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. But the number one reason sales stall when customers see the value in what you do is because they often don’t have a reason to buy NOW. The USP solves the, “Why Buy Me?”

Sales 328

Sales Campaign Sales Cycle Early Stage 328

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 30, 2013

This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. ” We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here. Of course you have to develop and nurture champions.

Sales 322

Sales Campaign Search Technology 322

Both Sides of the Table

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. As a tech startup grows it needs to develop more process & management if it is to scale. More experienced sales leaders seldom compete on price.

Sales 289

Sales API Distribution Metrics 289

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. We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here. Well think of it this way – you have your sales process. Unique Selling Proposition.

Customer 324

Customer PR Marketing Technical Review 324

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 4, 2013

This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here. Legal – The other big roadblock in sales is the legal department. Compelling Event.

Sales 321

Sales Dividend Security Campaign 321

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. Often your sales engineers can do the customizations without bugging the core eng team. Integrate PS Work Into Sales & Marketing Processes. Referenceability is the lifeblood of sales.

Software Review 321

Software Review Software IP Technical Review 321

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.

Early Stage 350

Early Stage Startup Sales Campaign 350

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. But how would I use it?”.

Campaign 336

Campaign Sales Software Customer 336

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

Due to the language and culture issues in Europe we opted for a country structure with an MD in each country and local sales, marketing & customers support staff. This is akin in the US to having sales staff in NY, SF & LA with your HQ in one of these locations. But it wasn’t just about company structures.

Ireland 319

Ireland Sales Bankruptcy Germany 319

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 9, 2018

I developed a list of questions to ask you next time we speak?—?especially Frankly, it’s the life of ANY executives with whom you want to sell product, do a business development deal with, execute M&A, a journalist you want to write about your company?—?anybody. I always tell people that fund raising is a sales process.

Software Review 381

Software Review Churn Rate Due Diligence New York 381

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. But “he didn’t have the budget to hire a developer until he had raised money!&#. He looked stunned. What lovely charts!

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 414

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

FEBRUARY 6, 2013

Early-stage companies shouldn’t: outsource core product development, have consulting firms build it for them to speed up time-to-market, shouldn’t hire too many business people until product is complete and early product/market fit tested. Your first sales people should be consultative sellers who can fuel evangelical sales.

Cofounder 388

Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 388

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. Markets develop for a complex set of factors that are often beyond all of our control. What did he know?

Development Team Review 374

Development Team Review Technical Review Lean Bulgaria 374

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

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). But often this doesn’t tell the whole story because often companies are also spending money on PR and other marketing activities in order to support the sales process.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. Some CTO’s swear that it is a huge improvement in development timeframes and doesn’t cause performance issues. They often aren’t great at planning development work. They should be setting the standards for how code is developed.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

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

JANUARY 28, 2012

The world is adopting smart phones and for many young people and many people in the developing world this will be one of their first computing devices. They are more likely to be the “bottom end of the sales funnel” or in other words close to “point of purchase.” They are limited in size.

Mobile 334

Mobile Web Software Review San Francisco 334

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

Fund raising (as is much of life) is a sale – pure and simple. As with any sales campaign you need to: Qualify your buyers early so you focus your scarce resources on people likely to buy your product. . Three rules in sales: Why buy anything? Remember again that the three major steps to a sale are: Why buy anything?

Developer 366

Developer Silicon Valley PR Las Vegas 366

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

MARCH 30, 2010

Burstly, a Santa Monica based company, provides an open and free ad management platform that helps mobile application developers better monetize their inventory. But I believe it’s a very comprehensive solution and our due diligence with large app developers confirmed as much. I’ll explain in detail below. Enter Burstly.

Mobile 282

Mobile Management Southern California Application Development 282

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2014

Phoebe had moved to the US (to Southern California) to set up shop, raise money and build a digital team to start to develop her online direct business (much of her product is sold through third-parties today – most of it offline) more fully. The opportunity never went away – we just accelerated our time to capturing it.

Merger 296

Merger Southern California eCommerce New Zealand 296

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 24, 2014

I spent my first year developing proprietary deal flow and learning the business and then the Sept 2008 / Lehman Bros collapse / financial meltdown happened. I become a venture capitalist in September 2007 – exactly 6.5 years ago. That company was Invoca, which just announced a $20 million fund raise led by Accel.

Los Angeles 387

Los Angeles Intellectual Property LP Venture Capital 387

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2014

Of course it is super helpful if a VC can drop you in to important people for business development, recruiting, PR, sales and eventually M&A. To be clear – I’m not saying huge successes make a VC less likely to be helpful to you – I’m just saying it’s not a guaranteed predictor. Connections?

Portfolio 364

Portfolio Chicago Incubator Sales 364

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. He decided that our largest customers would be involved in the setting of our priority lists (we did some of this internally in the early years but we saw it mostly as a sales process). The Outside In organization had a one-way flow. He’s a doctor.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

So investing $3-5 million in a company and taking a year to 18 months to see how it develops before adding more fuel can often be the right course of action. We worked with police departments, the ministry of defense, many of the largest utility companies in Europe and a ton of contractors, engineers, architects, developers and suppliers.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 10, 2012

When I started my first tech company in 1999 I had pretty good tech chops and had led teams but had very little exposure to many other things that matter in a startup including sales, marketing & business development. The owner of that company was in the meeting along with his business development lead. I talked too much.

United States 322

United States Software Developers Software Development Developer 322

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 20, 2018

These are similar to the pipeline reviews I used to do with sales reps when I was a CEO. Because entrepreneurs often don’t feel comfortable in a sales process (as a fund-raising process is) they often don’t enquire about the approval process at the firm. She was imploring them to push harder in their sales process.

LP 189

LP Software Review Europe Founder 189

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2010

Here’s how it goes: You have a business development group with two people. Your sales department has to have somebody has do deal with these inbound inquiries. If you don’t know WHY you’re adding features don’t do it just because you have a development team. I love that saying.

SEM 323

SEM Development Team Review Channel Social Media 323

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

But you must work hard to develop alternate distribution at websites like Yahoo!, You also need to develop an O&O (your own websites) strategy. MSN & AOL. You must find ways to get some distribution through other online partners like Hulu or package up shows for distribution on Roku or Xbox. Technology is Critical.

Video 339

Video Technical Review Distribution Aggregator 339

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 19, 2015

Sales people (and website customer acquisition folks) all think in terms of funnels and yet non-sales professionals seldom do. It doesn’t matter if it’s recruiting, business development, shipping product, writing blog posts, networking … it’s all the same. Lots of people start, very few finish.

LP 150

LP Warrant Portfolio Framework 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

And given your stage of development you sure better at least know what your goal is. For example, if you have developers, content people or SEO folks working on SEO programs you’ll need to allocate their time / costs to this effort. 10% of our revenue is coming from direct sales of our banner inventory. That’s not acceptable.

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

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. Who was willing to jump on a plan on a Sunday morning with a hang-over to make sure they were there the night before an important biz dev pitch on a Monday morning.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

Looong Appendix (only for those interested in reading another story about losing a sale & key lessons): A personal story of losing a sale that haunted me for years. They were looking for a collaboration tool to manage all of their large water development projects. I later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales.

China 333

China Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

Looong Appendix (only for those interested in reading another story about losing a sale & key lessons): A personal story of losing a sale that haunted me for years. They were looking for a collaboration tool to manage all of their large water development projects. I later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales.

China 328

China Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review 328