Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash

Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link).  They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples.  This one is probably my second favorite so far.

This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great.  It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless.  His recipe for success is simple:

– Get people to articulate the relevance in their jobs…the meaning they derive out of their work…an understanding of the people whose lives are made better, even in small ways, by what they do every day

– Get people to measure what they do (duh, management 101), IN RELATION TO THE RELEVANCE learnings from the last point (ahh, that’s an interesting twist)

– Get to know your people as people

All of these are things you’d generally read in good books on management, but this book ties them together artfully, simply, and in a good story about a roadside pizza restaurant.  It also stands in stark contrast to the book I reviewed and panned a few days ago by Jerry Porras in that it is nothing but examples from non-celebrities, non-success stories — ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.

Brad has blogged glowingly about Death by Meeting, so I’ll probably make that my next Lencioni read next month, with two more to go after that.

My name is Matt Blumberg. I am a technology entrepreneur and business builder based in New York City who just (in 2020) started a new company called Bolster.

Bolster is an on-demand executive talent marketplace that helps accelerate companies’ growth by connecting them with experienced, highly vetted executives for interim, fractional, advisory, project-based or board roles. Bolster also provides on-demand executives with software and services to help them manage their careers as independent consultants and provides startup and scaleup CEOs with software and content to help them assess, benchmark and diversify their leadership teams and boards.  We are creating a new way to scale executive teams and boards.

Before that, I started a company called Return Path, which we sold in 2019.   We created a business that was the global market leader in email intelligence, analyzing more data about email than anyone else in the world and producing applications that solve real business problems for end users, commercial senders, and mailbox providers.  In the end, we served over 4,000 clients with about 450 employees and 12 offices in 7 countries.  We also built a wonderful company with a signature People First Culture that won a number of awards over the years, including Fortune Magazine’s #2 best mid-sized place to work in 2012.

Early in my career, I ran marketing and online services for MovieFone/777-FILM (www.moviefone.com), now a division of AOL. Before that — I was in venture capital at General Atlantic Partners (www.gapartners.com), and before that, a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting (www.mercermc.com). And I went to Princeton before that.

Based on this blog, I wrote a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was published by Wiley in 2013 and updated in 2020.

I have been married for over 20 years to Mariquita, who is, as I tell her all the time, one of the all-time great wives. We have three great kids, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse.

I have lots of other hobbies and interests, like coaching my kids’ baseball and softball teams; traveling and seeing different corners of the world; reading all sorts of books, particularly about business, American Presidential history, art & architecture, natural sciences (for laymen!), and anything funny; cooking and wishing I lived in a place where I could grill and eat outdoors year-round; playing golf; lumbering my way through the very occasional marathon, eating cheap Mexican food; introducing my kids to classic movies; and playing around with new technology.

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS BLOG IS ALL ABOUT, read my first two postings: You’re Only a First Time CEO Once, and Oh, and About That Picture, as well as my updated post when I relaunched the blog with its new name, StartupCEO.com.

Book Short:  Like a Prequel to My Book

How to Start a Business, by Jason Nazar, CEO of our client Docstoc, is a great and quick (and free) eBook that feels a lot like a prequel to my book Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (original outline here). My book is about scaling a business once you’ve started it.  Jason’s book is a really practical guide to starting it in the first place.

The thing that’s particularly good about this book is that it’s as much a resource guide as it is a book.  At the end of each of its 24 chapters (and within them as well), Jason adds a series of external links to other resources, from videos to checklists to templates.  The book answers a lot of really practical questions that are easy for product-focused entrepreneurs to gloss over or ignore, from corporate structures to insurance, from trademark registration to pitching VCs, from payroll to tax planning.

It’s great to see so much more being written for entrepreneurs these days.  Ash Maurya’s Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (which I blogged about last week) is another related book that focuses on how to bring a new product to market.  But Jason’s eBook is a must read for anyone in TechStars or any accelerator program, or anyone contemplating starting a business.

Book Not-So-Short:  Not Just for Women

At the request of the women in our Professional Services team, I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In:  Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and while it may seem like dancing the meringue in a minefield for a male CEO to blog about it, I think it’s an important enough topic to give it a shot.  So here goes.

