In a well argued article in The New Yorker Nathan Heller questions the very core of VC claims. With reference to the book“VC: An American History” by Harvard Business School professor Tom Nicolas (I wrote about this and Fred Wilson’s article on this – post #196 – Whales. Not Unicorns) where the narrative starts with Whaling and its funding in the early 19th century.
Sales 3.0 – one of the most respected conferences on Sales, Produced by Selling Power – just released “The Future of Sales: How Technology os Impacting Sales Performance” report. Here are the highlights –
Like him or hate him, Gary Vaynerchuk is a force of nature. I have never seen anyone push the idea of hard work so much. He has been consistent over the years and it is quite amazing to see how he walks the talk. I came across this 4 minute video that I watch now and then, specially when things are not necessarily moving at a pace I want.
Did you ever wonder why TRUST by the consumers contribute 25% of Apple’s Market Cap – which is like $205B? Tomasz Tunguz wrote on what trust means in business – “Brands are so valuable because they are the encapsulation of years long efforts to engender trust. …. Trust accelerates sales cycles, creates long term defensibility, and increases the value of a business overall. It’s the core purpose of marketing.”
So one issue around privacy is that bad actors get access to your data through commercial or spurious routes. Manipulation through coercive commerce is real. And all the data gatherers are guilty of it.
At the SaaSBooMi session this afternoon Vinod Muthukrishnan the Co-Founder and CEO of Cloud Cherry a customer analytics company – gave a ring side view of the learnings, difficult path to growth and rise, and the eventual acquisition by Cisco.
Pendo.io and Product Collective released their 3rd Annual The State of Product Leadership Report was based on a Survey of over 600 companies with 69% being in the B2B space, of which 33% are SaaS and 27% Hybrid SaaS provider. Here are some of the highlights:
Strangely this motto of PitchLink – our buyer seller engagement platform, jumps right out of the new Gartner CSO Update on the new B2B buying journey. Gartner is calling it ‘Buyer Enablement’ – a term that is gaining traction over the past couple of years. So what do you enable? According to Brent Adamson (check out his entertaining and educative video in the link below) the buyer needs to complete 6 jobs and selling organisations need to focus on information excellence at each stage to assist the buyer ‘complete’ her jobs at each stage to be able to complete the sales process.
Last week I promised to write about this article by Ivan Mir, a former game designer and indie software creator on his personal quest and thus the formula he arrived at to get work done.
David Skok in this lecture at the Web Summit, summarizes the key metrics that you need to track to ensure success and growth of your Saas business. This is hands down one of the simplest presentations you will find on the topic.
