Business development
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This is the first in a series on building a global company from the ground up. In browsing Quora recently, I was struck, but not surprised, by how many people sought advice on how to expand a startup internationally. Not surprised, because for many young companies international expansion ranks with M&A as something that’s easy in concept, but difficult to execute well. (See the many Quora responses, including my own, to Why do companies often fail at international expansion? ) I grew up in Ireland.
Building the Global Startup // John O'Farrell
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. So I hope these posts will be useful to all and not just those who need road warriors. If you’re interested in recruiting sales people, I wrote on the topic of startup sales people: who to hire & when – understanding the roles of Journeymen, Mavericks & Superstars.
Startup Sales – Why Hiring Seasoned Sales Reps May Not Work | Both Sides of the Table
The Startup Pyramid
Every six months I rethink the optimal startup go to market approach based on new insights gained at recent startups. Lately I’ve been using a pyramid to represent the process I’m using. Startups require a solid foundation of product/market fit before progressing up the pyramid and scaling the business.
Seth's Blog: Understanding business development
Business Development is a mysterious title for a little discussed function or department in most larger companies.This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice .
3 Sales Tips for Startups – Creating a Burning Platform
SaaS selling lessons from a novice | Startable - Healy Jones' &
December 12th, 2009 by Healy Jones Vivek Wadhwa had an interesting post today on selling in TechCrunch . I’m learning some serious lessons on selling now that I’m the head of marketing at Pixily – although I am very much still a novice sales manager! I reserve the right to be completely wrong/change my mind on any or all of these points
Saturday night I arrived late at our house having taken our older son to his first tennis “tournament.” Everyone else was already asleep and the house was dark. I tried to turn some lights on, only to discover that we had a power outage! After some back and forth, I finally managed to get Con Edison to dispatch someone.
Customer Service Matters for Mission Critical - Continuations
Milestones to Startup Success
Update added to end of post When your startup accepts outside money (such as venture capital), you are obligated to focus on maximizing long-term shareholder value. For most startups this is directly based on your ability to grow (customers, revenue and eventually profit).
When the cost of customer acquisition exceeds your ability to mo
David Skok , serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners: “In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup failure. However in all these articles, I have not seen any discussion about what I believe is the second biggest cause of startup failure: the cost of acquiring customers turns out to be higher than expected, and exceeds the ability to monetize those customers… [emphasis added] “A quick look around all the B2C startups shows that, although viral growth is often hoped for, in reality it is extremely rare.Sean Ellis recently sat down with us and explained how to bring products to market. You should listen to this interview for ideas on how to get to product/market fit, how to measure fit, and how to survey your users so you can improve fit. If you don’t know Sean from his blog or tweets , he lead marketing from launch to IPO filing at LogMeIn and Uproar. His firm, 12in6 , then worked with Xobni (Khosla), Dropbox (Sequoia), Eventbrite (Sequoia), Grockit (Benchmark)… the list goes on. 12in6 “helps startups unlock their full growth potential by focusing on the core value perceived by their most passionate users.”
How to bring a product to market / A very rare interview with Se
Most technology startups seem to be founded by three types of people: product managers, engineers or biz dev types (MBAs and the like). Very few of them are started, in my experience, by sales people and very few early stage companies really understand sales. That’s why I started the Sales & Marketing Series and at one point I will do a bunch of posts on the sales methodology we developed at my first company called PUCCKA. Today I want to talk about sales executives and a model for thinking about them. If you ever have to interview, hire, judge the performance of, decide whether to promote, assign clients/regions to them or have to decide whether to fire sales people, I think having a framework for thinking about them is helpful. Here’s mine: