links for 2006-10-06
-
Brad’s colorful, quick posting on “how running is like entrepreneurship.”
links for 2006-04-13
-
Really thorough posting (battle scars *may* be present based on the level of detail) about how to best position your company for sale.
links for 2006-04-07
-
Good posting from Terry Gold of Gold Systems on his experiences over the years hiring and ramping up a sales team.
links for 2006-03-30
-
A great posting about Vendor Love from Seth Godin!
links for 2006-03-28
-
Brad has a good posting today about entrepreneur accountability — along the lines of my “Forecast Early and Often” theme. — /2005/11/notsocounter_cl.html
links for 2006-08-17
-
Tom Evslin’s entertaining Top 10 Ways You Know You’re an Entrepreneur. Some may dovetail nicely if I ever write up my read of The Fountainhead through entrepreneurial lens!
links for 2006-07-29
-
It’s kind of a “Let Them Eat Cake!” response — which kind of makes sense, given our recent trip to India.
links for 2006-06-05
-
Dallas Mavs owner and Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Click Fraud, a notorious member of the Internet Axis of Evil
links for 2006-07-27
-
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored (From The Onion — hilarious)
links for 2006-07-25
-
Fred has a good posting on some of the downsides of having managed through the bubble bursting. I wrote about this (a little bit) last year in Ratcheting Up is Hard to Do (/2005/01/ratcheting_up_i.html), but Fred’s posti
Book Short: The Little Engine that Could
Book Short:Â 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.