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What’s more important: product or sales?

Version One Ventures

It’s the age-old debate among start-up circles: which is more important to the success of a start-up: the strength of the sales/distribution strategy or the quality of the product? To be successful, a stand-alone company needs a top-notch product and a clever distribution/sales strategy. Today, it’s a different story.

Sales 145
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Top Hat Raises $22.5M Series C in a Tough Vertical: What Can We Learn from their Success

Version One Ventures

And selling to institutions requires a long sales cycle. They took an innovative approach to distribution. Top Hat adopted a bottoms-up approach to distribution, as covered in the Globe and Mail article: Sales took off after Top Hat ignored advice and flipped its sales strategy.

Vertical 133
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Seed Stage Funding 101: What it Is & How it Works

The Startup Magazine

pexels A war chest is virtually always a competitive edge in all aspects that count, including employing key staff, public relations, marketing, and sales. This suggests the firm should have a list of paying customers, consistent sales cycles, a clear value proposition, and a developing revenue pipeline in the ideal situation.

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How Pertino is reinventing the future of business networking

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Instead of selling to the CIO (which could have long, costly sales-cycles), Pertino has focused on marketing and selling their services directly to the end-user. Given their core expertise in networking, we believed that they were one of the few teams in the world that could deliver on this promise.

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My Life as a CEO (and VC): Chief Psychologist

Both Sides of the Table

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
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Sales Success Begins And Ends With Engagement

YoungUpstarts

By Kurt Bilafer, Global Vice President Sales & Success at WePay. As a sales leader, my professional life is filled with quotas, metrics and dashboards. Early in my career, I was always optimizing for percentage of quota attained, which is a typical sales metric and usually tied to your compensation. Optimizing to quota.

Sales 100
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Critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Founders

Up and Running

Think of them like this: If you have a critical sales milestone your company needs to meet by the end of the year, KPIs should deliver incremental evidence that you’re either headed in the right direction, or you’re not. . Sales KPIs. Sales conversion rate: shows how well your sales team is in converting prospects into new customers.

Founder 71