There is a very prominent west coast tech company, selling a social media management system, making the classic case for sales monkeys vs. creative, innovative sales talent. And it is indeed instructive to watch. What is a sales monkey in the enterprise software space? Sales monkeys represent a well-known “sales model” delivered by transaction Sales […]
Confrontational marketing is a streetfighting mindset, used for tech startups, to harness hidden market dynamics and get a tech product to market fast with minimal or zero equity dilution. Hidden market dynamics? Well, yes. Prospects, the ones you need to sell, absolutely loathe current marketing practices. They know when they download a “white paper,” which
Confrontational Marketing—Taking The Market Away From The Bland Read More »
Last week, the CEO of one of the hottest security startups in Texas visited and wanted to know how to set up his early market sales force. His product, while still in stealth mode, has won three Fortune 50 logos and one of the 3 largest telcos—as their means of cyber security for their enterprise-wide mobile
Why A Sales Quota Should be $5 Million Per Year—And Zero Base Salary Read More »
Enterprise sales personalities are typically broken down into “hunters” or “farmers.” These wildly inaccurate depictions can be broken into far more descriptive terms—those that give real meaning to the category. A hunter is usually someone who finds new business and the farmer works accounts where a product is already installed. VMware people are farmers, startup people are
A technology startup needs about everything. Sales, marketing, patent protection, a benefits program to attract talent and not drive it into insolvency and a hundred more things. So if you need everything, where does one start? And where is building a Business Development program on that list? Business development means finding partners who need
Business Development—Critical or Window Dressing? Read More »
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
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