Building the Global Startup // John O'Farrell. 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 believe you can maximize your chances of getting international right the first time around if you: Lay the groundwork from the moment you start your companyLaunch internationally with an owner, a strategy and a planApply some key principles and best practices once you’ve launched I’ll devote a blog post to each of these topics, starting today with the first one.
I grew up in Ireland. On the other hand, that huge starting advantage can become a liability when it comes time to expand internationally. Protect your IP. Startup Sales – Why Hiring Seasoned Sales Reps May Not Work. 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.
Evangelical sales – Understanding startup sales people and process. One of the biggest mistakes I see early-stage startups making is hiring “seasoned” sales professionals or hiring people too senior, too early. 1. I see way too many startup founders who don’t have experience in selling and probably don’t feel that comfortable going to customers and asking for orders. Also, this goes equally for business development. 2. It is a consultative sale. 3. 4. 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. Achieving Product/Market Fit Product/market fit has always been a fairly abstract concept making it difficult to know when you have actually achieved it. Yet many entrepreneurs have highlighted the importance of creating a product that resonates with the target market: I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product/market fit. You should measure your product/market fit as soon as possible because it will significantly impact how you operate your startup.
Race up the Pyramid Once you have achieved product/market fit, it’s time to accelerate through the next steps of the pyramid and then begin scaling your business. Understanding business development. Business Development is a mysterious title for a little discussed function or department in most larger companies. It's also a great way for an entrepreneur or small business to have fun, create value and make money. Good business development allows businesses to profit by doing something that is tangential to their core mission. Sometimes the profit is so good, it becomes part of their core mission, other times it supports the brand and sometimes it just makes money. And often it's a little guy who can be flexible enough to make things happen.
Examples: Starbucks licenses their name to a maker of ice cream and generates millions in royalties.A rack jobber like Handleman does a deal with a mass marketer like K Mart. You don't see business development from the outside, particularly all the potential deals that fail along the way. The thing that makes business development fascinating is that the best deals have never been done before. Process first, ideas second. 3 Sales Tips for Startups – Creating a Burning Platform.
3 Sales Tips for Startups — Creating a Burning Platform This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. Many entrepreneurs who start technology companies are product people, technologists or savvy business people who worked previously for a larger company. Most start-up entrepreneurs have little or no sales experience. I know I didn’t. But through nearly a decade of startups I learned that sales comes down to three essential elements: 1.
Even businesses that attempt to sign up customers directly on a website need to answer this question for people albeit programmatically and through good website copy. 2. Many entrepreneurs think naively that it’s not good to have competitors. I’ll cover “Why Buy Mine” in a later post, but my quick answer is that referenceability is the most critical tool to solving this problem. 3. Great sales leaders know that you can only sell effectively when your sales cycle matches the customers buying cycle. Initially the leads need to be qualified. Add Another Zero. Talking about scale and growth is hard. Many people talk in percentages in pre-determined time periods (e.g. let’s grow revenue 100% next year). I find this to be relatively useless. Instead, I like to challenge people to think on a bigger scale over a variable time period.
My favorite line of late is “add another zero – you pick the metric and the time frame.” I used to call this “increase X by an order of magnitude” until I realized that lots of business people don’t actually know that an increase in an order of magnitude is equal to multiplying by 10. While it’s silly, there’s no ambiguity when you talk about “adding a zero to the end of a number.” For example, I’m an investor in a company that is growing its user base as they had planned.
In another case, I’m an investor in a company that had a great year on all accounts. This question can apply to any metric. The variable time period is a key aspect of this. SaaS selling lessons from a novice | Startable - Healy Jones' & Customer Service Matters for Mission Critical - Continuations. Customer Service Matters for Mission Critical 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. A ConEd guy showed up at 1am and determined that the main circuit breaker in our house had somehow decided to stop working for no apparent reason. That’s where the fun really started. Never heard back from our regular electrician, who no longer is that (I left a follow up voice mail). This little episode really brought home (so to speak) how important responsive service is for anything that’s mission critical. 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).
Most entrepreneurs understand the importance of growth; the common mistake is trying to force growth prematurely. This is frustrating, expensive and unsustainable – killing many startups with otherwise strong potential. Most successful entrepreneurs have a good balance of execution intuition and luck. Several startups later I have a much better understanding of the key milestones needed for a startup to reach its full growth potential. Day 1: Validate Need for Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Before any coding begins it is important to validate that the problem/need you are trying to solve actually exists, is worth solving, and the proposed minimum feature set solves it.
Where’s the Love? Metrics Start Charging Driving Growth. When the cost of customer acquisition exceeds your ability to mo. How to bring a product to market / A very rare interview with Se. Nivi · December 14th, 2009 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.” This is the first time Sean has done an interview on the record. SlideShare: How to bring a product to market Audio: Interview with chapters (for iPod, iPhone, iTunes) Audio: Interview without chapters (MP3, works anywhere) Transcript with highlights: Below This inteview is free — thanks to KISSmetrics Prerequisites Outline Transcript Nivi: Right. Sean: Yeah. Journeymen, Mavericks & Superstars: Understanding Salespeople at. 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: Let me start with a few biases. First, I think that most great sales people have an innate skill that can’t be taught. 1. But doesn’t Journeyman almost imply something pejorative? 2. Every organization needs maverick sales people. 3. 4.