May 2022, 10

Why it’s so hard to align on an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) definition?

Most operators have a good general understanding of the concept of ICP, but if you ask them “how did you get there?” things immediately become fuzzier.

Most sophisticated operators will tell you that the more articulated and granular an ICP description is, the better. They will also tell you that to get to a high level of confidence in a granular ICP description, the best idea is to ground your analysis in some statistical significance, defaulting to Market Research to achieve that.

Apr 2022, 22

Reducing Platform Dependency is Overrated

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or starve to death.

Every morning across the world, a founder wakes up. They’ll receive an email from an investor recommending reducing dependency on some platform. Every morning an investor wakes up. They know they’ll have to invest in some company with strong platform dependency.

As much as everyone would love not to depend on someone’s else platform, the reality is that there’s only one way to have zero external dependencies: becoming so big that you are a platform.

Apr 2022, 20

How should I think about revenue modeling for my company?

I found myself in a heated discussion earlier this week. The big contentious issue: which direction should the company go?

Now, it’s hard to make informed strategic decisions if you don’t really have a decision framework around it.

Plus: at a strategic level, it’s always about too many opportunities available and never enough resources to go around.

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Apr 2022, 18

Does “wisdom” get in the way of innovation?

In the last two years, I’ve been having many conversations where the build vs. buy debate is the crux. Like many conversations, perhaps the challenge lies in a lack of nuance or discrepancy in definitions.

However, there is a clear relationship between tenure and perspective on this issue. Fewer years of experience will favor building over buying and vice versa for more tenured professionals.

Since I’ve been around the block a few times, I have some inherent bias regarding this topic.

Apr 2022, 15

There’s a trove of revenue hiding in your most boring pages

Most funnels and websites are filled with “service” pages that could have a high revenue impact but are completely neglected by marketers.

Thank you pages and unsubscribe pages are the most common ones.

Mar 2022, 30

How should I think about pricing and packaging in a smart way?

Pricing & Packaging is such a critical part of every company’s GTM (or go-to-market), you could argue that any company at its very core has two existential imperatives.

First: it needs to be able to deliver value to a group of customers (which implies being able to define and reach them effectively). Second: it needs to be able to extract a portion of that value for itself.

Have a hot take you’d like to see published? 🌶️

Write it down in 250-350 words, fill out the form below, and let us know.

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Mar 2022, 29

Now That You Have Big Data, It’s Time to Talk About Smart Data

Big Data has been one of the major buzzwords of the last 5 years.

Everyone rushed to build all the required infrastructure to support them: CDP, ETL, reverse ETL, data warehouses, and plugging them across their stacks.

Great companies like Snowflake, Segment, and Fivetran flourished in this period helping customers gather, route, synchronize, and store the huge amounts of data that was being generated all across the funnel, from the first touchpoint with a user down to their whole customer journey.

That’s great. I love data-driven companies and I think, at least in the tech space, it’s time to call the Big Data war won. Most companies nowadays have a horde of data about their prospects and customers.

So…has the time come for celebrations?

Well, no.

Mar 2022, 23

What’s a good framework to define what a good deal/lead is?

One of the conversations I’ve had more frequently in my professional journey is “how do you define what’s a good lead/deal”?

It’s really interesting to observe that most companies struggle in this area, they don’t really have a mental framework for it, tend to use anecdotal information until very late in their lifecycle stage and as a consequence create friction/misalignment that could be very much avoided and that ends up slowing growth down instead, in some cases putting the company as a whole at existential risk even.

Mar 2022, 21

Stop sweating your data; it’s better than you think

Dun & Bradstreet put out a piece titled “5 Shocking Stats About the State of B2B Marketing Data,” and I wasn’t shocked.

Maybe I’m cynical, or perhaps the years of experience at companies large and small caused me to react with a shoulder shrug and “meh.”

The starting salvo in the article was that only 50% of B2B professionals are confident in the quality of their sales and marketing data. Even though over 80% say, it’s crucial to their success.

Here’s why I don’t care–this will always be the case.

Have a hot take you’d like to see published? 🌶️

Write it down in 250-350 words, fill out the form below, and let us know.

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Mar 2022, 17

My data infrastructure kinda sucks–what should I do about it?

Spoiler alert: this is really what most companies are at.

The “big data” narrative from a few years back introduced the idea that ‘the more data the better’, but today’s companies are most likely drowning in it.

Also: the problem is rather around how to store, organize, and complement the data they have.

Mar 2022, 15

What’s a good average conversion rate from MQL/PQL to SQL?

TL;DR: It really depends. Also: wrong question.

Conversion rates are interesting, people look at a percentage and take it as an absolute truth, it’s a number after all right?

What most operators miss tho is that every number has a story behind it, a series of assumptions and ideas that were baked into the calculation to get there. Not knowing what that story is more often than not sets you up for failure.

Why it’s so hard to align on an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) definition?

Reducing Platform Dependency is Overrated

How should I think about revenue modeling for my company?

Have a hot take you’d like to see published? 🌶️

Does “wisdom” get in the way of innovation?

There’s a trove of revenue hiding in your most boring pages

How should I think about pricing and packaging in a smart way?

Have a hot take you’d like to see published? 🌶️

Now That You Have Big Data, It’s Time to Talk About Smart Data

What’s a good framework to define what a good deal/lead is?

Stop sweating your data; it’s better than you think

Have a hot take you’d like to see published? 🌶️

My data infrastructure kinda sucks–what should I do about it?

What’s a good average conversion rate from MQL/PQL to SQL?

Revenue Acceleration Manifesto