First, given the minefield potential, let me issue a few caveats up front.  These are deep, ages old, complex, societal issues and behaviors we’re talking about here.  There is no quick answer to anything.  There is no universal answer to anything.  Men don’t have the same perspective as women and can come across as observers (which in some respects, they are).  Working moms don’t have the same perspective as stay-at-home moms, or as single women.  We try to be good about all these issues at Return Path, but I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface.  </caveats>

Perhaps most important, my overall take on the book is that it’s a very good business book that everyone should read – not just women.  I have a strong reaction to the reactions I’ve read and heard about the book – mostly from women dismissing the book because Sandberg has immense financial resources, so how could she possibly know the plight of the ordinary mom, and how could she understand what it is like to be a stay-at-home mom?  That reaction is to dismiss the dismissals!  I found the book to be very broadly applicable.  Of course things about life with a two-working parent family are easier if you have more money.  But that’s completely not the point of the book.  And Sandberg doesn’t once criticize stay-at-home moms for that choice – in fact, she acknowledges feelings of guilt and inferiority around them and admiration for the work they do that benefits all families and kids, not just their own.

Here are a few of the biggest areas of thinking, AHA, or questioning, that the book gave me:

• One of Sandberg’s underlying points is that the world would be a better place with more women in leadership positions, so that’s an important goal.  It’s interesting that few enough of our leaders are women, that it’s hard for me to draw that same conclusion, but it makes sense to me on the surface, and there’s some research about management teams and boards to back it up.  As far as I can tell, the world has yet to see a brutal female dictator.  Or a fair share of political or corporate scandals caused by women.  There are definitely some horror stories of “tough boss” women, but probably no more than “tough boss” men.  It’s interesting to note that in our society, leadership roles seem to be prized for their power and monetary reward, so even if the world wouldn’t be a better place with more female leaders, it would certainly be a more fair place along those two dimensions
• I felt that a bunch of Sandberg’s points about women were more generalizations about certain personality types which can be inherent in men and women.  Maybe they’re more prevalent in women, even much more, but some are issues for some men as well.  For example, her general point about women not speaking up even if they have something to say.  I have seen this trait in women as well as more introverted men.  As a leader, I work hard to draw comments out of people who look like they have something to say in a meeting but aren’t speaking up.  This is something that leaders need to pay close attention to across the board so that they hear all the voices around their tables.  Same goes for some of the fears she enumerates.  Many male leaders I know, myself included at times, have the “fear of being found out as a fraud” thought.  Same goes for the “desire to be liked by everyone” holding people back – that’s not gender specific, either.  All that said, if these traits are much more prevalent in women, and they are traits that drive attainment of leadership roles, well, you get the point
• The fact that women earn 77 cents on the dollar in equivalent jobs for men is appalling.  I’ve asked our People Team to do a study of this by level, factoring in experience and tenure, to make sure we don’t have that bias at Return Path.  I know for sure we don’t at the leadership level.  And I sure as heck hope we don’t anywhere in the organization.  We are also about to launch an Unconscious Bias training program, which should be interesting
• Sandberg made a really interesting point that most of the women who don’t work are either on the low end or high end of the income spectrum.  Her point about the low end really resonated with me – that women who don’t earn a lot stop working if their salaries only barely cover childcare costs.  However, she argues that that’s a very short term view, and that staying in the workforce means your salary will escalate over time, while childcare costs stay relatively flat.  This is compounded by the fact that women who lean back early in their careers simply because they are anticipating someday having children are earning less than they should be earning when they do finally have children.
• The other end of the income spectrum also made sense once I parsed through it – why do women whose husbands make a lot of money (most of whom make a lot of money as well) decide to off-ramp?  Sandberg’s point about the “Leadership ambition gap” is interesting, and her example of running a marathon with the spectators screaming “you know you don’t have to do this” as opposed to “you’ve got this” is really vivid.  See two bullets down for more on this one.  But it might not be straight-up Leadership Ambition Gap so much as a recognition that some of the high-earning jobs out there are so demanding that having two of them in the household would be a nightmare (noting that Dave and Sheryl seem to have figured some of that out), or that moms don’t want to miss out on that much of their children’s lives.  They want to be there…and they can afford to.  Another related topic that I wish Sandberg had covered in more depth is the path of moms who off-ramp, then re-on-ramp once their youngest children are in school, whether into the career they left or a different one.  That would be an interesting topic on many fronts
• Societal influences must matter.  The facts that, in 2011 – Gymboree manufactured onesies that say “smart like Daddy” and “pretty like Mommy,” and that JC Penney teenage girl t-shirts say “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me” are more than a little troublesome on the surface (unless Gymboree also produces “handsome like Daddy” and “wicked smart like Mommy,” which somehow I doubt).  The fact that women do worse on math and science tests when they have to identify their gender at the top of the test is surprising and shocking
• I am really fortunate that Mariquita only works part time, and it’s unclear to me how our lives would work if we both worked full time, especially given my extremely heavy travel schedule, though I am sure we’d figure it out.  And there’s no way that I carry 50% of the burden of household responsibilities.  Maybe 20-25% at best.  But I was struck by Sandberg’s comments (I am sure true) that in two-working-parent families, women still carry the preponderance of household responsibilities on their shoulders.  I totally don’t get this.  If you both work, how can you not be equal partners at home?  A quick mental survey of a couple of the two-working-parent families we know would indicate that the parents split household responsibilities somewhat evenly, though you can never know this from the outside.  This should be a no brainer.  Sandberg’s point that men need to “lean into their families” is spot on in these cases for sure
• On a related note, Sandberg’s comment that “as women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home…moms can be controlling and critical…if he’s forced to do things her way, pretty soon she’ll be doing them herself” made me smile.  I have definitely seen this “learned helplessness” on the home front with dads quite a bit over the years
• One really good point Sandberg makes is that younger employees who don’t have kids should be allowed to have a life outside of work just as much as women who do have kids.  And that she pays people for the quality and quantity of their output, not their hours.  These are principles that match our values and philosophy at Return Path 100%
• Probably the most startling moment in the book for me – and I suspect many other men – was Sandberg’s vignette about the young woman at Facebook who was starting to “lean back” because she might someday have a family – before she was even dating anyone!  This really gave me a lot of pause.  If widespread (and I assume it is), there are clearly societal forces at work that we need to do more to help women early in their careers overcome, if they want to overcome them
• Sandberg’s point that a rich and fulfilling career “is a Jungle Gym, not a Ladder” is spot on, but this is true for men as well as women.  It matches our philosophy of Scaling Horizontally perfectly
• Another very poignant moment in the book was when Sandberg talked about how she herself had shown bias against women in terms of who she called on in meetings or lectures during Q&A.  Again, lots of pause for me.  If female leaders have the same societal bias against women, that’s a sign that we all have real work in front of us to help level the playing field around giving women air time.  Similarly, her example of the Heidi/Howard study was fascinating around how women with the same characteristics are perceived differently by both male and female co-workers gives me pause (for the record, I know the Heidi in question, and I like her!).  Likewise, the fact that female leaders are often given unflattering nicknames like “The Iron Lady” – you’d never see something like that for a man in the same position.  At least Thatcher wore the name as a badge of honor

