Category: SaaS

Why You Shouldn’t Hire a VP of Demand Generation

 in Lead Generation, SaaS

I’m seeing more and more companies (startups in particular) replacing the CMO (or VP of Marketing) role with a VP of Demand Generation.  When you talk to the CEOs making these decisions they often say – “I want someone who is going to focus on generating leads versus all the other ‘stuff’ that marketing does.”  Of course, the implication is…

Building a Sales and Marketing Machine for SaaS Companies

 in Lead Generation, SaaS, Sales, Sales Marketing Relationship

In the software industry you often hear about sales and marketing being compared to machines or factories. Executives like this analogy because it suggests that sales and marketing is able to consistently produce outputs in a predictable, repeatable way – like a machine or factory would. Executives and investors want to remove the uncertainty that often accompanies sales and marketing.

How Cloud Computing is Changing Product Management

 in Cloud Computing, Product Management, Product Marketing, SaaS

Everyone is talking about cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) these days.  Almost every technology vendor has announced a cloud strategy – even the traditional software zealots.  But what do cloud computing and SaaS mean for product managers?   The impacts are more significant than you may think.  From pricing and profitability measurement to sales and marketing, cloud is having a noteworthy influence on the…

Outages Suffered by Cloud Computing and SaaS Providers

 in Cloud Computing, SaaS

Over the past 18 months there have been an increasing number of high-profile outages amongst providers of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors.  Application vendors Intuit and Workday both suffered extensive service disruptions, which impacted a broad segment of their user community.  Infrastructure providers have suffered short outages over the past year as well.  Even heavy weights amazon.com and Google…

Sajak’s Law of Technology Marketing

 in Cloud Computing, Gobbledygook, SaaS

If you are in the technology sector you are probably familiar with Moore’s law, which describes the exponential advances in computing hardware that have occurred over the past 50 years. Specifically, Gordon Moore, who was one of the co-founders of Intel, observed that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubled every two years. There have been several adaptations of Moore’s law in other computing sectors. For example, Butter’s Law describes how the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber doubles every nine months. In this post, I will introduce a new principle in technology marketing which I refer to as Sajak’s law, named after the host of the popular game show Wheel of Fortune.