Both Sides of the Table

JULY 9, 2013

This is final part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. Well think of it this way – you have your sales process. You know exactly when you want to sell to this customer and presumably it’s this quarter! Unique Selling Proposition.

Customer 324

Customer PR Marketing Technical Review 324

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 30, 2011

It’s the lifeblood of any organization and yet most startups don’t have any sales DNA on their teams. It’s important enough that I dedicate a tab on my blog to startup sales & marketing. But the ground we covered was awesome for anybody wanting to know more about sales. How do you get access to customers?

Software Review 300

Software Review Sales Due Diligence Startup 300

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers. We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 26, 2010

Social proof is defined as “looking for others to guide our decisions&# and is also one of the most important techniques in acquiring customers in your company. We would take every day users from our customer base and make them heroes. Tags: Sales & Marketing Advice Startup Advice.

Customer 294

Customer Marketing Technical Review Iowa 294

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

The remainder of this article will deal with this decision but it comes down to the different economics of DVD rentals due to “ the first sale doctrine ” which gives Netflix a complete library of films and the fact that the first-sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital downloads. ” customer segment.

Customer 287

Customer Technical Review Caching PR 287

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 19, 2011

He is very hands-on and helpful – especially for any company looking into customer acquisition. o Everything is for sale but it’s the price that moves the timing. Good listener, take in information, • Have pulse on what the market wants (hard to train that) cannot take this from customers only. we both love Jason).

Acquisition 304

Acquisition Warrant Customer Term Sheet 304

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 19, 2013

The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. But the “no sales people” mantra isn’t what I’m here to take on. I believe it’s flawed.

Technical Review 403

Technical Review Software Review Startup API 403

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2013

Like most startup entrepreneurs, when I began my first company in 1999 I had no formal sales experience. I did have the wherewithal to visit potential customers and try to understand the pain points that I thought could be solved with our solution. question in sales. This is a very important to do when you first start a company.

Sales 393

Sales Startup Framework Search 393

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

But if you level up , raise capital and grow customers, revenue and staff – life changes. Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. Do you hire more sales people? And then there’s product management. Engineering?

CTO Hire 385

CTO Hire Entrepreneur Technical Review Leadership 385

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2013

So when I meet with GRP portfolio companies that do enterprise sales I try to emphasize the following: 1. This might mean helping customers buy traffic, arb’ing deals, helping with RTB pricing or trading, etc. Minimize Any Custom Work That Will Not Feed Back Into Your R&D. Referenceability is the lifeblood of sales.

Software Review 321

Software Review Software IP Technical Review 321

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

The functions of an early-stage board are pretty obvious and well understood: Providing introductions to customers, biz dev partners, recruits, the press, other investors, etc. Over time you start to figure out who you customers are and how to sell to them or how to get them to adopt your products if you’re a consumer-oriented startup.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 23, 2013

Every sales organization with more than a handful of reps or that is across multiple offices or time zones would benefit from having a sales methodology. Simply, this is identifying a customer need that has economic value to them if they can solve it. This solves the customer question, “Why Buy Anything?”.

Sales 328

Sales Campaign Sales Cycle Early Stage 328

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 26, 2016

profitable and companies like Amazon who chose to focus on growth > profitability were not losing money on each book sale (ie they were gross margin positive). If you acquire 10 customers a month at $100 per customer and this scales to 100 customers at the same price you may make assumptions about 1,000 customers that don’t hold.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2013

In my first enterprise software company we developed a methodology for sales that we called PUCCKA , which I wrote about previously. Having a good sales methodology can help you ensure your company runs more disciplined campaigns and focuses scarce resources on your best opportunities. It the second rule of sales, “Why Buy Me?”

Campaign 336

Campaign Sales Software Customer 336

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 418

Startup Revenue Technical Review Flash 418

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 3, 2010

I’d like to talk about Crocodile Salesmen in 3 scenarios: 1) when YOU are selling (or someone on your team), 2) when you are trying to recruit a sales person. But how to apply “listening&# in a sales meeting? Let’s assume you run a Customer Support software company. I still do this sometimes, too.

Sales 314

Sales Non-Compete Campaign California 314

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 8, 2010

Very few of them are started, in my experience, by sales people and very few early stage companies really understand sales. That’s why I started the Sales & Marketing Series and at one point I will do a bunch of posts on the sales methodology we developed at my first company called PUCCKA. More on that later.

Early Stage 350

Early Stage Startup Sales Campaign 350

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NOVEMBER 2, 2010

This is part of a series on sales & marketing. I previously covered how early phase sales teams should be “evangelical&# and consultative in nature. The first post on scaling sales dealt with “aiming&# your sales teams – making sure they were focused on the right opportunities.