I hope this post doesn’t end up as a no-win piece of writing where all I do is touch a few nerves and inspire no ongoing dialog.  “Let’s start talking about it,” the ending theme of the book, is a great way to end this post as well.  As with all tough issues, articulating the problem is the first step toward solving it.  Women need to allow men (as long as the men are open-minded, of course!) to think what they think, say what they think in a safe space, and blunder through their own learnings without feeling threatened.  And men need to be comfortable having conversations about topics like these if the paradigmatic relationship between women and leadership is going to continue to shift instead of avoiding the topic or just calling in HR.

Hopefully this blog post is one step towards that at my company.  Return Path colleagues – feel free to comment on the blog or via email and share stories of how we’ve either helped you or held you back!  But overall, I’m glad I read this book, and I’d encourage anyone and everyone to read it.

In Defense of Email, Part 9,732

I commented today on our partner Blue Sky Factory’s CEO, Greg Cangialosi’s excellent posting in defense of email as a marketing channel called Email’s Role and Future Thoughts.  Since the comment grew longer than I anticipated, I thought I’d re-run parts of it here.

A couple quick stats from Forrester’s recent 5-year US Interactive forecast back up Greg’s points con gusto:

– 94% of consumers use email; 16% use social networking sites (and I assume they mean USE them – not just get solicitations from their friends to join).  That doesn’t mean that social networking sites aren’t growing rapidly in popularity, at least in some segments of the population, and it doesn’t mean that email marketing may not be the best way to reach certain people at certain times.  But it does mean that email remains the most ubiquitous online channel, not to mention the most “pull-oriented” and “on demand.”

