Author: wi11iamm
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Sales Compensation – Account Executive 1 – RDU / Southeast SaaS
Sales compensation is always tricky… Most folks that haven’t “carried a bag” (vernacular for being in sales and carrying a quota) aren’t aware of the high risk, high reward nature of sales compensation plans. We recently updated our comp plans and I thought I’d share the datapoints that I gathered. Concepts The big concepts to…
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Aching for Something New
I had dinner last night with Chris Baggott, one of ExactTarget’s co-founders, and the founder of Compendium, and Bill McClosky, founder of eDataSource and Only Influencers. The war stories of these two entrepreneurs from the digital marketing space as they took risks, built companies, and followed their passions was inspiring and humbling. Chris told a…
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Conceptualizing the Tunnel and Pushing Through
Laurie (super star wife) and I were reading a little book called “Good Busy” this weekend. The author, Julia O’Grady, introduced a concept that fit well into the experience of starting a company. She shared that when people find themselves in unusually tough circumstances (death of a family member, struggling with an illness, etc.) that…
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Extraverts: Talk Think Talk, Introverts: Think Talk Think
One of our investors and mentors, John Fahlberg, is a retired executive who’s built and managed several companies, and has held executive posts with Target. Net: this guy’s got some time in the saddle. He does executive coaching these days to keep active, and we’ve been fortunate to have him run several sessions with our…
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Pardot’s Growth
David Cummings posted some numbers about revenue growth and financial models in his blog. I took a moment to boil it down to growth projections to compare to Windsor Circle’s SaaS growth model. The first post, Key Moments in the Life of Pardot, gave some milestones for Annualized Recurring Revenue (ARR) at $1M, $5M,…
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Studying ExactTarget – Post #2: Cost of Revenues and Operating Expenses
In this post, I wanted to explore a bit about how a high growth SaaS company has been spending in various functions against top line revenues. I’m using consolidated financial statement data from their S1 (link here) between 2002 and 2006. Given that ExactTarget was founded in 2000, this represents years 2 through 6 of…
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Studying ExactTarget – Post #1: Cost of Revenue, Subscription v Prof Svcs, Gross Profit Margins
ExactTarget (ET) is currently on a tear. Founded in 2000, they raised $75M on the way to going public in April of this year, and have already made $115M+ worth of acquisitions (Pardot for $95M, and iGoDigital for $21M). As of this post, they have $1.5B market cap and rumors of buyouts from SAP, Oracle,…
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Go After Really Big Markets… The Target Addressable Market (TAM) Conundrum
For my inaugural, post, I thought I’d share a bit of wisdom from Brad Feld, of the Foundry. I’ve had the good fortune to have met him once or twice, and I occasionally seek his opinion on items of import. I’ve been recently engaged in the venture funding process, and as usual, the notion of…
The Next 10,000 Hours 