Early stage startups often look at a category and see it as a daunting marketing and sales exercise requiring massively expensive (dilutive) infrastructure. They look at a B2B market, with the Fortune 1000 as prospects and think they need outside venture capital to build massive marketing machines. They embrace dilution as the only way to […]
You Can Disrupt Any Industry if You Know 532 People Read More »
The first thing we usually tell a friend launching a startup is to stop writing checks. Just stop. Sequencing means building a strategy toward only one goal—obtaining those first 5 paying customers. So what needs to be done to get that accomplished? There are some basics all raw startups need done—one is protect your IP.
Sequencing—Doing What Matters—Skipping What Don’t Read More »
A B2B technology startup with an innovative, differentiated technology should sell to the early adopter, the innovator—period. Often, however, these startups get marketing and sales advice from potential investors or the brain dead management types who inhabit large technology companies and thus think they know something about how a new technology finds its market. Invariably
Raw, early stage startups often watch way too much TV and see shows like Startup.com and others where there is some kind of achievement when they get a “funding event.” Well, what they do not see is it is more accurately called a dilution event. VCs are not the friends of the raw startup.
There is a time in every industry where it goes through a major change so fundamental it rocks decades of its past. This is happening now in the on line ad business as it creates more and more interrupt ads on your phone and computer. You cannot read an on line article today without
Hiring for a startup is always a challenge because the people you may think you want might just be too timid to take the risk of a startup. Actually, that is a good thing—it eliminates people you are going to have to pamper and manage—neither of which you can afford. In about every position, you
A raw startup has a very different goal than a mature or semi-mature tech company. The raw startup must find that early adopter/innovator who can launch it as both a customer and non-equity funding source. Often, the raw startup gets hooked up with the brain-dead marketing types who try to help it “establish a brand”
Marketing Without An Edge—Disaster for the Raw Startup Read More »
Every day we see more over-funded startups, those with millions of VC dollars, hiring brain dead sales managers who do nothing but measure the number of emails or the number of weekly sales calls a rep makes. Metrics-driven-management is stupid incarnate. A good enterprise rep will manage a territory as an organic whole. He or
Territory Management Beats Useless Metrics Every Time Read More »
There are too many technologies chasing too few real opportunities and the result is a dramatically lower intelligence in enterprise sales campaigns. This results in a preponderance of metrics driven activity, for the sake of activity, in over-funded VC invested firms. If a sales manager has reps who are lower skilled, one could train them
Many raw startups get some VC funding and immediately apply steroids to their sales efforts. They hire those 3-5 former ERP reps who have no business even visiting a startup, and off they go. These reps usually fail unless the product sells itself. In those cases, they will look like heroes, but that is the
A Raw Startup Needs a Franchise Player, Not a Sales Force Read More »