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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 had never had any sales training so everything we did for the first couple of years was instinctual. I boil it down to this: sales people are sales people.
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.
I recently wrote about my views that startups rounds should be priced. Fred, who also wrote his views about convertible debt (significantly more succinctly than I) believes that the price of a single round should be the same for everybody. The trouble is, nobody has an incentive to agree to write the first check. why buy me?
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.
When convertible debt first started being introduced as a “faster, cheaper way to get startups funded” they didn’t have pricing built into them. ” And some seed stage investors told me, “I prefer not to fight over price now. They’ll get priced soon enough by a VC.” Enter “the cap.”
2 preamble issues having read the comments on TC today: 1: I know that the prices of startup companies is much great in Silicon Valley than in smaller towns / less tech focused areas in the US and the US prices higher than many foreign markets. You can be pissed off, but I don’t set prices. That’s stupid.
I’m over-paying for every check I write into the VC ecosystem and valuations are being pushed up to absurd levels and many of these valuations and companies won’t hold in the long term. If you’re going to play in the big leagues you need to be writing checks from a $700 million?—?$1 Are we in a bubble?” By definition?—?I’m of the fund.
I find it amusing when a journalist writes an article about a prominent startup (either privately held or preparing for an IPO) and decries that, “They’re not even profitable!” The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.
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.
Preparing for the game… If you have been following our recent insights, you’ll be up to speed knowing that professional investors negotiate tough terms, from provisions of control over asset acquisition, eventual sale of the company, future investments, forced co-sale when others attempt to sell their shares and more.
As a result I’ve really resisted writing about negotiations. Sometimes I even say, “I will change price / terms if I need to. If I forget to write, “Don’t Negotiation Piecemeal” after that then remind me. Your job is to offer a price (or terms) and walk. submitting term sheets.
I started by writing 3-4 times / week. I didn’t have any grand ambitions other than to write, share ideas and try to build awareness of who I am through my thoughts. Just like a sales person at the end of a quarter. I still have to get sales, operations, finance, HR & corp dev right to win. I did that?
I pointed to several Economist articles I had read that mapped historical prices of real estate for 400 years and how on average property values grow at no more 1.5% above inflation yet in many markets in the US & Europe prices were rising at 10-25% per year. And it’s driving up prices beyond their inherent value.
If you have been following our recent insights, you’ll be up to speed knowing that professional investors negotiate tough terms, from provisions of control over asset acquisition, eventual sale of the company, future investments, forced co-sale when others attempt to sell their shares and more.
I’m not sure I really even need to write this at length because Nivi absolutely nailed the topic in his article “ The Option Pool Shuffle.&#. The price / share is actually $2.40 (not $3.00), which is $3,000,000 pre-money / 1,250,000 shares (because you had to create the 250,000 share options).
…” I’ll write soon on my views of why I believe Instagram took off as a social network and what I think comes next. But if you raise the money at the big price (or any price) please go in with the expectation that you are going to build a large, long-term business. to justify a “strategic” price.
When you first start your career as an investor (or when you first start writing angel checks) your main obsession is “getting into great deals.” the sale of the company for $1 billion. That’s return, not exit price of the company. You’re thinking about one bullet at a time. It was ~30 days from bankruptcy.
The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 senior 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 6 months. COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.
An additional way the government could juice the auto industry — and specifically electric vehicles — is by providing point of sale rebates for all vehicles that could be issued through car dealerships, according to the proposal. Light-duty charging infrastructure occupies another $10 billion of the suggested stimulus measures.
Write things down. 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. We helped the write out their requirements for a system. I later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales. Be gracious.
Write things down. 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. We helped the write out their requirements for a system. I later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales. Be gracious.
I will write more about this in the next 2 weeks. But that doesn’t mean that people are paying rational prices as investors based on intrinsic value. Rational people can disagree and some may argue that today’s prices are rational and under-pinned by economic drivers. I believe that. That’s fine.
1) Expect Independent Channel Sales Reps To Perform Missionary Sales. Rationale: I cannot afford to hire a direct sales force. Fallacy: Third-party, OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing) representatives succeed once the sales process is defined, proven and documented. 5) Allow Partners To Write Your Agreements.
Here is my edited summary of their ten principles, which I like and may convince you that you don’t need a business plan at all, or at the very least will help you write a better one later: A new venture is a means, not an end. These include financial management, marketing and sales, and the appropriate production ability.