Sales 289

Sales API Distribution Metrics 289

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. An obvious example would be in sales. By going on sales calls you pick up directly the feedback of what customers want and also what they’re telling you about competition.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 30, 2013

This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. The “P” stands for Pain or the reason your customer needs to implement a new product. In order for somebody with IA to be your champion he has to be actively helping you through the sales process.

Sales 322

Sales Campaign Search Technology 322

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

There is nothing more pure than building a product, putting it out in the world and seeing paying customers using your product and in some cases loving it. As companies get this initial customer feedback on their product they start to have to ask harder questions about unit economics: How much does it cost us to acquire a new customer?

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

At times I wanted the engineering team to produce features to support our sales efforts to I occasionally leaned on them a bit. So he would allocate say – 20% to sales, 15% to marketing, 20% to eng priorities, 10% to customer support, 10% to ops, 20% to ‘platinum customers’ and maybe 5% directly to me as the CEO.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

They will often run all of the daily reports into them covering off for finance, sales, marketing, biz dev & HR. You can always spot these types because they can’t tell you what their revenue number for last month was or what their sales target is for next month. But ask yourself, what does a COO actually do?

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Due Diligence 325

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 4, 2009

Most start-up entrepreneurs have little or no sales experience. But through nearly a decade of startups I learned that sales comes down to three essential elements: 1. Even businesses that attempt to sign up customers directly on a website need to answer this question for people albeit programmatically and through good website copy.

Sales 319

Sales Sales Cycle Startup Reputation 319

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

Once you’ve been around for a few years, attracted some great people, landed real, paying customers and raised venture capital you’ve likely got a talented team around you. This is akin in the US to having sales staff in NY, SF & LA with your HQ in one of these locations. It doesn’t seem fair.

Ireland 319

Ireland Sales Bankruptcy Germany 319

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

4 times / 100 means if a customer uses your app frequently (say 10-20 times / day) then they are crashing nearly every day. Customer Acquisition. At the highest level you’ll obviously want to track how many customers your adding every month (and for some businesses that have hit scale this is measured on a daily basis).

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. I was the one pointing out that we were behind on our sales targets and our “Elephant Deal&# that had been promised was 6 months late.

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 414

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

You are particularly vulnerable if: You have revenue concentration (few customers each providing a large total of percentage of your revenue). You have a large number of startup customers (because when markets crash they have a funny way of going bankrupt quickly or cutting burn precipitously).

Burn Rate 383

Burn Rate Balance Sheet .Net Valuation 383

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2009

I’ve sat through a lot of VC pitches and having been CEO of an enterprise software firm for many years I’ve also sat through many customer meetings with sales teams. This is part of my blog series “Pitching a VC.&#.

Sales 292

Sales Venture Capital Software Technology 292

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 16, 2011

After college Joanne worked for 4 years in retail apparel at Macy’s where she initially managed sales reps on the floor and then worked as a buyer of clothing. This is where she first developed sales skills. She doubled her salary by going into sales. to $12m in sales. “A lot of sales is innate.

Startup 311

Startup Sales Database Community 311

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 24, 2018

controlling your psychology ) you no doubt have heard me say that raising capital is a sales & marketing process. Building models to evaluate the deal and/or reviewing customer files, company financials, business plans, etc. This is Sales 101.

Technical Review 314

Technical Review Due Diligence Partner Term Sheet 314

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. They care about the quality of what is build more than they care about end customers. As you head into the phase where you’ve had real customers paying real money for a period of time you’ll have a whole new set of issues.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

” Who cut you in on their bonus because even though you’re “just an sales engineer” they know you really deserved more credit for this deal. Neither is very strategic nor in the best interest of either set of customers that VCs have (portfolio companies & LPs). We tell startup stories.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

You can ask them to come and watch your videos at your owned & operated websites (O&O) where you can make higher margins as well as ask directly for more meaningful customer information such as Facebook connections, Twitter oAuths, email addresses and the like. Build Direct Relationships with Customers. And production matters.

Video 339

Video Technical Review Distribution Aggregator 339

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 20, 2018

This is true of any buying process where a customer has to make a large investment decision on your software or when an investor must decide whether to give you $5 million. These are similar to the pipeline reviews I used to do with sales reps when I was a CEO. She was imploring them to push harder in their sales process.

LP 189

LP Software Review Europe Founder 189

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

.&# They know instinctually how customers buy and how to excite them. Because they’re street smart, most great entrepreneurs tend to prefer getting out and talking with real customers rather than sitting in a cubicle all day doing beautiful PowerPoint slides. They have a sixth sense for the competitors’ weaknesses.

Entrepreneur 306

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Cofounder Sales 306

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2011

In the initial phases of any new market you’re developing a product (hopefully with a minimal set of features), getting feedback from customers, refining your product based on user feedback and then re-launching your product. I had my sales teams telling me we needed certain features to be competitive. Rinse & repeat.

Development Team Review 374

Development Team Review Technical Review Bulgaria Lean 374