Sales - Introduction
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Startup Sales Dos and Don'ts with Colleen Francis | OpenView Labs
Building a high-functioning sales team is no easy task, especially for startup companies eying expansion. In this episode of Labcast , Colleen Francis, Founder and President at Engage Selling Solutions , calls in to discuss some of the common missteps many young sales organizations make and offers some advice for staying on course at the startup stage. Brendan Cournoyer: Hello again, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Labcast. Today we are joined by Colleen Francis, founder and President at Engage Selling Solutions.
At HubSpot, we love working with our customers. From day one, whether you’re an intern (which we’re looking for) or an executive, everyone takes part in customer support. In fact, the ability to empathize and empower a customer is one of the most common skills among our growing, but tight-knit team. Our company’s MO is much like the trends in marketing—customer-driven. Customers decide how and when they want to interact with companies, not the other way around. Marketers tend to develop an in-depth strategy for how their marketing efforts will be implemented for the month ahead.
5 Ways to Create a Customer-Driven Company
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.If Money Doesnt Change Hands, You Cant Call a User a Customer.
Here is another excerpt from my September interview with Gabriel Weinberg. This one focuses on why payment and testimonials are so important to differentiate users from actual customers. yegg: So you are OK with a lower price for the first few customers, but you do want some money changing hands?
Selling vs. inviting
Selling is often misunderstood, largely by people who would be a lot more comfortable merely inviting. If I invite you to a wedding, or a party, or to buy a $500,000 TV ad for $500, there's no resistance on your part. Either you jump at the chance and say yes, or you have a conflict and say no. It's not my job to help you overcome your fear of commitment, to help you see the ultimate value and most of all, to work with you as you persuade yourself and others to do something that might just work. If the marketing and product development team do a great job, selling is a lot easier... so easy it might be called inviting.
The Customer: Providing Value
This is the first entry of The Entrepreneur's Boss Series . You don't work for yourself! You work for The Customer The first boss is the customer, not the shareholders. If you make your customers happy (and have a solid monetization plan) the shareholders will probably be happy. That doesn't mean give away your product for free to please a customer.
Continuing on the theme of the entrepreneur's boss , its important to stay relevant to the customer. Staying relevant is a fine balance between innovation and focus. If you've got your feedback mechanism working efficiently, then you'll have discovered plenty of opportunities for innovation. And sure, you can do them all... but not well. Product Innovation.
Staying Relevant
Generous service is essential. Everybody's got a boss . The entrepreneur's first boss is his customer. Eventually, everybody screws up.
Generous service is essential
Everybody's got a boss
Everybody's got a boss . Taking care of the customer is the first duty of every entrepreneur. That can be tough enough! But the real challenge is consistency and longevity. Consistency is a hallmark of great service.
I'm continuing my series on The Entrepreneur's Boss . Today's entry is about effectively using customer feedback. The way a company handles feedback can be categorized into three ways: organic, passive, and proactive. Effectively incorporating feedback involves all three
Gathering Feedback
One of the big lessons that I’ve learned with startups is about when to determine how you are going to sell your products and actually make money. By nature, developers tend to want to start building something and then they’ll figure how to sell it once it’s built. That’s mostly because, well, they are developers and not salesmen. I’ve made that mistake myself, but have since learned from it. I left Telligent in June 2009 to launch my first startup, League Galaxy .
Determine How To Sell, Then Build
Repeat after me: business is always about the customer — Tech News and Analysis
One of my core beliefs is that if you are in business, it is always about the customer. You need to know your customer and you figure out ways to make them happy. Make them happy and they will spend money (or attention) and everything else – fame and fortune to be precise – will follow.The following is a guest post by Daniel Tenner. Daniel is the founder of several companies including GrantTree . He blogs about startups and founders at Swombat.com .
3 Quick Entrepreneurial Sales Lessons
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.