Last week I wrote about mapping out the problems your customers face at each stage of their growth. Today I'll focus on growing your installed base by cutting churn. The way we often look at churn is this. A customer cancels, you ask why, you write it down, ...
I don't know how it is with you, but more and more blogs start to turn me off. Blogs from reputable companies, that employ smart people who know their thing. It's not that what they write is wrong. To the contrary, it's all factually correct, ...
Today, a tip everyone of you can implement today - and get value from next week. It's about the power of peer feedback on a deal you're working on. Here's the story. A few weeks ago, one of the new sales execs at one of my customers started to share one of his must-win deals in a Slack channel. ...
Tuesday, I wrote about why so many software companies struggle to sell anything more to the customers they already have. The symptom: customers have moved on, and what we offer no longer matches where they are. So the question is: how do you find out where they are now? ...
"The bigger the customer is, the bigger the need is, the more room you have to dictate terms" This quote is from Dima Gutzeit, CEO of LeapXpert. He started LeapXpert in Hong Kong in 2017, after defining the big idea behind his company (presented by his banker friends who spent a lot of time on WhatsApp while having dinner with him). ...
Last week, in part 3 of this series, I wrote about how little we tend to know about the customers we've had the longest. Today I want to go a step further. Say you do go and find out. What then? Here's the pattern I keep bumping into. ...
In the past weeks, I have frequently bumped into a value communication opportunity that many of you can start benefiting from today. It's the gap between the costs customers budget for, and the ones that are just as real but never counted. Let me give you an example from one of my customers: ...
On Tuesday, I wrote about the four different situations hiding in your installed base, and how three of them mean talking to someone you've never met. Today the next question: what are you going to say to them? Pick a prospect your team is chasing right now and ask your team what's going on in that business. ...
"Surprisingly, currently Amazon is rebuilding or cloning what we are building." This is a quote Cyril Golub, CEO of Jinnify, shared in the interview I had with him. A fear many founders of software companies have, for good reasons. It happens - and will continue to happen more easily. ...
Last week I started this series on growing your existing customers. Today I want to give you a different way to look at your installed base. If I ask a software CEO where the growth sits in his installed base, the typical answer that comes back is: ...
Yesterday we made a decision we didn't want to make. Six weeks ago we found Tango in the shelter here in Denia. It's a pitbull of three and a half years old who'd been sitting there for eighteen months. And for a pitbull in Spain, ...
Yesterday I sat in on two calls that made the same point - but from opposite ends. One was a discussion in a sales confidence lab with one of my customers on how to approach 15-minute executive meetings. The other was my CEO mastermind, where someone described a cold call that went like this: ...
Over the past month, I wrote nine reflections on holding your price, and I just turned them into a long-form essay. Let me give you the essence. The first discount is one you gave yourself. Ask a founder why their price is their price, ...
Last week I wrote about courage, a story about a VP of Growth telling his team that what was missing wasn't effort or offering. It was nerve. Courage is indeed key in the sales process. But the question is - What builds it? ...
Growing the installed base has come up with several of my customers lately. It's such a key area for growth that I'll make it my theme for the coming weeks. Let's start with a quote from the VP of Growth of one of my customers that frames the dilemma: ...
I was working on my website this morning, and something crossed my mind in relation to differentiation. Reflecting on it, I realized we're underusing the power of it.
It's often cornered as a marketing thing.
It's often misunderstood.
It's sometimes missing completely; nobody has ever really asked the question.
Eight reflections so far on holding your price, zooming into various aspects that matter: What to ask, what to trade, who to talk to. But all of it depends on one thing I've left for this reflection: Courage. Let me share a story. I sat in on a sales meeting recently where the VP of Growth was talking to his team after a quarter that hadn't gone well. ...
"I came into the company thinking this is not a turnaround situation. This is a fine-tune, refine situation. And so I just went in with the mindset of there's goodness here." This is a quote from Martin Payne, the CEO of TextUs. ...
On Thursday, I wrote about holding your price when the value is clear and the buyer pushes anyway. But sometimes they push because the part of your value that matters most isn't on their scorecard. I reviewed a deal yesterday where this was the case: ...
In my CEO mastermind from Thursday last week, one of the participants shared his new pricing page for feedback. He's built a vertical CRM for real estate agents. He's seen a problem with traditional CRMs in the market - and took a different approach to solve it. ...
Yesterday in my CEO mastermind, one of the participants shared a breakthrough on something he'd struggled with for well over 9 months. He recently started to use one simple sentence at the start of every demo: "This is our approach.” Now, six, ...
On Tuesday, I wrote about the question that makes a buyer argue your case for you. Do that well, and you'll get far fewer price pushes. But some buyers will push regardless, because that's what they do. So then what? What you do next matters more than the deal in front of you. ...
Monday, I wrote about how easy it is to be unclear to the market while thinking you're perfectly clear. Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine, wrote back: "I think you're often unclear to yourself too. Ask 10 employees to explain your strategy in a few sentences. ...
Two weeks ago, before I went on holiday, I wrote part 5 in this series - a story about Niels, who gets the buyer to do the value math in the first call way before making a proposal, so a price objection never forms. ...
