“I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service suck” Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures AVC Blog When Fred Wilson posted this quote on his blog in 2011 I was taken back a bit. I had been in enterprise software marketing for almost 15 years at the time having served as…
CBInsights recently published a deep dive of Google’s current strategy. At 90% share of the search market, Google dominates today – but what about tomorrow? This piece does a great job of describing Google’s current strategies based on published materials, execs speeches, earnings calls, and public filings. The post includes: Alphabet’s structure and background Google’s…
Private equity EV/Revenue multiples have increased 70% since 2000. They averaged 10.3x for the first three quarters of 2018 versus 6.6x in 2000. AS a result of these higher valuation expectations, the traditional private equity playbook of acquire, cost restructuring, and flip based on financial engineering are being disrupted by growth equity PE players like Vista who demonstrated the success of this model through the acquisition and sale of Marketo. Vista acquired a struggling Marketo in 2016 for $1.75B, improved it, and sold to Adobe a little more than two years later for $4.75B.
A post about how Vista Equity’s $1.79 billion purchase of Marketo turned into a $4.75 billion exit to Adobe in a little more than two years. They didn’t use the tradition tech private equity playbook.
Charles Lambdin recently published a piece on Medium titled “Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending”. In the post Charles talks about his frustrations with the current state of Agile practice.
The story of the infamous Shed at Dulwich is a great example of how Internet marketing techniques can scam the unsuspecting public. The Shed at Dulwich was a fake restaurant created by Oobah Butler to prove the gullibility of today’s Internet user. I have been involved in technology marketing and sales for almost 20 years. …
The Software Equity Group has published their 3Q18 SaaS M&A Update. SEG regularly publishes comprehensive free research on the state of M&A in the tech space. It is invaluable resource in tracing the key trends and development in the market. A few of the key findings include: Aggregate software industry M&A deal volume (including SaaS,…
I am launching a new side gig today vendorbumper.com. We provide research reports on software companies for buyers looking to build a basic profile of a firm or for marketers looking to update their competitive analysis. Gartner notes that buyers complete 70% of their buying journey before contacting sales. Unfortunately buyers often need to provide…
The objective of this post is to talk about a new strategy for filling the top of the sales funnel with valuable opportunities. The harsh reality is that only a fraction of the mid-market and enterprise scale companies in today’s market will purchase and implement a major new software solution. As Gartner has noted, buyers are completing 70% of their buying journey before contacting a sales rep. Research shows the odds of winning the sale are 74% when you reach decision makers at the right time and help set their buying vision. This post talks about the types of triggers that lead to customers starting a process to identify and evaluate new solutions.
Another installment of great research from OpenView Venture Partners. A few examples: 15. Leads responded to within 5 minutes are 100X more likely to be contacted and 21X more likely to be qualified (LeadResponseManagement.org) 16. Waiting just 10 minutes to respond drops the likelihood of qualifying the lead 4X (LeadResponseManagement.org) 17. Yet less than 25%…
