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Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves. I boil it down to this: sales people are sales people. Here are mine.
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.
Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves. We focused together on improving our sales methodology, our training and our comp plans.
This is part of my ongoing Sales & Marketing Series. In the first part of this post I talked about how sales in a startup is often evangelical , requires as consultative sale and needs constant adjustments based on customer feedback. We had 4 or 5 sales reps that had been around since the early days.
To bring that ability to name your own price on products, Los Angeles-based Greentoe (www.greentoe.com) recently launched, allowing consumers to name their own price to retailers of everything from electronics to baby products. Joe Marrapodi: GreenToe is a name your own price marketplace for products. What is Greentoe?
There can be nothing more important in your business planning that selecting the proper pricing niche, making your story clear using that niche, and the defending your position against the competition. There are exceptions, based upon cost of sales. Assume that you are not an Internet retailer with many competing products to sell.
Professional investors laugh when they hear an entrepreneur state, “We have no competition.” Doing nothing is the main competitor for most products and services, whether a compelling new idea or a seasoned product long proven to be effective. That statement has killed more investment deals than almost any other.
Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. If you hire truly talented people you end up definitionally with a lot of competitive peers who will inevitably jockey for resources and control. Do you hire more sales people?
Jeff (also an HBS alum) co-teaches the LTV course with Professor Eisenmann about a student of theirs who had written a blog post about sales taking on some of my previous assertions. That student is Erin McCann who formerly worked in sales at Google, so she has some ground to stand on in her assertions.
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?”
You need to first create a compelling product. Compelling in the sense that you solve a real problem a target group of potential customers has with a product that is significantly better than the alternatives on that market. You need product / market fit. Product / market fit is everything. ” True.
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. Is it one product line or multiple? ” The Details.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the key elements of a competitive advantage for your business have changed as businesses move online, and your domain is instantly global. As a business advisor, I have to recommend even to established companies that they review and revamp their competitive strategy now, even if it appears to be working today.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced Energica to hit the brakes on production of its battery powered machines that can reach top speeds of 168 mph. general manager ( Stefano Benatti ) — filled more orders in the first two months of 2020 than all its sales for 2019, according to Cevolini.
Does your business have a visible positive strategy, or do your customers and employees still see your primary focus as closing more sales and killing competitors? When customers are excited, your team becomes more engaged and productive. Competitive and leadership leverage. Customer and employee value propositions.
Crowdfunder , the Los Angeles startup led by CHance Barnett, has launched another crowdfunding event aimed at the local industry, saying Wednesday that it has launched CROWDIMPACT LA , a pitching competition which will award $20,000 in a top prize to a winning social enterprise company. Deadline for entry is March 28th. READ MORE>>.
An entrepreneur pitches using a deck with no slide for competition. We have no competition.”. It could be that a larger competitor has met with its customers, promising to extend its product line into this very niche. We investors see this all the time. When asked (as we always do,) the response is “This is new.
You can always tell during this discussion whether the entrepreneur has logged into their products, talked to their customers, read all the news stories and gotten all of the back channel info on the competition. You can tell if they have a deep-seated competitive spirit. Can’t go a mile deep on competition?
The path I went down after a few years was to hire more process driven people and devolved more daily operational ownership to people running individual functions such as product management, sales management, finance, etc. One of the most obvious places where you see this is in sales & marketing. Ditto the CFO.
For the rest of us, we need a business plan, as well as a product plan. Some of you may be convinced that your product specification communicates the product message even better than a business plan, so why be redundant? Professional investors and even customers invest in people, rather than just a product.
These are so succinct, so well defined, so precise that everyone in sales and everyone involved in marketing must be able to answer these three questions without pause, and convincingly. It would pay you to work over this set of questions in a special session with sales, marketing and senior management in the room at once.
These are so succinct, so well defined, so precise that everyone in sales and everyone involved in marketing must be able to answer these three questions without pause, and convincingly. It would pay you to work over this set of questions in a special session with sales, marketing and senior management in the room at once.