I am back from holiday, and fully refreshed and energized again. Btw - if you ever go to Spain, instead of visiting the obvious places like Barcelona, Madrid or Seville - consider Asturias. Magical. But back to business now. And for today I wanted to make a point about something fundamental to every software business: ...
On holiday, going through old notes, and found something I wrote three years ago that still holds up completely. Most sales-led SaaS scaleups obsess over gross margin. Few realize one of the easiest ways to move it is to sharpen who you sell to. ...
I will be on holiday for the coming 2 weeks, so it could be that I miss a couple of days. Not today, however. During breakfast, I thought about the art of differentiation and asked this question out loud: How do you know you've nailed your software's differentiation story? ...
Monday, I wrote about a deal deck where every claim boiled down to hours saved. Yesterday I used the same deal in a coaching session, and the fix wasn't more or better facts. It was a different slide. The discovery had gone well. The sales rep had pulled real input from three parts of the customer's business — product, ...
There's a salesman I've worked with for whom the word discount doesn't exist. His name is Niels. He sells software to hotels. And what he does works because it's so simple. Before he shows anything, he asks: 'Let's imagine we can help you with this. ...
One thing I often see compromising growth in sales-led software companies isn't product. It's not even positioning. It's that we play it safe. And as Seth Godin famously said: "Safe is risky."
We take what the customer says at face value, instead of asking what's underneath it.
On Thursday, I wrote about reading a buyer's push on price once you're in the deal. Today, one step earlier, before you've committed to the deal at all. Because the surest way to win a price fight is to never be in one. ...
I reviewed a deal deck last week. And on a surface level, every line was accurate. Nothing really wrong or overstated. Yet, it was still in trouble. If you looked deeper into what was said, every claim the proposal made — save time, reduce effort, ...
I continue to read posts on LinkedIn and Substack about people worrying that AI will take their job. It's a fair worry, don't get me wrong. But my take is, it's not really about AI. It's about being one of many doing it the same way - the average. ...
In my reflection on Tuesday, I talked about how your approach to pricing sets up the discounting battles you'll have later. Because very often, a price has no real ground under it, only internal logic. But that's only half of it. The other half is who you're up against. ...
“You can have something being built while you're drinking your coffee... So then the question becomes, are you still asking critical questions as to why you should build something?" This is a quote from my interview with Alex David, Co-founder and CEO of unSurvey (recently acquired by G2). ...
On Thursday, I said something that's easy to get wrong: a buyer can have a real deadline — but the pressure to drop your price is usually yours, not theirs. So, buyers will push on your price. It’s a sport, right? So then what? ...
“If you’re afraid to say it out loud, people will probably resonate with it.” I came across this line during the weekend on Substack, and had to write a reflection on it. This is so real. It aligns 100% with Trait #10 in my book: ...
This week I got two pieces of news about Evernote. Monday: an email telling me my subscription goes from €99 to €199.99 a year. Wednesday: their owner, Bending Spoons, IPO'd on the Nasdaq. The stock jumped 40% on day one. Valuation: around $25 billion. I joined Evernote in 2008, ...
"We didn't have the balls to say: then that's it." A SaaS CEO I work with shared this with me last week. He wasn't complaining about a lost deal; it was about a deal they actually won, and it still bothered him. That intrigued me. ...
"The traditional web browser is not the appropriate tool for work." This is a quote from Mazy Dar, co-founder and CEO of Here. It's the belief that led him to a corner of the market and a solution the world's biggest banks now rely on. ...
I started this series with two founders I'd interviewed for my podcast. Both set out to build a movement, and neither managed it. In fact, both companies are gone now. That's what intrigued me, because they had so much going for them. One had a referral rate most founders would kill for, ...
A week ago, I wrote about moving the box. The thing your customer can't see about their own situation, that you can see from the outside. A reader wrote back: "Do you have an example from one of your customers?" Yes. Here's one from my customer CSS AG in Germany. ...
Yesterday, I got involved in a deal discussion with one of my customers that's worth reflecting upon here. The particular prospect had come in earlier this month through inbound, and as with many deals, he was well prepared. They knew what they needed functionality-wise, and even had set the budget already. ...
Every person who carries your idea does it for their own reason. I landed there last Tuesday. What I didn't get to is the question underneath it: What kinds of reasons actually move someone, and why do some people never stop carrying you? ...
"If you want this competitive edge, you need to own your technology, and also your infrastructure." This quote is from Renaud Charvet, co-founder and US CEO of Ringover. He's twenty years in, and this mantra allowed him to succeed and grow his business past $50M ARR. ...
Last week, a founder told me his new salesperson still hadn't closed anything after six months. The strange part: the guy had a track record. He'd sold software before and was successful then. So the founder did what most do: he blamed the pipeline and then the market for not being ready. ...
Yesterday, after two meetings, it hit me again how often we leave our strongest positioning on the table — simply because we don't show customers what they've stopped seeing about themselves. Take a company that's grown. Some by acquisition, some just organically — 460 people three years ago, ...
Over the past weeks, I've been pulling apart why some points of view spread and others die. I keep coming back to two founders — both with genuine believers, both now gone. I told myself it was the enemy, the cost, or the identity. But they had all three. ...
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