Kellblog

JANUARY 26, 2020

In part I of this three-part series I introduced the idea of an inverted funnel whereby marketing can derive a required demand generation budget using the sales target and historical conversion rates. For example, if your average sales cycle is 90 days, then opportunities generated in 1Q19 will be modeled as closing in 2Q19 [1].

Startup 98

Startup Forecasting Payment Services Finance 98

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 25, 2016

Demand generation is a critical limiting factor to the growth of many startups. I had the opportunity to moderate a panel of demand generation experts recently at Heavybit , an incubator in San Francisco. Facing a declining growth rate, the startup has to generate demand in a different way than they have in the past.

Startup 100

Startup Scale Social Media Innovation 100

Baremetrics

AUGUST 18, 2021

Serendipity: Generating More Referrals If your job is to create serendipity and serendipity often comes in the form of referrals, then you must understand that referrals are a process that takes place, not a random act. When you were provided the opportunity to do something great, often this takes the form of referrals and introductions.

Acquisition 91

Acquisition Scaling Investment Churn 91

Kellblog

DECEMBER 3, 2019

So, if you want to know if your company is spending enough on marketing [3], the first thing you should do is to make an inverted demand generation (aka, demandgen) funnel to figure out if you’re spending enough on demandgen. 6] When I say demandgen budget, I mean money spent on generating leads through marketing campaigns.

Startup 98

Startup Benchmarks Leadership Sales 98

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 18, 2015

Last and most useful, vaporware is software that’s pre-announced to gauge customer demand. But this type of marketing serves as terrific demand generation. By measuring how many users explore the feature, a team can proxy the demand. In the consumer hardware world, vaporware has a different name: crowdfunding.

Startup 100

Startup Market Research Mobile Education 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2022

Two lieutenants, a head of product marketing and a head of demand generation, enlist teams of various specialties. The demand generation function is structured similarly. Managers of paid acquisition, organic acquisition, and marketing operations/systems report to the head of demand generation.

Startup 361

Startup Acquisition Product Marketing Scaling 361

SaaStr

JANUARY 31, 2024

Splunk’s core product is a platform for collecting and analyzing high volumes of machine-generated data. Folks often think of marketing as the primary department responsible for pipeline generation. The Splunk team has matured away from thinking about pipeline generation as a silo. Why is that?

Enterprise 236

Enterprise Scale Sales SaaS 236

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

Sometimes in the short term, sometimes in the medium term, but it at least makes its money back and more: At even $20k in MRR, you’re ready for a head of demand gen and maybe even a true VP of Marketing (as long as they’re hands-on). Done right, it’s a top revenue-generating and pipeline accelerating strategy.

Scale 227

Scale Marketing SaaS Scaling 227

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2023

” Both Google & Microsoft have announced Copilot for security products, features that other security vendors including Cisco are developing, uggesting this may be the next vertical to grow from AI after content generation & legal software. This reduces the time security teams spend writing, running and refining searches by 7x.

AI Search 309

AI Search AI Cloud Azure 309

TechEmpower SaaS

OCTOBER 9, 2023

With Generative AI and LLMs, new avenues for improving operational efficiency and user satisfaction are emerging every day. In layman's terms, while conventional search mechanisms demand exact phrases or keywords to return relevant results, LLMs can understand and interpret the intent and context behind a query.

AI Search 519

AI Search Artificial Intelligence Generative AI AI 519

SaaStr

MARCH 20, 2024

Companies weren’t buying or interested in buying as often, so conversion rates and demand were down. For headcount specifically, make sure that the constraint to growing faster is that you don’t have enough salespeople to work the demand that exists for your business. They often did so in decreasing spending environments.

Sales Hiring 245

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Headcount 245

The Daily Egg

MAY 8, 2019

To get valuable pointers from someone who runs website optimization experiments as part of his job, we […] The post Customer Spotlight: Nate Murray, Demand Generation Manager at BlueSnap appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Management 50

Management Advertising 50

SaaStr

MARCH 4, 2021

Well, for SaaS companies, marketing broadly speaking breaks into three species — Corporate Marketing, Product Marketing and Demand Generation. And demand generation folks in BigCos are the junior folks in the backroom. I can pretty much guarantee you the billboard above generated $0 in direct revenue for us.

Sales Hiring 356

Sales Hiring Scale Marketing Branding 356

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 26, 2024

We continue to bring capacity online as we scale our AI investments with growing demand. Currently, near-term AI demand is a bit higher than our available capacity.” Naturally, we can only look at FCF multiples for companies that generate FCF. You can see my FCF multiples chart below, but I’ll also re-paste it here.

Azure 152

Azure Cloud Software AI 152

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2023

Jessica Gilmartin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Calendly, where she leads all aspects of marketing including brand awareness, creative, demand generation, and product marketing. Jessica brings nearly 20 years of marketing and leadership experience to Calendly.

Marketing 242

Marketing Leadership Engineering Enterprise 242

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 16, 2023

In Q2 2022, Snowflake generated roughly the same amount of revenue. For now, Databricks’ growth, despite the environment, fueled by the demand for AI is a promising sign for startups. Plenty of demand exists to buy innovative data infrastructure. Snowflake was growing at 85% y/y compared to 51% for Databricks.

