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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.
In my first enterprise software company we developed a methodology for sales that we called PUCCKA. Having a methodology instead of just going on random sales visits helped force a bit of rigor and honesty amongst team members about how well or not we thought we were doing. The best sales meetings are discussions.
One of the questions I’m most often asked by CEOs is how to hire sales people. I’ve also written extensively on sales and on which sales execs to hire and how to think about the different kinds of sales leaders. Clearly in an enterprise customer this is unlikely. Call high, and get passed down or; B.
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?”.
Or read the quick, informative summary below the image! He is very hands-on and helpful – especially for any company looking into customer acquisition. Here’s a summary of our interview. o Everything is for sale but it’s the price that moves the timing. He told them it was now or never. we both love Jason).
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. Specifically, 1.
Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary.
Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most sophisticated investors ignore them, focusing their attention on an entrepreneur's pitch and presentation materials, financial forecast and executive summary. As such, the primary goal of your executive summary is to open the door to an in-person meeting. Entrepreneurs routinely seek my advice regarding their executive summaries.
Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Bloom’s classic book, “ The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers.” This is a key moment where your customer acquisition costs go way down, and your profits go way up.
Early in a services business there is usually no profits as the company reinvests in hiring people to grow, but by $20 million in sales the company should at least be pulling in 10% profits (if not more) depending on how much is reinvested. Often in this strategy you end up giving them the product for free and bill them only services fees.
This is part of my ongoing series on startup advice but also filed under my sales & marketing posts. The only problem is that you can’t afford all of these expensive direct sales reps to go and sell it. Sort of amortizing the costs of their sales reps over more products. You decide to go out and hire a sales rep.
Paige is a gifted communicator and my summary does not do him justice. He offers a number of worthwhile tips and tricks that I was not able to capture in the textual summary, so the 14-minute audio file is well worth your time. What follows is a summary which paraphrases Paige’s responses. Click here to listen to the Audio File.
Contrary to popular opinion, viral marketing has not eliminated the need for old-fashioned lead generation to bring customers to a startup. Here is my summary of the seven most successful lead-generation vehicles he and I still recommend today, despite the popularity of viral marketing: Search-engine marketing. Display advertising.
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. In summary.
This post is about how to work with your largest customers when you’re an early-stage software company and about how you can increase your margins by selling your roadmap. For starters as a young enterprise software company you need to think about the customer segments you serve. One way of slicing customer segments is by size.
Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Bloom’s classic book, “ The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers.” This is a key moment where your customer acquisition costs go way down, and your profits go way up.
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. The first of question is about qualifying your potential customers aka leads. Why Buy Me?
Almost always the CEO plus members of his or her management team including tech, marketing, sales and/or product. I know that back in your office you will disagree with each other – but never in front of investors, customers, partners, etc. This is as true for a VC meeting as it is for a sales meeting or any group setting.
Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Bloom’s recent book, “ The New Experts: Win Today''s Newly Empowered Customers.” This is a key moment where your customer acquisition costs go way down, and your profits go way up.
Detailed roadmap of features you plan to build Detailed customer information Salary information Any other information you wouldn’t want seen or know by your competitors or a larger audience In short, there is nothing in your deck that should give you pause or make you feel like you can’t just send the damn file to somebody.
Entrepreneurs always work hard to create an innovative product or service, but often count on standard seller marketing for sales. But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. The best way to do this is with real customer interviews. Don’t start from how you want to sell.
Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary.
Your historical trading information including financials and a “customer file” which shows the history of your transactions so that investors can run “cohort” analyses Customer reference, personal references, key team members, compensation, cap table, stock option plan, etc. and then asking to take a brochure home with you.
Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Bloom’s classic book, “ The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers.” This is a key moment where your customer acquisition costs go way down, and your profits go way up.
When entrepreneurs introduce new products to the market, their passion and conviction often leads them to assume that every potential customer will see the immediate need and value, and will quickly adopt the solution. The more revolutionary the solution, the more important it is to educate customers on a solution’s existence and value.
There’s a healthy balance between allowing a design team to dream up functional requirements, talk with customers, analyze competitors and for technical projects – research the latest cool-kid tools to play with. In summary – I have been involved with software development for 25 years. CEOs are time-driven creatures.
I wrote the summary notes in this blog post. I talked about this in the TWiVC video but I didn’t do a good enough job of writing it up in the summary notes in the post. And when you finish the demo you can bring in the other important components such as competition, team, customer acquisition strategy, etc. Mobile app?
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. Simply put – I’d be in search of a VC who had an intuitive sense of my product, my customers, my organizational issues, my competitors, etc. Connections? EQ and Team Leadership?
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.
It’s best to think of your VC partnership as a customer. Just as with sales, if you have a strong champion as a partner you will likely be OK. In summary, VC partnerships are like any organization. Doing so would expose you to unnecessary risk that you don’t control.
To be clear, I define a product specification as the technical definition of your product, to be used for development and testing purposes, with a quick business summary for context. Use non-fuzzy terms to quantify customer value. Provide specifics on the customer business model. They want to see revenue to share in the return.
The promised to follow up with: calls, using your product, talking to customers or “noodle on things.&# Will they? This is not unlike a major biz dev deal you’re trying to sign or a big sales campaign into the VP of a major company. I like to tell entrepreneurs to treat it like a sales campaign.
It also starts with a good summary of the intangibles, summarized as the five rules of relevancy, by Mark Zawacki: A startup needs to be relevant and stay relevant. This is not the total opportunity out there, and not the total target market, but the subset of customers who have and will spend the money you need to cure their pain.
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.
For extroverted people I recommend that entrepreneurs have an “executive summary&# slide up front that cuts to the chase. If it’s preparing for a sales, biz dev or other type of meeting it’s so easy these days using LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter to find out who knows that individual. Drain in quickly.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a long post, so I put an executive summary here if you want to get the point without reading all the detail. If you plan to read the post you can skip the summary if you want. Underpinning it all I wrote: sales, asset management, analytics & talent management. So I thought I would.
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.
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?
Serious investors, on the other hand, look for a professional business plan or summary first, and hardly ever look at the product plan. These requirements must be based on market analysis, expert input, and existing customer feedback. Executives, marketing & sales, financial projections, and funding.
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