Dave Kellogg
51 statements across 7 episodes · 10 bullish · 11 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement May 22, 2019 by Dave Kellogg · said 12 times in 5 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Dave Kellogg's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Scott Beechuk (4), Jason Lemkin (4), Bill Binch (2), Sophie Chesters (1), Doug Song (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2022 11 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Increasing Runway Without Sacrificing Growth with Norwest Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz
- 16 Ways to Level Up in 2022 with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin | SaaStr Software Community
- SaaS Secret Sauce: How the CEO/CRO Dynamic Drives Growth | Marketo’s Former EVP Sales Bill Binch
- 10 Lessons Learned Along the Path to $100M ARR | UserZoom's CEO and CMO | SaaStr Software Community
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Dave Kellogg, oldest first
May 22, 2019
May 22, 2019
May 22, 2019 neutral
May 22, 2019 positive
Startups must be publicly vision-driven, culturally customer-driven, and strategically competitor-driven
“Avoid this fake either or framing, which is you need to speak like you're vision driven. So when you're talking to customers and analysts, the markets, talk about the desired end state. Talk about the vision. Don't talk about competition. When you're building …”
May 22, 2019 negative
May 22, 2019 neutral
May 22, 2019 neutral
Asking a board what to do next quarter gets a CEO fired
“First, you're working for a committee, not a person, and second, if you ever went to that committee going, gosh, I wonder what we should do next quarter, right? They would look at you and say, I think you should help us find a new CEO, right? Because you're su…”
Jan 10, 2021 negative
Kellogg: Calling SaaS Churn Uncontrollable Is Often an Organizational Cop-Out
“So to me, controllable versus uncontrollable churn, it is a concept people talk a lot about. But I get super uncomfortable because I think it could easily be a cop out, right? You know what? Like my last company, they got a new CFO and they didn't renew. We ca…”
Jan 10, 2021
Jan 6, 2022 negative
Jan 6, 2022
Kellogg: Technology pioneer references fail to persuade pragmatic enterprise buyers
“People want references who remind them of themselves. So, this is a large part of the whole Crossing the Chasm book, is you can't take a, you know, technology pioneer and reference them against a pragmatist. It doesn't work.”
Jan 6, 2022
Kellogg: Unformed categories require value selling; established ones need differentiation
“If the category hasn't formed yet, you're probably in a why-buy-one mode. Hey, I know there's this thing you never heard of. Let me tell you why you should buy one. If there is a category, and there's five vendors in it, and there's a magic quadrant, you're pr…”
Jan 6, 2022
Kellogg: Product messaging should be black-and-white on offense, gray on defense
“And I like messaging to be black and white, particularly when we're on offense, we want to be black and white. Only we have this. When we're on defense, we want gray. Right? Well, you have consolidation. Well, they have consolidation. You don't. Well, actually…”
Jan 6, 2022 negative
Kellogg: No marketing executive is top-tier in both product and demand generation
“There's nobody who's a five-five. God doesn't make them, right? You either grew up in product marketing, or you grew up in demand generation, right? You also don't get 20 pointers. I think 15 is the maximum number of points you can get on this scale.”
Jan 6, 2022
Kellogg: Tech messaging requires adding 'how different' to the 5Ws and 2Hs
“They teach journalists in journalism school that for any story it's about five W plus two H, right? Who, what, where, when, why are the five W's? How and how much are the two H's? I add a Third H for how different, because in tech, differentiation matters so m…”
Jan 6, 2022 neutral
Jan 6, 2022
Kellogg: Use multi-level ternary trees to structure complex, memorable messaging
“So this is the key to building simple, memorable messaging. I still, I launched Business Objects version six in 1996. I still remember the messaging. P-D-E. Why? Because it's in a ternary tree, right? So I firmly, firmly recommend using ternary trees to struct…”
Jan 6, 2022
Kellogg: CEOs should only hold teams accountable for pipeline coverage and sales
“I think the number one mistake I've seen founders make is they hold people's feet to the fire on all those cells, and I think that's wrong. I think it's demotivating. I think it doesn't reflect an understanding of the fact that the model deviates from reality.…”
Jan 6, 2022
Jan 6, 2022
Kellogg: SaaS companies should conduct quarterly third-party win-loss analyses
“The way to solve that is two things. One, quarterly win-loss analysis at your QBR, right, hire a third-party firm, To analyze wins and losses, to bring reality back into the room, and second, this is done far less often, but I think even more important, a win-…”
Jul 20, 2022 neutral
Jul 20, 2022
Jul 20, 2022
Kellogg: Repeatable sales processes require customer-verifiable stage exit criteria
“To me, the definition of that should be customer verifiable, right? With one phone call, I should be able to verify that, and that one's easy. I just call the customer and say, do you think our product can solve your problem? Because that's what solution fit c…”
Jul 20, 2022 neutral
Kellogg: Scale-Up Phase Replaces Individual Heroics With Repeatable Systems
“Scaling is very different. It's about a small number of amazing process and infrastructure oriented leaders leveraging a large number of great, but not necessarily amazing people, right? They're not solving problems. They're building systems and processes. Qua…”