Most technical entrepreneurs focus hard on building an innovative product, but forget that an elegant solution doesn’t automatically translate into a successful business. Defining the right business model requires the same diligence as designing the right product, but the approach and skills required are different.
The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do. Rinse & repeat. It takes options off of the table. You have a hunch.
It is the bane of every startups existence because it takes up so much time, it is so competitive to sign people and it feels like unproductive time because it’s not moving the ball forward on product, engineering, sales, marketing, biz dev, fund raising. Recruiting. In fact, it’s worse than that.
Every one of you business owners I know periodically introduces new products and services to sustain growth, fight off competitors, or take advantage of new technologies. The cost of any new product these days must include education and rollout marketing, perhaps equal or greater than the development costs.
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.
If it takes eighteen months to get a new product out the door and into the market, and if a product’s gross margin is ten dollars but the corporate overhead is a million a month, it will take the sale of 67,000 more units to break even than if it were to take only six months to market.
I have also spent the past year talking publicly about how I didn’t believe that their were strong monetization opportunities in “group messaging&# and that people offering that product would need to find other ways to monetize. I said it was a great product that was well marketed.&#. It lingered. Congrats, GroupMe team.
In this context, even “satisfied” is only a “meets-minimum,” and does not put you ahead of your competition. With pervasive access to social media, customers no longer differentiate poor product repair and replacement from a poor shopping experience or customer usage satisfaction. This results in more profits and growth for you.
Many people are too cautious in sales processes and as a result when they present their solutions they end up sounding milquetoast and undifferentiated from anybody else in the market. I recently wrote about the three rules of sales. Assume competition and assume within the buying organization you have enemies. Why Buy Me?
Linktree leads the space, securing a recent $45 million Series B raise to build out e-commerce features, but Beacons boasts competitive creator monetization tools with just a $6 million seed round in May. Snipfeed is free to set up, but if you make sales, the company takes 15% — this percentage is inclusive of any transaction fees.
Most technical entrepreneurs I know demand the discipline of a product specification or plan, and then assume that their great product will drive a great business. Serious investors, on the other hand, look for a professional business plan or summary first, and hardly ever look at the product plan.
It’s been more than 5 years and I still think about that sales campaign and get pissed off at how much I took for granted. In business competitions the clock has rarely expired when you’re told you’ve lost – even in government tenders – key text below. In every sales campaign of any substance (e.g.
The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them. In sales there are also three rules: Qualify, qualify, qualify.
These are your candidates, because they are companies already absorbing much or all the marketing expense necessary to make sales of your invention. They will be more willing to pay a royalty fee if your product gets them to market earlier or is protected by patent to create a barrier to their competition. So, there you have it.
I’m writing this post as part of my series with Advice on Raising Venture Capital but will file it under Sales Tips as well since it applies equally to both scenarios. Or on a sales campaign you’ve finally gotten your project sponsor to take you to the “executive committee&# where decisions are made and budgets are agreed.
I was recently talking with a startup company who wanted me to try their product. I’m a big believer in product stability & performance before adding too many features. If you have multiple versions of your product, how many are web vs. mobile? 10% of our revenue is coming from direct sales of our banner inventory.
I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. They’re competitive. I keep my competitors as friends and those that didn’t choose me or my product as friends, too. I later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales.
If it takes eighteen months to get a new product out the door and into the market, and if a product’s gross margin is ten dollars but the corporate overhead is a million a month, it will take the sale of 67,000 more units to break even than if it were to take only six months to market. A critical question for you.
I believe that it is part of the DNA of an entrepreneur – being so competitive that you’re practically sick when you lose. They’re competitive. I keep my competitors as friends and those that didn’t choose me or my product as friends, too. I later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales.
The wrong person in a job causes all below or above that person in the production system, that depend upon that person, to operate at a reduced rate or quality of output. The second “P” is for productivity. How to stage and tune a production line for maximum quality and output? The first “P” stands for people.
Do you still need marketing costs when there is no-one out there buying new product? Are you salespeople making few if any sales because your prospective customers are distracted by their own problems? Have you squeezed every dime of cost that is non-core related from your business?
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