Dave Daniels

30 days - Learn the market and competitive landscape. Visit as many customers and non-customers as possible. Read every Win/Loss report you can get your hands on. Talk to as many sales reps as possible. Use the Steve Jobs line of questioning: "What's working here?" "What's not working here?" Warning: don't assume you're the smartest person in the room. Network and leverage as many brains in the organization as you can.  60 days - Formulate a GTM strategy. Be prepared for a lot of "We don't do it ...Read More

Start with these: 1. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) - it measures how long a customer stays with you and how much they spend during that time. It's a good early warning metric.  2. Win/Loss Ratio - of all the deals you have the opportunity to win, the number you win and the number you lose. It's a great tracking metric to help measure the effectiveness of things like sales enablement. 3. Retention Rate - the king of metrics in SaaS. What is the rate at which customer are staying (or the opposite ...Read More

Product positioning/value propositions/messages are developed for people (personas) in markets. The first step is to identify the personas that influence a buying decision for your products. When you understand that, you can dive into the problems each persona is experiencing and develop a value prop for each. A message for a technical buyer won't resonate for an economic buyer, as you point out. Trying to create one message that resonates with both may be impossible (and will be too generic).  ...Read More

In a word - results. Your product managers should have a goal defined for the product you're supporting. It may not be the most realistic goal, but there should be a goal you can anchor to. Take that goal and break it down into bite size pieces. Think about what it's going to take to get a buyer from Attention to Acquisition (assuming a new customer goal). Break a purchase into individual buying steps. Identify the buyers (on average) that influence a purchase and find out what they need. Then m ...Read More

First, don't think of Win/Loss as a project to be done at certain times of the year. It's like a lifestyle change that has be worked into your organization's priorities (like exercise or losing weight). Second, salespeople should never conduct W/L interviews. Never. The purpose of W/L is to figure out how buyers make a decision (in the aggregate) and salespeople are not the best resource in this regard. To get a sustainable W/L program you need to bring something to the table: reasons why you lo ...Read More