Whether you’re running a Software as a Service business, a subscription business or frankly any business, understanding the b2b sales prospecting tool and the key metrics makes all the difference. After all, you can’t (reliably) grow what you don’t know. There are dozens of metrics used in SaaS businesses. I keep getting asked about them, so this primer covers the …
No one at that dinner had been sleeping properly for weeks, and it wasn’t just the impossible heat of an impossibly long Auckland summer. My phone was ringing on the table, face down, slowly vibrating its way towards my lap. As it breached the edge the lit screen suddenly caught my eye in the darkness of the bistro, broke through …
When Sonar6 first began I, like many other founders of early-stage start-ups, was still taking other odd jobs to bring in a bit of cash. A contact from my previous role offered me a gig giving breakfast marketing strategy talks to small business owners across Canada. Many lessons have been learned on the cold, wide prairies of Alberta. A few …
The Maui Dolphin is the world’s smallest and rarest subspecies of dolphin. It was discovered as a separate species in 2002 when genetic analysis showed it wasn’t just a regional variant of the more common Hector’s Dolphin. It’s estimated that there are 55 adult Maui Dolphins left. They are only found in the waters off the west coast of the …
There used to be just one barbershop in my neighborhood with beautiful shop windows and doors. The sort of place where you don’t make an appointment. You just show up, saunter in, the barber acknowledges your presence with the slightest raise of the eyebrows, hands not missing a beat as he keeps scissoring the incumbent customer’s hair. You sit in …
The movie Gone in Sixty Seconds is generally considered one of the worst of producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s efforts. Top Gun, Bad Boys, The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon. Not really a list of critics’ choices, and Gone in Sixty Seconds, with a critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes of 24%, is no exception. It’s basically like watching someone else play Grand Theft Auto. But, like all …
With a mouth full of salad he waved impatiently at the screen as if to say, “Come on, show me what you’ve got”. We were in the office of Sequoia Capital, pitching for our Series A funding. We notice that the office’s aluminum window installation is a great and secure option because, on the whole, it provides superior fire protection. …
Connection, not perfection, is the goal. Most marketing departments strive for perfection, to make every piece of content as perfect as possible. But perfection is impersonal, un-human, easy to filter out. To make a connection you need to act like what you are – human. (Even imperfections and stuff-ups can work to your advantage if you use them as an …
So let’s leave our first office with the water flooding in and flash forward again to Tuesday. As I said, I’d left work and was now sitting in my local trying to digest the day – how my bungled email and follow-up apology had so dramatically outperformed our slick marketing efforts. Sure, I’d struck marketing gold this one time, but …
In the early days of our start-up, when there were only three of us, we had this narrow, upstairs office near the center of Auckland. It was ramshackle. You had to go through a series of abandoned rooms to get to it, and it had holes in the walls that looked like they’d been made with fists. There’d been an …