For Entrepreneurs Blog

Why Sales People shouldn’t Prospect – An interview with Aaron Ross

David Skok — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:45:55 +0000

In this article I interview Aaron Ross, co-author of a new book, Predictable Revenue. Aaron discusses his experience at Salesforce.com starting a new group that used an innovative outbound prospecting approach (involving no cold calls) to create new leads. Aaron’s group came up with several important breakthroughs which enabled them add over $100m in incremental [...]

Understanding the Customer Buying Cycle & Triggers

David Skok — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:00:23 +0000

This article looks at why customers expect different interactions with you depending on where they are in the buying cycle. It also examines how specific events trigger them into a buying mode. It then explains how you can use this information to make your marketing more effective. The Customer Buying Cycle A simple way to [...]

The Application Development Landscape – 2012 and beyond

David Skok — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:00:38 +0000

Today’s application developers are faced with a broad set of architectural decisions that can make or break their company going forward. This presentation, which was given as a keynote for the MassTLC application development conference, highlights the major changes that are taking place in the world of application development. The Application Development Landscape – 2011 [...]

HubSpot’s Best Practices for Managing SaaS Inside Sales

David Skok — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:00:07 +0000

Best practices for inside sales managers. An interview with Mark Roberge, VP of Sales at HubSpot, discussing how he blends science and process with the art of selling. HubSpot is a SaaS company selling Inbound Marketing software. HubSpot has grown revenue over 6,000% in the last four years, placing them #33 on the Inc 500 [...]

When Selling is the Worst Way to Win Customers

David Skok — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:30:33 +0000

Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy something. But much of the time they are not ready to buy, and one of the most irritating things is to have a salesperson try to get them to buy when they aren’t ready. Unfortunately too many people in [...]

Multi-axis Pricing: a key tool for increasing SaaS revenue

David Skok — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:00:16 +0000

Scalable pricing is a powerful tool to grow revenue in a SaaS or software business. It allows you to capture more of the revenue that your customers are willing to pay, without putting off smaller customers that are not able to pay high prices. It also provides a great way to continue to grow revenue [...]

SaaS CEOs: Measure Customer Engagement – Increase Conversions & Lower Churn

David Skok — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:30:00 +0000

The goal of a SaaS CEO should be to increase the profit they make from each customer (LTV), and lower the costs in sales and marketing that it takes to acquire each customer (CAC). Measuring Customer Engagement is a key tool that will help you achieve that goal, as it will allow you to increase [...]

The Science behind Viral Marketing

David Skok — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:38:55 +0000

The Science behind Viral Marketing is a look at the key factors that drive growth in viral marketing. (Hint, the most important factor is not the one everyone expects.) It also looks at what is needed to get virality to work, and how to create and optimize viral marketing campaigns or viral products. This was [...]

Brainstorming for New Startup Ideas: A Framework to Spur Creative Thinking

David Skok — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:00:26 +0000

If you are a serial entrepreneur starting to look for an idea for your next startup, you are likely to want a way to stimulate your brain to come up with as many good ideas as possible. This blog post outlines a framework that is designed to fire up your best creative thinking modes, triggering [...]

Cash is King: 8 tips for Optimizing your Startup Financing Strategy

David Skok — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:05:03 +0000

Introduction This post aims to help startup CEOs optimize their funding strategy by examining how investors value startups, and explaining how to avoid the common cash management pitfalls. (Note: The concepts in this post will likely be obvious to experienced CEOs and entrepreneurs. Despite that, our experience indicates that entrepreneurs frequently make costly, avoidable mistakes [...]

Slides on Building a Sales & Marketing Machine

David Skok — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:00:42 +0000

Here is the slide deck that I presented last night at the Boston Lean Startup Circle. The slide deck describes how to build a Sales & Marketing Machine that is predictable, scalable, automated, well instrumented, and cost efficient. Building a sales & marketing machine View more presentations from David Skok.

Finding Product/Market Fit: Using Consulting to Understand Customer Needs

jraguin — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:30:32 +0000

Many entrepreneurs have a strong suspicion that there is an opportunity in a particular market, but lack the detailed understanding of customer pain needed to design an appropriate solution. The following guest post by John Raguin, ex-CEO, and co-founder of Guidewire Software, describes how he and his co-founders tackled this problem. Recently, David Skok and [...]

Will your 2011 Plan stand up to investor scrutiny?

David Skok — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

How to make sure your sales forecast has been properly validated so it will stand up to test of time (and investor scrutiny). This blog post looks at the process that I would use as a board member or investor to validate a bookings forecast, checking to see if the key elements that are needed to support that forecast have been thought through properly.

How MySQL solved their Sales & Marketing challenges

David Skok — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:22:50 +0000

An interview with Lesley Young, who was the VP of worldwide Sales for MySQL, and then head of sales for the MySQL division within Oracle. Few products are as well known as the ubiquitous MySQL database. The company behind the database was also one of the great success stories in the Open Source world, and [...]

Building a Sales and Marketing Machine Webinar

David Skok — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:30:11 +0000

Slides and video on "Building a Sales and Marketing Machine", with a discussion on how to optimize your sales & marketing funnel.