Business 310

Business Cloud Finance AI 310

SaaStr

APRIL 20, 2024

The first head of marketing should have a title that indicates a focus on demand generation or growth, rather than product marketing, corporate marketing, communications, or branding. Founders should focus on simple messaging, effective emails, and valuable webinars before worrying about product marketing.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring Startup Marketing Technical Review 247

SaaStr

JULY 19, 2023

It’s demand-gen. One way to get a clear insight into your demand gen environment is to examine the number of opps created per AE and then pull up sales reps calendars. If you see that the sales reps are swimming in demand and that the bottleneck lies elsewhere, you go down the funnel to see where to focus efforts. PMF issues?

Revenue 204

Revenue Acquisition Technical Review Systems Review 204

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

“Our own research as well as external studies show as much as 70% improvement in productivity using generative AI for specific work tasks.” This stellar growth presages strong demand across both agents & copilots in software, greater demand for databases for storing data, & compute power models.

AI 210

AI Azure Artificial Intelligence Generative AI 210

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

If you’re not growing both supply and demand, the product generally isn’t getting better over time. In this essay we explore one channel that helps many marketplaces scale faster than others: supply driving demand. These products generally do not generate cross-side network effects.

Payments 116

Payments SaaS Payments Scale Payment Methods 116

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2022

Demand generation is the focus of targeted marketing programs that drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and or services. The ultimate success of demand generation is defined as the number of marketing qualified leads (MQL) generated, and is measured by impressions, website visits, and clicks. .

Scale 232

Scale Revenue Scaling Marketing 232

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

CS hires over the last couple of years, you’ll likely also see it weighted away from top-of-the-funnel pipeline generation. To solve the bottleneck created during times of faster growth, you have to either start hiring into those roles or shift the focus of existing roles back to pipeline generation. Jameson and Sam agree.

Sales Hiring 194

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 194

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2023

By no later than $1m in ARR, you should be growing at least 80% or more year over year without adding to demand generation, i.e. organically. Add in a killer sales VP, a great VP of Demand Gen, an experienced VP of Customer Success … and then … magic happens. You may be close, but not there yet.

SaaS 199

SaaS Product Marketing Customer Success Marketing 199

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 11, 2023

In the last ten years, with capital nearly freely available, many companies have decreased the priority of generating revenue, especially those using product-led growth techniques. The first is the clear demand from customers seeking security & compliance features.

compliance 298

compliance Benchmarks Engineering Pricing 298

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Over time, they changed that to revenue — when an opportunity closed and generated revenue, and the SDR sourced it, they received credit on that revenue. Over time, SDRs generated more revenue than AEs on a per-rep basis. The further up the funnel you go, the more you solve for quantity of demand.

Sales Hiring 171

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Revenue 171

SaaStr

MARCH 7, 2024

Embat is building the next-generation treasury management software. We believe that in 10 years every company above a certain size will demand effective real-time treasury and automation. #2. Businesses involved in AI, climate, and generally any software ventures that demonstrate efficient growth are experiencing high demand.

Payments 196

Payments Payment Services Payment Solutions Scale 196

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

A long-term way of thinking would be hiring on the demand gen side since you might not hit that top-line growth unless you create demand coming in. At some point, you need to get that product out to the world, drive some level of demand, and close that demand into dollars. That’s a potential short-term way of thinking.

Scale 251

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 251

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

Let’s deep dive into how combining innovative demand gen strategies with a modern tech stack and specific team setup can provide a winning formula for scaling B2B growth, even with low budgets of greater than a 2x burn multiple. We’re in a window where AI-generated content, like the example with Ramp mentioned earlier, can drive growth.

Scale 216

Scale Sales Hiring Strategy Marketing 216

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 23, 2020

Demand generation limits growth. The more external the signal of lead quality, the easier the demand generation task will be. Most bottoms up SaaS companies with smaller ACVs use product qualification to grow because outbound prospecting or other demand generation techniques aren’t economically viable.

Scale 250

Scale Headcount Sales Startup 250

SaaStr

MARCH 10, 2024

The Difference Between a VP of Marketing and a VP of Demand Gen On Your Next Big Deal? 6 Questions Founders Should Ask Themselves to Drive Value from Generative AI with Base10 Partners 3. Double Your Pricing. Top Podcasts This Week: 1. How to Double Your Magic Number and Increase Your Go-to-Market Efficiency with Sapphire Ventures 4.

Generative AI 148

Generative AI AI Pricing SaaS 148

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 25, 2024

” McDermott also mentioned the benefits within their developers teams from AI code-generation. They are generating high-quality code using text to describe the type of code they won. ” Improving customer demand drives greater revenue growth. features shipped?) This has increased our developer innovation speed by 52%.”

AI 163

AI Innovation Technology Subscription 163

Predictable Revenue

DECEMBER 14, 2022

Sam Kuehnle joins the Predictable Revenue podcast to discuss re-envisioning the SDR role through a demand generation lens. The post Re-envisioning the SDR role through the lens of a Demand Gen Marketer appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Marketing 147

Marketing Revenue Development Sales 147