Why all the fuss about variable pricing? I have been in many conversations with CEO’s about how to achieve variable pricing. Let me start by describing what I mean by the term ‘variable pricing’. I mean a pricing mechanism where increases in customer value derived or customer usage of the […]
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11 posts
In a board meeting at Demandware where we were debating where to invest among many choices, a board member noted that “we are drowning in a sea of opportunities”. In a rapidly growing SaaS company, it often feels that way. It usually has, by definition, a wide variety of opportunities […]
Conveying what the Engineering organization has accomplished to a Board is often a challenge. I have seen (and caused) a range from no coverage of accomplishments of the past period to, at the other extreme, lists of dozens of features delivered and in progress. Neither extreme is terribly useful […]
Some sharks, like great whites, die if they stop swimming. I have learned the hard way that customer relationships can be that way too. If the customer is not progressing, the risk of churn steadily increases. My experiences have been with enterprise customers using products that had high switching costs. […]
STOP reading if you have experience as a sales person, sales manager, or sales executive. You probably know more than I do about the topic. Prior to my experiences as a CEO and independent director, I had no exposure to sales compensation plans or issues. Over the course of leading […]
A common question is how to strike the right balance between the preservation of the flexibility of Agile software development with customers’ legitimate desires to have delivery commitments. At Demandware, I often thought this tension was somewhat unique to us, having adopted Agile and striving to increase the frequency of […]
Enterprise SaaS companies usually start by implementing their own solution. Sometimes they charge explicitly and other times it is simply treated as a cost of doing business. As its business grows, it inevitably confronts the question of how to scale such services. Unless implementation is simple, it cannot be indefinitely […]
Insights from 525 CEO interviews. I found this article from the New York Times very worthwhile as it summarized the journalist’s insights from having conduced 525 CEO interviews over a number of decades. This quote was among the most compelling observations from my perspective: “Leaders, for example, need humility to […]
Having recently facilitated a discussion with Deepak Taneja at the Pillar Venture Capital Unconference for early stage CEO’s made me thank about how my role as CEO evolved as I led companies ranging from 15 to 1,200 employees. I needed significantly different capabilities, behaviors, and time allocations to be effective […]
Board discussions and board relationships are some of the most powerful ways a CEO can influence the success of the company. What is your responsibility as CEO wrt the Board? It is to keep the board properly informed about what is really happening in the business and to ensure […]