Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 7, 2009
Without the revenue to match its expenses, the company is in now danger of running out of money. The rest of the organization (product development, marketing, support) has been burning cash, all according to plan, expecting Sales to make its numbers. Blame it On Marketing In the next 3-6 months, a new VP of Sales is hired.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 24, 2009
5) The customer’s needs don’t match your long term direction. While I completely agree with this notion, the signals might be more important (when you might fire them): 1) You don’t have a bi-directional (respectful) relationship. 2) They don’t care about your profitibility and ultimately, your staying power.
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Steve Blank
JUNE 25, 2009
The next thing you need to do is match your sales team with your market type. It’s only after you’re done with customer discovery and are in the final steps of customer validation (building a repeatable and scalable sales process) that you start hiring a sales executive. You need to hire the right type of sales people for the type of market.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 5, 2009
We also talk about cash flow management rather than fund-raising though – watch and justifying expenses by cash coming in that matches or exceeds. Hopefully this will get more bootstrapping entrepreneurs focusing on making money instead of raising money.
Steve Blank
AUGUST 24, 2009
The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.
Steve Blank
JULY 13, 2009
It wasn’t that I didn’t have a smart VP of Marketing who was getting early feedback from customers and screaming that the games didn’t match the hype. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to listen to customers. I had outsourced customer feedback and ignored the input.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. You have to wonder: does the VC you have on your board today have the right skill set to help you succeed in today’s economic environment?
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