– Spend on email marketing is $2.7b this year, growing to $4.2b in 2012.  Sure, email by 2012 is the smallest “category” by dollars spent, but first of all, one of the categories is “emerging channels,” which looks like it includes “everything else” in the world other than search, video, email, and display.  So it includes mobile as well as social media, and who knows what else.  Plus, if you really understand how email marketing works, you understand that dollars don’t add up in the same way as other forms of media since so much of the work can be done in-house. 

What really amazes me is how all these “web 2.0” people keep talking about how email is dying (when in fact it’s growing, albeit at a slower rate than other forms of online media) and don’t focus on how things like classifieds and yellow pages are truly DYING, and what that means for those industries.

I think a more interesting point is that in Forrester’s forecast, US Interactive Marketing spend by 2012 in aggregate reached $61b, more than triple where it is today — and that the percent of total US advertising going to interactive grows from 8 to 18 over the five years in the forecast. 

The bigger question that leaves me with is what that means for the overall efficiency of ad spend in the US.  It must be the case that online advertising in general is more efficient than offline — does that mean the total US advertising spend can shrink over time?  Or just that as it gets more efficient,
marketers will use their same budgets to try to reach more and more prospects?

The Gift of Feedback, Part IV

I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion.  I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it.  As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly.  This time around, there are three development items:

1. Continue to spend enough time in-market.  In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients.  There was a lot of discussion about this at my review.  One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my time in-market, thinking I was spending less than that.  We track my time to the minute each quarter, and I spend roughly 1/3 of my time in-market.  The problem is the definition of in-market.  We have a lot of large partners (ESPs, ISPs, etc.) with whom I spend a lot of time at senior levels.  Where I spend very little time is with direct clients, either as prospects or as existing clients.  Even though, given our ASP, there isn’t as much leverage in any individual client relationship, I will work harder to engage with both our sales team and a couple of larger accounts to more deeply understand our individual client experience.
2. Strengthen the Executive Committee as a team as well as using the EC as the primary platform for driving accountability throughout the organization.  On the surface, this sounds like “duh,” isn’t that the CEO’s job in the first place?  But there are some important tactical items underneath this, especially given that we’ve changed over half of our executive team in the last 12 months.  I need to keep my foot on the accelerator in a few specific ways:  using our new goals and metrics process and our system of record (7Geese) rigorously with each team member every week or two; being more authoritative about the goals that end up in the system in the first place to make sure my top priorities for the organization are being met; finishing our new team development plan, which will have an emphasis on organizational accountability; and finding the next opportiunity for our EC to go through a management training program as a team.
3. Help stakeholders connect with the inherent complexity of the business.  This is an interesting one.  It started out as “make the business less complex,” until I realized that much of the competitive advantage and inherent value from our business comes fom the fact that we’ve built a series of overlapping, complex, data machines that drive unique insights for clients.  So reducing complexity may not make sense.  But helping everyone in and around the business connect with, and understand the complexity, is key.  To execute this item, there are specifics for each major stakeholder.  For the Board, I am going to experiment with a radically simpler format of our Board Book.  For Investors, Customers, and Partners, we are hard at work revising our corporate positioning and messaging.  Internally, there are few things to work on — speaking at more team/department meetings, looking for other opportunities to streamline the organization, and contemplating a single theme or priority for 2015 instead of our usual 3-5 major priorities.

Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my 360 this year – my board, my team, a few “lucky” skip-levels, and my coach Marc Maltz.  The feedback was rich, the experience of observing the conversation was very powerful, and I hope you like where the development plan came out!

Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I

As you may know, we published a book earlier this year at Return Path called Sign Me Up! Sales are going quite well, in case you’re wondering, and we also launched the book’s official web site, where you can subscribe to our “email best practices” newsletter.

