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Helping Startups Understand Salespeople & the Sales Culture

Both Sides of the Table

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.

Sales 382
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Startup Sales – Why Hiring Seasoned Reps May Not Work

Both Sides of the Table

A while back I wrote a bunch of posts on Sales & Marketing and have been meaning to get back to that theme for a while. Even if you don’t have “direct&# sales I would tell you that “everything is a sale&# including fund raising, hiring, getting press and doing business development. You learn by asking.

Sales 346
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Improving Sales: The Excuse Departement is Closed

Both Sides of the Table

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.

Sales 316
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People Management: Startup Teams Should Dip but not Skip

Both Sides of the Table

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. You’re also learning directly about the skills of your sales staff by observing them in action.

Startup 308
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One of the Biggest Mistakes Enterprise Startups Make

Both Sides of the Table

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.

Startup 403
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How to Acquire Customers by Marketing “Heroes”

Both Sides of the Table

It influenced a generation of tech marketers. The book popularized the technology adoption lifecycle curve that originally came out of Iowa State University shown below. So the early part of a technology company is about finding your hard core group of early adopters and making them passionate about your products.

Marketing 294
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Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More?

Both Sides of the Table

Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves.” It might be for technical reasons or it might be for customer adoption reasons. That leverage technology or drive change. In revenue terms our first two years of sales were $2.1

Startup 390