Jul 20, 2022 positive
Kellogg: Startups Expanding to the US Should Segment Vertically by Geography
“The U.S. Has geography and vertical industry, right, they're correlated. Like, if you're focused on pharma, you go to New Jersey, finance New York City, entertainment LA, and sometimes for a company, I actually recommend, even if you don't have to be verticall…”
Jul 20, 2022
Kellogg: Fully loaded cost of hiring an enterprise AE is $700,000
“Their OTE, their on-target earnings, is 300 K. They're gonna cost a 180 K for two-thirds, and you can adjust these numbers to your local market, but do the exercise, right? So I'm hiring a seller. I'm hiring two-thirds of an SC. I'm hiring two-thirds of an SDR…”
Jul 20, 2022
Kellogg: Consulted for a startup that missed targets despite 100x pipeline coverage
“I literally did a consulting gig with a company that had 100 X pipeline coverage. Can you imagine? So their pipeline was a hundred times bigger, and they still missed their numbers. So, so think about that. And the answer is they don't have what I call pipelin…”
Jul 20, 2022 positive
Kellogg: Startups Scaling Past $10M ARR Should Redeploy Early Leaders
“I've worked with many startups where the figure it out sales VP had to leave when we hit ten million. And I always feel bad about that, because I don't actually think they have to leave. I think they should be redeployed. Like, my answer is, what do you do wit…”
Jul 20, 2022
Kellogg: VCs targeting billion-dollar returns will block hundred-million-dollar sales
“You don't want to raise money from a VC who wants you to be a billion dollars, and you want to sell it a hundred million. I've had friends who wanted to sell it a hundred million. VCs wouldn't let them, right? Because they'll say, no, we're blocking the sale b…”
Jul 20, 2022 neutral
Jul 20, 2022 negative
Sep 3, 2023 negative
Sep 3, 2023 neutral
Kellogg: In a VC Arms Race, Founders Must Out-Raise or Pivot
“So, if you find yourself in this situation, it's probably a sign that you're in a really good category, but you either need to play to win, and go out raise the other guy, or you need to find pivot into some sub-segment where you're not directly competing with…”
Sep 3, 2023
Sep 3, 2023 neutral
Kellogg: Large Horizontal Categories Inevitably Face Massive VC Spending Arms Races
“The perverse thing about this is, the better your category, the more likely that is to happen. If you're selling some very Focused vertical SaaS app, you're unlikely to find a spending arms race, right? But if you're in some horizontal platform category, peopl…”
Sep 3, 2023 positive
Sep 3, 2023
Sep 3, 2023 positive
Kellogg: Companies must be vision-driven publicly, customer-driven culturally, competitor-driven strategically
“Avoid this fake either or framing, which is you need to speak like you're vision driven. So when you're talking to customers and analysts, the markets, talk about the desired end state. Talk about the vision. Don't talk about competition. When you're building …”
Sep 3, 2023 neutral
Benioff dismissed early Zendesk threats to Salesforce to avoid fear-based leadership
“I did a year at Salesforce in the middle of all that, and I was mentioning Zendesk. I was like, hey, there's these guys called Zendesk, and they might be a problem for, like, our customer service business and I got the kind of uh-oh moment where, like, oh, and…”
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Kellogg: SaaS Benchmarks Should Be Segmented by Company Aspiration
“I actually think the best way to segment them is by aspiration. That, that if we could, and nobody offers these yet, but I want you to just consider this concept that we should segment benchmarks by aspiration, which is if I want to sell for 18 times EBITDA in…”
Dec 13, 2023 negative
Dec 13, 2023 negative
Kellogg: Upgrading SaaS metrics often requires replacing non-strategic RevOps and FP&A staff
“The change management is hard. It may require staff upgrades, particularly key analytics roles like RevOps, FP&A. Sometimes those people are not that strategic. They're not that fast, right? That they're good at making a budget and they're good at getting comp…”
Dec 13, 2023 neutral
Kellogg: Establishing SaaS metric foundations takes quarters, not 30 days
“Even layer one has taken me with certain companies I work with quarters. And I walk in every time I have this kind of entrepreneurial blind spot going, this is going to be easy. Me, head of FP&A, CFO, we'll get this nailed in 30 days, 60 days. Every time I do …”
Dec 13, 2023 negative
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Kellogg: A 90% confidence sales forecast allows missing once every 2.5 years
“And when I give the forecast to the board, I want to give a 90% confidence interval. So I'm giving them the lower bound of a 90% confidence interval. Now people hate that. And if people get scared when you use those words, I have advice. Just say you get to mi…”
Dec 13, 2023 negative
Nov 4, 2024 neutral
Kellogg: Enterprise software manages pricing friction via consistency or complexity
“There's two ways to solve that problem. One is to have super consistent pricing, which in my experience in enterprise is very difficult. The other is to have very complicated pricing. So it's very hard for them to figure out who got the better deal.”
Nov 4, 2024 negative
Kellogg: Customer Success Should Not Report to Sales or the CRO
“By the way, for whatever it's worth, I don't actually think customer success should report to sales. I think that's a stress reaction to save money. I think the company hits a downturn. There's too much sales expense, which customer success is usually classifi…”