The process of publishing the book was fascinating and convinced me that publishing will never be the same.  Even in two parts, this will be a long post, so apologies in advance. Front to back, the process went something like this:

– We wrote the content and selected and prepared the graphics

– We hired iUniverse to publish the book for a rough total cost of $1,500

– iUniverse provided copy editing, layout, and cover design services

– Within 8 weeks, iUniverse put the book on Amazon.com and BN.com for us (in addition to their site) and properly indexed it for search, and poof — we were in business

– Any time someone places an order on any of those three sites, iUniverse prints a copy on demand, binds it, and ships it off. No fuss, no muss, no inventory, but a slightly higher unit cost than you’d get from a traditional publisher who mass prints. We receive approximately 20% of the revenue from the book sale, and iUniverse receives 80%.  I’m not sure what cut they give Amazon, but it’s hard to imagine it’s more than 10-20% of the gross

Other than the writing part (not to be minimized), how easy is that?  So of course, that made me think about the poor, poor publishing industry. It seems to me that, like many other industries, technology is revolutionizing publishing.  Here’s how:

– Publishers handle printing and inventory.  iUniverse and its competitors can do it for you in a significantly more economic way.  Print on Demand will soon be de rigeur.

– Publishers handle marketing and distribution.  iUniverse gets you on Amazon.com and BN.com for free.  Amazon.com and BN.com now represent something like 12% of all book sales (cobbled together stats from iMedia Connection saying the annual online book sale run rate is now about $3 billion and the Association of American Publishers saying that the total size of the industry is $24 billion).  Google and Overture take credit cards and about 5 minutes to drive people to buy your book online.  Buzz and viral and email marketing techniques are easy and cheap.

– Publishers pay you.  Ok, this is compelling, but they only pay you (especially advances) if you’re really, really good, or a recognized author or expert. iUniverse pays as well, just in a pay-for-performance model.  Bonus points for setting yourself up as an affiliate on Amazon and BN to make even more money on the sale.  iUniverse actually pays a higher royalty (20% vs. 7.5-15% in the traditional model), so you’re probably always a fixed amount “behind” in the self-publish model, but you don’t have an agent to pay.

Unless you are dying to be accepted into literary or academic circles that require Someone & Sons to annoint you…why bother with a traditional publisher? As long as you have the up-front money and the belief that you’ll sell enough books to cover your expenses and then some, do it yourself.

In Part II, I will talk about how iUniverse pitches a “traditional publishing model” and why it only reinforces the point that the traditional model doesn’t make a lot of sense any more in many cases.

Book Short:  A SPIN Selling Companion

At Return Path, we’re big believers in the SPIN Selling methodology popularized by Neil Rackham. It just makes sense. Spend more time listening than talking on a sales call, uncover your prospect’s true needs and get him or her to articulate the need for YOUR product. Though it doesn’t reference SPIN Selling, Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn is a nice companion read.

Rooted in psychology and cognitive science, Why People Don’t Buy Things presents a very practical sales methodology called Buying Path Selling. Understand how your prospect is making his or her buying decision and what kind of buyer he or she is, be more successful at uncovering needs and winning the business.

The book has two equally interesting themes, rich with examples, but the one I found to be easiest to remember was to vary your language (both body and verbal) with the buyer type. And the book illustrates three archetypes: The Commander, The Thinker, and The Visualizer. There are some incredibly insightful and powerful ways to recognize the buyer type you’re dealing with in the book.

But most of the cues the authors rely on are physical, and lots of sales are done via telephone. So I emailed the author to ask for his perspective on this wrinkle.  Kim wrote back the following (abridged):

Over the phone it is fairly easy to determine a prospect’s modality. I’ve developed a fun, conversational question which can be asked up front, “As you recall some of your most meaningful experiences at XYZ, what words, thoughts, feelings or visuals come to mind? Anything else?”

If you’re interested in letting your blog readers test their modalities, the link below will activate a quick 10 question quiz from our website that generates ones modality scores along how they compare with others. (It’s like Myers-Briggs applied to decision making.) http://www.wallacewashburn.com/quiz.shtml

In any case, if you are a sales, marketing, or client services professional (or even if you just play one on TV), Why People Don’t Buy Things is a quick, insightful read.  Thanks for the quick response, Kim!

Welcome to the new StartupCEO.com!

I started writing this blog in May of 2004 with an objective of writing about the experience of being a first-time entrepreneur — a startup CEO — inspired by a blog post written by my friend, long-time Board member and mentor Fred Wilson entitled “You’re only a first time CEO once.”  The blog and the receptivity I got along the way from fellow startup CEOs encouraged me to write a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was originally published in 2013 and then again as a second edition last year in 2020.

