both an Inside Sales role and in a Strategy and Planning role. Scale's culture has a very quantitative-oriented DNA, including having its own benchmarking organization known as Scale Studio. Benchmarking delivers reality to every Scale portfolio company and aligns the founder and the investor on a metrics-oriented approach to decision making. The fi...
May 23, 2022•34 min
Everyone talks about the "Customer Journey" but often operates in stage-by-stage silos of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. What is the Customer Journey - first, it often depends on if you come from a "Buyer perspective" versus the "Seller perspective." Ultimately, the seller is trying to figure out how to turn the buyer's meandering journey into a more liner, faster buying journey...sounds like an adversarial relationship using this model. One interesting aspect of today's buying ...
May 04, 2022•29 min
Taft Love's journey to becoming a Revenue Operations leader started in law enforcement, with a pivot to starting his tech career by becoming a Sales Development Representative, on to direct sales, sales leadership and ultimately to Revenue Operations. This journey is exactly the cross-functional experience that builds a strong foundation to being a strategic revenue operations leader. Interestingly, Taft's experience as a sales lead at early stage B2B SaaS company, PandaDoc by identifying and th...
Apr 26, 2022•33 min
SaaS Capital - I have always loved that name and followed their B2B SaaS Research for many years. Todd Gardner was a founder at SaaS Capital, which helped lead the early days of "Debt Lending" for SaaS companies. Most recently, Todd is now the principal at SaaS Advisors assisting both SaaS companies and SaaS investors during the financing process. During Todd's career, he has reviewed thousands of SaaS income statements and balance sheets which positions Todd very well for the business and finan...
Apr 05, 2022•35 min
Kyle Porter, the founder and CEO of Salesloft, started the company over ten years ago. The goal was to have sellers "loved by the customers" they serve. An initial observation was that it was difficult to deliver a personalized customer engagement experience at scale, thus the catalyst for Saleloft and the Sales Engagement category. The future of Sales Engagement? All professionals who are responsible for driving revenue will be able to log into a single system, have a pre-defined queue of activ...
Mar 23, 2022•37 min
The Great Resignation has been a trending topic for six months - how does a B2B SaaS company prepare for the impact? Sales Enablement is one strategic function that will be a key component to combat attrition and ramp new sales hires to productivity...quickly Dave Lichtman has been a sales trainer, a sales professional at Salesforce and a sales leader at Sales Enablement platform vendor, SalesHood. We first discussed how Sales Enablement evolved during the pandemic. First, most sales playbooks h...
Mar 15, 2022•33 min
Anna Baird is the Chief Revenue Officer at Outreach, the leading Sales Engagement Platform. Anna started her career as a partner at KPMG, and continued her career journey across multiple “C-Level” roles including CFO, COO, President and now CRO. The first portion of our conversation centered on the maturity of the Sales Engagement Platform category. Anna shared that across all B2B Sales, that the category has only achieved a 2% market penetration, as measured by the number of B2B sales professio...
Mar 08, 2022•40 min
Customer Success has been growing in importance across the B2B SaaS landscape for over 10 years. Guy Nirpaz recognized this trend early on and founded Totango in 2010 to deliver a SaaS platform to empower Customer Success (CS) professionals to focus the company around the customer. Guy stated our conversation with his belief that Customer Success is a company strategy - not just a department. If you want a customer to renew and expand their relationship, every interaction with the customer needs...
Mar 01, 2022•29 min
We apologize for the sound quality on this episode of the Metrics that Measure Up. Bill was not able to participate on our traditional digital channel medium and instead we relied upon the traditional "analog phone line". This traditional approach created a little "reverberation and noise". Bill shares so many great insights developed over his 37 years of being a Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist and his multiple best selling books in this conversation, we decided to go ahead and publish the epi...
