Jay Valentine, Author at Jay Valentine

Enterprise Sales Reps Are Worse Than Useless for the Raw Startup—NEVER Hire One!

There is something called the philosophical fallacy of composition. It goes something like this: the hotel is large, therefore it must have large rooms. This obvious fallacy has an enterprise sales rep equivalent: the sales rep worked for IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, VMware, EMC and did really well, so they must be great tech sales […]

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The Innovator Is Your First Customer and They Are Looking For You

Lone Wolf Sales, Startup Strategy

A raw tech startup should not be selling to any market. Any “market” is too big and the sales cycles are long, painful and often fruitless. The raw startup sells only to the early adopter, the innovator. The raw startup has built some sort of differentiated offering that solves a problem or opens a door to new opportunity. In

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Most Technology Marketing is Wasted: Save Your Money

Lone Wolf Sales, Startup Strategy

Raw startups, especially if the founders are technically inclined, have this notion they need to pay for expensive marketing. Probably this comes from them knowing nothing about marketing thus feeling personally insufficient in this area. Perhaps this makes them want to overcompensate. Marketing for a raw startup is the equivalent of taking your money, leaving

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Find The Customer Looking For You

Lone Wolf Sales, Startup Strategy

No matter who you are, no matter what your technology, you are looking for the innovator and early adopter. You are looking for the customer looking for you. Let that sink in. Who would be looking for you if nobody knows who you are? Finding the customer who does not know you, but has a

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Why Different Is Better Than Better

Lone Wolf Sales, Senseless Marketing

One of the most fun marketing challenges today, perhaps the greatest for a raw startup is that customers are overwhelmed with marketing messages from vendor marketing machines. There are just too many vendors chasing too few buyers. The raw startup cannot hope to compete with this kind of marketing machinery. And there, is where the

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Why Big Company Enterprise Reps Fail At Startups

Lone Wolf Sales, Startup Strategy

A raw startup, one that may have zero customers or just a few, is not a small HP or IBM. It is a fundamentally different entity with dynamics that are completely foreign to people who have thrived in high infrastructure environments. It is now almost a truism that large company sales and marketing people fail

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The Single Most Important Question For A Startup

Lone Wolf Sales, Startup Strategy

The single most important question in startup sales is this: is getting in front of the right person 5% of the sales process or 90%. No other question matters more, for the most subtle of reasons, because this one question, almost never verbalized, drives the entire behavior of the sales and sometimes, marketing organization. It

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Marketing Driven Sales or Sales Driven Marketing?

Lone Wolf Sales, Thoughtful Marketing

Bet you never heard those terms before. But in a tech startup, they can make all the difference in the world. Like the difference between being an employee at your over-diluted enterprise or achieving material wealth to give to animal shelters. What is the difference? Well let’s take a story–currency for the easiest communication of

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Don’t Write Stuff Nobody Ever Reads!

Lone Wolf Sales, Thoughtful Marketing

To sell stuff, you have to be able to explain it–fast. Thus the need for marketing collateral and an OK web site and some basic communication. Contingency Sales believes the customer never reads 90% or more of all the stuff marketing departments create. Or if it is read, it has little or no impact. This

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Knowledge Nibblers Lead You To Customers

Lone Wolf Sales, Sell Smartly

Years ago, I was brought on to launch a territory in the Texas area for a struggling logistics software company. They had never sold a single deal in the region, had gone through 3-4 reps over 6 years and had nothing to show for it. Their product was a highly specialized offering and was vital

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Author name: Jay Valentine