Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 30, 2022

Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Bloom’s classic book, “ The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers.” These decisive moments, and how to respond, are outlined in Robert H. Build a relationship and trust quickly.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 5, 2019

Too many business owners still think of “ customer support ” as an after-sale process to rectify customer problems with completed transactions. With the advent of instant communication and social media, customer service starts at the first hint of interest by you, and never ends for repeat customers.

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Customer Custom Company Companies 84

socalTECH

MAY 28, 2013

In real life, you can just about bargain a price for anything you want to buy--a car, a house, even that new stereo from your local electronics store. Joe Marrapodi: GreenToe is a name your own price marketplace for products. It''s very similar to the Priceline.com model, where you name your price for a flight or hotel.

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InfoChachkie

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

Software as a service (SaaS) is a popular business model because it facilitates the delivery of incremental value to customers, while allowing the vendor to adjust their prices over time. However, such price increases generally occur after new utility has been provided to the customers. Focus on Existing Customers.

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SaaS Pricing Sales Customer 215

TechCrunch LA

MAY 3, 2022

The company Winters was working for sponsored her MBA to Harvard Business School, and it was there that she came up with the idea for Upgrade. “I The company, which raised $1.7 All of the stylists are independent contractors and set their own pricing. The price a consumer pays depends on the stylist chosen.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves. I had never had any sales training so everything we did for the first couple of years was instinctual.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 23, 2021

Yet, as a business consultant, I often find minimal focus on improving employee engagement and assessing their customer-facing performance. For example, I commonly see metrics to keep track of revenue per employee, overtime, and absenteeism, but I don’t often see measures of overall customer satisfaction with individual employees.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 7, 2014

I spend a lot of time with startups and thus hear many companies talk about their approach to sales and their interactions with customers. From these meetings you can really tell the leaders that care deeply about their customers and those the look down on them. You’d be very wrong.

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Customer Custom Venture Capital Software Review 341

Berkonomics

JANUARY 26, 2017

The most striking example was the one hundred–million–dollar purchase of one of my companies by a New York private equity investor using only five million of its cash. If there are enough of these, the CEO or founder can announce a valuation as high as double the actual negotiated enterprise value of the company.

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Pricing Sales Tool Equity 120

Berkonomics

MAY 16, 2019

There must be at least several companies out there right now positioning to compete with you. There are five niches you can chose when defining your positioning strategy: price, quality, service, innovation, and elegance. Pricing strategies differentiate your business. Using price creatively.

Company 120

Company Companies Pricing Competition 120

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 2, 2010

This is part of a series on sales & marketing. I previously covered how early phase sales teams should be “evangelical&# and consultative in nature. The first post on scaling sales dealt with “aiming&# your sales teams – making sure they were focused on the right opportunities.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 31, 2010

This is part of my ongoing Sales & Marketing Series. In the first part of this post I talked about how sales in a startup is often evangelical , requires as consultative sale and needs constant adjustments based on customer feedback. We had 4 or 5 sales reps that had been around since the early days.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2013

So when I meet with GRP portfolio companies that do enterprise sales I try to emphasize the following: 1. This might mean helping customers buy traffic, arb’ing deals, helping with RTB pricing or trading, etc. Minimize Any Custom Work That Will Not Feed Back Into Your R&D.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Bloom’s classic book, “ The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers.” These decisive moments, and how to respond, are outlined in Robert H. Build a relationship and trust quickly.

Customer 124

Customer Custom Startup Course 124

InfoChachkie

APRIL 13, 2015

Avoid a simple pricing mistake which could sink your startup. Because I am cheap and I know that car dealers are incentivized by the manufacturer to hit quarterly and annual sales goals. Thus, the value of a sale at the end of a quarter can be significant, if the sale contributes to obtaining a manufacturer''s incentive.

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socalTECH

DECEMBER 3, 2015

Los Angeles-based all-you-can-fly airline is telling prospective customers that the company is planning a big pricing change on January 1st, and will increase its starting subscriptions from $1,750 per month to $1,950 a month.

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Pricing Burbank Hawthorne Email 100

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 12, 2010

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. You learn by asking.

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socalTECH

JULY 10, 2019

The company has raised $1.9M We spoke with CEO and co-founder Spencer Price to learn more about the company. Spencer Price: Halla is the only software company to dynamically profile human tastes so we can help people make better choices. Spencer Price: That's a fair question. What is Halla?

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

The big price increase : 5 out of 5 stars. The remainder of this article will deal with this decision but it comes down to the different economics of DVD rentals due to “ the first sale doctrine ” which gives Netflix a complete library of films and the fact that the first-sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital downloads.

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InfoChachkie

JANUARY 5, 2015

In his premier film appearance in the blaxploitation send-up “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” Chris Rock inadvertently addresses a key pricing challenge faced by most entrepreneurs. Watch this 93-second clip and see if you can identify the pricing pitfall addressed in this humorous snippet. How Much For A Rib?

