Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Just as I was getting settled into Zilog, the manager of the training department got fired. (I I was beginning to think that my hiring managers were related to red-shirted guys on Star Trek.) Since the training department was part of sales no one really paid attention to the four of us. VP of Sales? Life was good.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

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techcrunch.com

AUGUST 12, 2012

She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. The top layer of applications and services that use the innovations of the first two layers to transform vertical markets (e.g, San Francisco, California.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. I was met by a very apologetic manager who said, “We’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last week. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Motioning to our VP of Sales, he ordered: “Go with him and get him in front of customers, and both of you don’t come back until you can tell us something we don’t know.” Reply Chui , on October 8, 2009 at 8:05 pm Said: Anyone squirming probably shouldn’t be in sales anyway, and a wise person would have realized it was good advice.

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ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 27, 2011

It is also an excellent platform to address the questions from prospects and help clarify issues and objections for any sales process, which is one of the primary ways Voluble is seeing some of its major early customers using it. The entire discussion was streaming automatically into Twitter and gave us great visibility. Taariq, please note!

Entrepreneur 116

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. What happened?

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show. This is worthy of an open and honest discussion with sales up front. And inviting to the booth/dinner/private demo.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

I knew we were selling through a multi-level indirect sales channel. That’s a mouthful to say that our sales people didn’t sell our products directly to a customer. Instead they managed rep firms (independent sales companies that carried multiple, non-competing products) that called on computer resellers that sold to the customers.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” Let’s Fire Our Customers « Steve Blank (tags: product-management startup business) [.] 3) Managing the relationship is more consumptive than the rewards.

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

The Customer Validation lesson of, “no formal launch until you have early sales validating the product and sales process&# was also born here. Which at this stage of the company was marketing and financing. Customer Development is a divide by zero problem for these companies and the process is not useful.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks. What did I learn so far? We were constantly creating metrics [.]

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. Then it hit me – no one else wanted to be manager – what was the worst that could happen? All I had to do was ask. For entrepreneurs good things come to those who ask.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile. Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.] Hmm… typical booth stuff…key chains, data sheets, pens… Until I got to the material from Cray.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Your goal was to preserve your cash while you turned these guesses into facts and searched for a repeatable and scalable sales model. We also talk about cash flow management rather than fund-raising though – watch and justifying expenses by cash coming in that matches or exceeds.

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Growthink Blog

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

What is the future for good-old fashioned DVD rentals and sales? Get The Answers I am very excited to share with you the opportunity to meet the Managing Director of Growthink's new media and entertainment practice, Mr. Lee Muhl. He is a current member of the California State Bar, and the Hollywood Writers Guild.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Market Type affects your spending and sales ramp after you reach product/market fit. You say, “Market Type affects your spending and sales ramp after you reach product/market fit.&# Use the Lean Startup - When There's Market Risk The second question is : “What’s the “ Market Type ” of your startup? Does this help?

Customer Development 219

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Growthink Blog

JUNE 19, 2010

What is the future for good-old fashioned DVD rentals and sales? Get The Answers I am very excited to share with you the opportunity to meet the Managing Director of Growthink's new media and entertainment practice, Mr. Lee Muhl. He is a current member of the California State Bar, and the Hollywood Writers Guild.

Los Angeles 76

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. The IPO Bubble – August 1995 – March 2000 In August 1995 Netscape went public, and the world of start ups turned upside down. On its first day of trading, Netscape stock closed at $58/share, valuing the company at $2.7

Silicon Valley 217

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. When we saw our salespeople actually trying to steal the early boards to take home and show their kids, we knew we had a winner. You may know it by its final name.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

Dara manages Uber’s fast-growing business in 63 countries around the world and leads a global team of more than 22,000 employees. She worked as a sales clerk at a fashion company called Celine. I still remember it – she used to shop at those kinds of places, and she had to become a sales clerk. We had a management offsite plan.

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. If the management team is thinking they’ve made it, the new building is just symptomatic of a company heading for a crash. That’s when things went south.

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Start Up Blog

APRIL 29, 2013

A local example was the Greenhouse pop up restaurant in Melbourne by Joost Baker – Which included vertical gardens and large amounts of material re-purposing. Residents are collaborating to start, finance and manage public works projects and proving they can bootstrap a better job themselves.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

I learned a lot at Convergent, going from product marketing manager in a small startup to VP of Marketing of the Unix Division as it became a public company. His marketing and sales instincts and skills seemed magical and he built the company into a $400 million OEM supplier, ultimately selling the company to Unisys.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

However, in catching up with the VP of Sales of Ardent last night, I was reminded one of the few times I did return for closure. As one could imagine this was the last thing the supercomputer center management wanted to hear. I liked to fail fast, move on, and not look back.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan. Marketing starts to build a sales demo, writes sales materials (presentations, data sheets), and hires a PR agency.

Silicon Valley 260

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ReadWriteStart

MAY 12, 2011

Today, he has over a thousand, and he has chosen to focus on the realtor vertical. Then Taariq Lewis from San Francisco, California, presented Stanzr, a lightweight online events platform specifically focused on moving qualified leads generated through webinars towards a close. He is seeing excellent results. Following a guerrilla p.r.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Market Type Integral to the Customer Development model is the notion that Market Type choices affect the way the company will deploy its sales, marketing and financial resources. Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) « Steve Blank (tags: product-management startup strategy customer-development) [.]

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.&# (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Or simply wishful thinking?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. Sloan realized that the traditional centralized management structures (like General Motors had in 1920) were poor fits for the management of GM’s already diverse product lines.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. Before you go to a trade show sales and marketing need to agree to measurable goals. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t tertiary goals, but they are just that – not the top one or two.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Rule 1: In an existing market Customer Development means not only understanding potential customers, but your competitors in detail – their product features, their sales channels, their demand creation strategy, their business model, etc. Me – “So what’s the problem?” We only have 20 customers, and Large Company x has millions.”

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

Do you know of any similar studies showing correlation between sales success and founder success? The three dropouts above were each, in their own way, some pretty slick sales guys. When recruiting was hard the functional managers started looking at 2.8-9s. So “good students aren’t good at all things.&#

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