25 posts by Dave Kellogg you should (re-)read

It is holiday season, which means reading time. I found myself browsing through old posts on Kellblog (on a great beach btw). I realized how “spot on” Dave’s posts are, even 10 years after they have been written.

I compiled a list of my favorites – most of them related to Professional Services and Customer Success, my field of interest – and added a short explanation why I found them interesting.

Good reading, wherever you decide to read these:

• The role of professional services in a Saas business (03/2017): I absolutely loved this post when I first read it years ago. I had many a debate about PS being a loss leader vs PS having to bring in a profit. This post nails it!
• The professional services paradox (06/2023) explaines how investors tend to dislike companies with a larger PS footprint, but that in certain cases (e.g. category creation) that is actually the preferable solution.
• The Zero-Sum Fallacy: ARR vs. Services (03/2020): This is a post I retweeted in the past. I love this post. I use it to educate our sales teams! The phrase: “the deal you lose is not necessarily the deal your competitor wins.” has stuck in my brain since I read this post.
• Can you solution sell without selling solutions? (08/2017): YES WE CAN! And I have found myself often trying to explain this to eStaff members. In the Enterprise Software business, especially in SAAS, solution selling has become a dirty word, but only because people think it means you are selling a solution, AND IT IS NOT THE SAME! If you don’t believe me, read this post, or go talk to somebody from the PS team in your company. They should know the difference 🙂
• A Disney parking lot attendant gets more training than your typical 250k enterprise sales rep (03/2015): This one is so very true especially for PS in the Enterprise Software business, because your offerings are only a “secondary product” or “add-on”. I have see from experience what a proper training can do for your PS bookings or PS attach rate.
• The Role of Services in Today’s SaaS Market (02/2022): Listen to the podcast !
• Why You Should Eliminate the Title “Implementation Consultant” from Your Startup (06/2020): ‘Who ever said the customer defined success as getting the software implemented?” “Hey, it’s all set up now, you can login, gotta go!” is not the credo of a success-oriented consultant.”
• Talking about the numbers vs talking about the business (09/2024): After a career spent in Business Intelligence and Decison Making, this one is so recognizable. Many organisations still don’t know how to agree on a limited set of well defined metrics and agree to run the business using those. Running Professional Services team in the Software world, the one where I beat my head the most is “PS Attach Rate”.
• Promote stars, not strangers (08/2016): This is very applicable to the start-up world. Everytime change comes around (and that tends to happen often in a start-up), eStaff tends to think they need different managers for the different phase in the life of the company. That might be true, but when that adagio is applied blindly, you can wreak havoc on your company (culture). I’ve seen it happen! This is a good recipe to estranging your most valued people.
• What it really means to be a manager, director or VP (03/2015): The responsibility that each role carries is what should make the title difference. This post is very succinct and applicable to any department, not just PS or CS.
• Congratulations, You’ve Created a Category. Now What? (06/2020) This is a very interesting post because Neo4j was doing exactly that, creating the category of property graphs.
• Should Customer Success Report into the CRO or the CEO? (03/2020) A very interesting post, especially if you have been part of a start-up’s journey from 20m$ to 200m$ ARR.
• Simplifiers go far, complexifiers get stuck (05/2015): Combined with the above post of differences in accountability between managers, director and VP, this is simple but oh so valuable career advice.
• Are your managers good enough (07/2015): A good topic to stop and think about. The cost of having a “good enough” manager in your team can be dramatic.
• I’ll get it to you tomorrow (11/2015): Guilty as charged 🙂 ! Being a problem solver at heart, it is sometimes tough to say no to a problem that you really know needs solving. But you need to say NO!
• Survivor bias in churn calculations (04/2015): PS and CS end up fighting churn more than they want. So yes, getting that KPI right and honest matters.
• You can never fire someone too early (09/2026): Nobody likes ugly truths.
• The best work parable (11/2015): A Henry Kissinger story !
• Whose team is it anyway (06/2016): About the time you have to get started as a new manager, and how long you can pretend the brides period will last. Your credit runs out after 3 months !
• We are not buddies (07/2016): About managers who are too busy with being liked.
• You don’t want that (06/2022), a rant by the amazing Lance Walter with whom I worked at Pentaho and Neo4j. A plug for a buddy 🙂
• Detecting and eliminating the rolling hairball (07/2017) is about sales opportunities that continuously get pushed out, quarter after quarter. A very painful problem, and PS are usually the last ones to know that the deal slipped again. It makes planning unnecessarily difficult.
• Are you challenging or just plain difficult (08/2017) is about remaining collaborative even if you have a different point of view, a lesson that often need to remember as I tend to like to challenge the equilibrium.
• The one question to ask before you blow up your customer success team (01/2024): Frank Slootman declared CS dead. So should we start the funeral arrangements?