Feb 23, 2022•25 min
One of the great aspects of the Cloud software delivery model is the generation of insightful data generated by users and the purported ease of using the data to better inform decision-making. At the same time, the amount of data being generated in the Cloud makes the job of normalizing, analyzing, and determining what data is truly informative and predictive versus just adding noise and complexity to the system. Adam Wilson, CEO at Trifacta was purchased by Alteryx after this podcast was record...
Feb 15, 2022•39 min
Usage-Based Pricing is trending across the B2B SaaS and Cloud industry. This pricing model is not new and is also known as Consumption pricing as the cost of the service or product increases as the "consumption" of the product increases. Saas has traditionally become known for the use of subscription pricing, which often associates an annual subscription cost for each user of the product. In this scenario, the cost would only increase as additional users were assigned a "seat" and were then able...
Feb 03, 2022•38 min
B2B SaaS founders envision their entrepreneurial journey including a liquidity event such as an IPO, a financial acquisition, or a strategic acquisition from an industry leader. Lowell Ricklefs has deep operating experience leading tech companies and has experienced acquisitions on both the buyer and the seller side multiple times. During these processes, Lowell often wondered why banks were required to sell a SaaS company. Lowell identified an opportunity for enhanced sell-side assistance for S...
Jan 27, 2022•45 min
Andy Byrne is the founder and CEO of Clari, an enterprise artificial intelligence B2B SaaS platform that enables companies to build more pipeline, accelerate revenue growth and increase revenue predictability. Andy has a long-term relationship with machine learning from his previous company Clearwell Systems (acquired by Symantec), and that experience was the foundation of his vision for Clari. Andy identified that machine learning had not previously been used to help sales teams close deals fas...
Jan 18, 2022•35 min
Benchmarks go far beyond the “numbers” and “metrics” Benchmarking is a discipline that enables organizations to identify processes and best practices that companies inside and outside of your industry to become best in class in a specific discipline. Scott Sutton is the VP, Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo and shares his experiences in building the Revenue Operations function. Scott’s initial career experience was in the automotive industry and provided a solid foundation for his transition into B...
Jan 07, 2022•40 min
Sam Jacobs first created the foundation for Pavilion - formerly the Revenue Collective in 2016. The vision was to address these two trends: 1) the average tenure of executives at B2B start-ups was shrinking - about 17 months for revenue leaders; 2) The job of being a B2B executive continues to grow in complexity and difficulty. Sam was experiencing this phenomenon in his career and wanted to create a platform and community to share best practices and assist members in realizing the potential tha...
Dec 20, 2021•33 min
Are you involved, responsible for, or dependant on Sales Development and pipeline growth for a B2B SaaS or Cloud company? If you answer yes to any of the above, this is an excellent conversation to gain new insights and hear innovative approaches to maximize pipeline development. Kyle Coleman is the Vice President, Revenue Growth and Enablement at Clari. This role includes sales development, sales enablement, and demand generation at Clari. This integrated approach to pipeline development is uni...
Dec 14, 2021•35 min
Have you read Crossing the Chasm - the Go-to-Market bible for high tech leaders for over 30 years? Crossing the Chasm, written by Geoffrey Moore, was first published in 1991 introduced the Technology Lifecycle Adoption Framework. The basic concept of Crossing the Chasm is that there are five stages in the Technology Lifecycle Adoption curve, and each stage has a specific "buyer profile" at each stage of adoption: Stages of the Product Lifecycle Adoption Curve: Innovators - Get excited about the ...
Nov 26, 2021•46 min
Conversational Intelligence (CI) is a technology that materially enhances the effectiveness of every B2B Sales professional. CI has quickly become a "must-have" component in the B2B sales tech stack and has become a feature in most Sales Engagement Platforms...WHAT is the future of Conversational Intelligence? Our host, Ray Rike, recently spoke with Amit Bendov, Founder and CEO of Gong.io, to discuss the vision and future of Gong and the Revenue Reality. Amit's premise was "is there a better way...
Nov 24, 2021•34 min