I’m sitting at my computer now at 9.00pm writing this – which is an hour earlier than I normally write (there are about 8 women at my kitchen table having a book club (aka excuse to drink wine & gossip so I’m locked in another room writing. Should entrepreneurs have convertible debt or priced equity?
I am chairman of a company that, as I write this, is twelve years old and has not yet taken a dollar of outside investment. Grant writing takes skill and immense amounts of time. First, here’s a link to my recent TEDx talk, “Smiling at success; laughing at failure.”
We had the final terms of our agreement fairly well boxed in within a range of about 5-7% on price and within 30 days on move-in date. I obviously preferred the lowest price and I wanted the latest move-in date. She told me, “start with the price you want but the move in date he wants.&#. I told my agent. She way annoyed.
If no financing happened then this “note&# may not be converted and thus would be senior to the equity of the company in the case of a bankruptcy or asset sale. They also trust VC’s to determine the right price to pay for the company securities that they buy. Maybe the market views this as not worth the price you paid?
Will Price , October 11, 2010 Georgians Should Vote No - Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby , October 28, 2010 Free Software for Managing a Lean Startup - Platforms and Networks , January 17, 2010 Purpose Driven Life - Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur , July 26, 2010 Two Decade-Defining Acquisitions?
Example: Work Experience can be broken down into: has managed a team, has led direct sales efforts, has worked for a startup before, etc. If it’s a job that requires writing you could ask them to submit a sample in advance. What was your original price quote? What was your final price? One other thing that I do.
When to get a lawyer - If you plan to be a venture or angel backed technology company (what I mostly write about) the best time to start meeting and getting to know lawyers is long before you ever start your company. I write about some of the lessons in my post on Startup Mistakes. Consider it a sales & marketing expense for them.
The effort to write a grant request is not trivial. Email readers, continue here…] Grant writing takes skill and immense amounts of time. Often, grants require that you partner with other organizations to deliver the results or measure the effectiveness of your special project. Other sources of grants.
It has historically been the case that VCs would rather fund the promise of 100x in a company with almost no revenue than the reality of a company growing at 50% but doing $20+ million in sales. Our goal is to produce a $10 billion+ winner and remain the market leader in this SaaS category of AI in Sales & Marketing.
Gross margin (GM) is the amount of profit you make per sale of your product or service taking into account your total costs of selling that product or service. If you have a very low gross margin (10-30%) it can be very hard to build a large, scalable business because you need to make a lot of sales to cover your operating costs.
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.
Three reasons: There is a relative valuation between the price a VC pays and their expectations of what it will exit for in an IPO or trade sale. Also, it’s harder to pay a $30 million pre-money value on an unproved company when you see public companies with $100 million in sales trading for less than $20 million.
The other thing that struck me, is because it is only men, they tend to write with lots of testosterone. Their writing style, even for a mainstream publication, is they write with lots of testosterone. They write about the transmission, the brakes, and the suspension, and that creeps into all of their evaluations of cars.
He writes with a great perspective and is well worth reading. Do you really think Porter’s Five Forces is going to help you figure out what feature set to launch or how to price your product? I do find it strange that the most valuable skill for any employee in any company isn’t emphasized AT ALL in my experience: sales.
There’s one attribute (coming soon) that I need to have in order to write a check but I don’t believe is vital for success. I’ll publish the final post in this series this week and then move on to my next series – sales & marketing. I’ll be covering my PUCCKA sales methodology.
The process for retailers and brands to liquidate excess inventory hasn’t changed very much, if at all, and while some retailers were able to build operational infrastructure to service the off-price channels, it continues to be a constant pain point. She went on to write, “Dee and Josh are the exact right team to tackle it.
Should I write off my $2.5 And if your ultimate strategy is a small sale of the business that recovers investment and puts some cash in your pocket – having more time to make this work makes a lot of sense. But know that unless we do gain the traction we hope for it may make it harder to price the next round as a big up round.
This insight follows closely the conclusions from the previous declaration, that professional investors negotiate tough terms, from provisions of control over asset acquisition, eventual sale of the company, future investments, forced co-sale when others attempt to sell their shares and more.
On the product side, once you have a proven product and business model, all you need is money to build inventory, and a sales and marketing operation to drive the business. For example, both need to provide exemplary customer service, build customer loyalty, and provide real value for a competitive price. Capture your “secret sauce.”
In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. He did it yesterday, “Mark, I’m going to write a blog post following on from your VC’s aren’t dumb. ” I know it sounds obvious.
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