Today I am relaunching the blog as StartupCEO.com both to reflect that relevance of that brand as the book continues to get good traction in the startup ecosystem, and to reflect the fact that I’m now on my second startup as CEO, so “Only Once” doesn’t seem so fitting any more.

The web site has a very minimalist design – and I realize many of you read posts on either RSS or email — those will still operate the same as they have been (no new RSS feed).

As I approach the first anniversary of starting our new company, Bolster, where we help startup CEOs scale their teams, themselves, and their boards, I am recommitting to this blog and will try to post at least once a week.  Because there is a lot of overlap between this blog and Bolster’s blog (which I’d encourage you to subscribe to here either by email or RSS), posts will occasionally show up on both blogs, or I’ll put digests of Bolster blog posts here.  

But the Bolster blog will be broader and will also have many additional authors besides me, while this blog will remain distinct about some of the experiences I’m having as a startup CEO.

Boards That Lead, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem, was recommended to me by a CEO Coach in the Bolster network, Tim Porthouse, who said he’s been referring it to his clients alongside Startup Boards. I don’t exactly belong in the company of Ram Charan (Brad and Mahendra probably do!), so I was excited to read it. While it’s definitely the “big company” version to Startup Boards, there are some good lessons for startup CEOs and founder to take away from it.

The best part about the book as it relates to ALL boards is the framework of Partner, Take Charge, Stay out of the Way, and Monitor. You can probably lump all potential board activities into these four buckets. If you look at it that way…these are pretty logical:

• Monitor – what you’d expect any board to do
• Stay out of the Way – basic execution/operations
• Partner – strategy, goals, risk, budget, leadership talent development
• Take Charge – CEO hiring/firing, Exec compensation, Ethics, and Board Governance itself.

There was an interesting nugget in the book as well called the Central Idea that I hadn’t seen articulated quite this way before. It’s basically a statement of what the business is and how it’s going to win. It’s about a page long, 8-10 bullet points, and it includes things like mission, strategy, key goals, and key operating pillars that underlie the goals. It basically wraps up all of Lencioni’s key questions in one page with a little more meat on the bones. I like it and may adopt it. The authors put the creation of the Central Idea into the Take Charge bucket, but I’d put it squarely in the Partner bucket.

Other than that, the book is what you’d expect and does have a lot of overlap with the world of startups. Its criteria for director selection are very similar to what we use at Bolster, as is its director evaluation framework. The book has a ton of handy checklists as well, some of which are more applicable than others to startups, for example Dealing with Nonperforming Directors and Spotting a Failing CEO.

All in, a good read if you’re a student of Boards.

Book Short:  The Little Engine that Could

Authors Steven Woods and Alex Shootman would make Watty Piper proud.  Instead of bringing toys to the children on the other side of the mountain, though, this engine brings revenue into your company.  If you run a SaaS business, or really if you run any B2B business, Revenue Engine:  Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage, will change the way you think about Sales and Marketing. The authors, who were CTO and CRO of Eloqua (the largest SaaS player in the demand management software space that recently got acquired by Oracle), are thought leaders in the field, and the wisdom of the book reflects that.

The book chronicles the contemporary corporate buying process and shows that it has become increasingly like the consumer buying process in recent years.  The Consumer Decision Journey, first published by McKinsey in 2009, chronicles this process and talks about how the traditional funnel has been transformed by the availability of information and social media on the Internet.  Revenue Engine moves this concept to a B2B setting and examines how Marketing and Sales are no longer two separate departments, but stewards of a combined process that requires holistic analysis, investment decisions, and management attention.

In particular, the book does a good job of highlighting new stages in the buying process and the imperatives and metrics associated with getting this “new funnel” right.  One that resonated particularly strongly with me was the importance of consistent and clean data, which is hard but critical!  As my colleague Matt Spielman pointed out when we were discussing the book, the one area of the consumer journey that Revenue Engine leaves is out is Advocacy, which is essential for influencing the purchase process in a B2B environment as well.

One thing I didn’t love about the book is that it’s a little more theoretical than practical. There aren’t nearly enough detailed examples.  In fact, the book itself says it’s “a framework, not an answer.”  So you’ll be left wanting a bit more and needing to do a bit more work on your own to translate the wisdom to your reality, but you’ll have a great jumping off point.