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Pricing Product Startup Customer 100

Berkonomics

JULY 26, 2018

These are so succinct, so well defined, so precise that everyone in sales and everyone involved in marketing must be able to answer these three questions without pause, and convincingly. It would pay you to work over this set of questions in a special session with sales, marketing and senior management in the room at once.

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Sales Customer Custom Pricing 226

Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Celebrating that strategic partnership Many of us make it a priority to find and partner with companies that can add to our offering or extend our reach. It takes real effort and planning on both sides of a partnership between companies to make it work. Why would this partnership – one that benefits both companies – fail to succeed?

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Press Sales Training Resource 156

socalTECH

JULY 22, 2014

San Diego-based OneRoof Energy , the solar energy services financing and solar installation company led by David Field, said today that it has tied with "digital services" company Elevate. Accor ding to OneRoof Energy, the move will help extend OneRoof to a "substantial" customer base. READ MORE>>.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 14, 2012

All the experts these days are talking about the increasing need for customer focus and maximizing sales. According to Kevin Davis, as outlined in a recent book “ Slow Down, Sell Faster! ” and a related article, the single biggest mistake people make is that they try to close the sale too fast.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 11, 2015

Yet in this age when customers have a thousand alternatives, and are overwhelmed by a multitude of messages, sales efforts can make or break a business. In fact, I believe modern entrepreneurs need to be super sales people, in the most positive sense, to their team as well as customers. No pain usually means no sales.

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Sales Entrepreneur Customer Custom 106

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

But what IS the right amount of burn for a company? Burn rate in case you don’t know is the amount of money a company is either spending (gross) or losing (net) per month. (it Conversely if you’re burning $600,000 per month (yes, some companies do) then you only have 5 months of cash left. Gross Burn vs. Net Burn.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 23, 2011

All the experts these days are talking about the increasing need for customer focus and maximizing sales. Typically entrepreneurs and even professional sales people think this means more emphasis on the customer selling process, when in fact it means spending more time understanding the customer buying process (view from the customer).

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Sales Customer Custom Competition 93

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 18, 2023

Customer service has traditionally been focused on the resolution of complaints , primarily after a transaction. My recommendations always include adopting a customer mindset, as well as the following steps: Accept today’s definition of relevant customer support. Treat every customer exceptionally before they complain.

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Berkonomics

AUGUST 3, 2023

Some businesses require very little capital and the founder can self-finance the enterprise and retain 100% of its ownership and control from ignition through liquidity event (startup through sale). Strategic investors validate a business, by their presence creating the very value they pay for with increased price per share purchased.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 29, 2023

I recognized this as I was reading the classic book, ” The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need ,” by Anthony Iannarino, who is an international sales leader and expert on optimizing results. His focus is on sales, but I see the same skills needed for entrepreneurs. Diagnosing and understanding the customer problem.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 2, 2022

You can’t succeed in business without an operational model that delivers value to customers at a reasonable price, with an underlying cost that allows you to make a profit. A target market is the group of customers that the startup plans to attract through marketing and sales their product or service. Sales/Marketing.

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Berkonomics

MAY 8, 2014

I am chairman of a company that, as I write this, is twelve years old and has not yet taken a dollar of outside investment. The company has been funded entirely by grants from the National Institute of Health, amounting to millions of non-dilutive dollars in all. How refreshing!

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Company Companies Writing Education 166

TechCrunch LA

MARCH 2, 2021

The company has already worked with names as diverse as the Golden State Warriors, the Dallas Cowboys, and pop sensation Billy Eilish on embedding its interactive tools into various live events and promotions. But what started in the gaming world quickly spun out as the company slashed prices to $500 per month for its services.

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Tool Commerce .Net Entertainment 315

Berkonomics

JANUARY 28, 2021

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked away from deals where the entrepreneur insists on a start-up pre-money valuation that is so high, no angel could expect to make a return upon the investment, even with a reasonable sales price for the company down the road. And here’s the “why.”. Lessons founders learned.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 17, 2022

On the other end of the spectrum are companies that fell behind the curve and may never recover, including MySpace for social networking, Yahoo with online ads, and Groupon with discounts for group purchasing. Power has been guiding growth companies for 25 years, and now teaches innovation at the Harvard Extension School.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 29, 2022

In my experience, there will always be growth challenges that you can’t predict, including new technologies, economic downturns, and political changes, but I’m talking here about changes in the market that every good business leader should anticipate, including the following: Your targeted customer segment has a limit.

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Marketing Pricing Startup Customer 110

InfoChachkie

JANUARY 14, 2013

If you have your eyes and ears open, you can discover sales lessons in unexpected places, including the cable TV show, Say Yes To The Dress. There are a number of solid sales techniques on display by the Say Yes team. Throughout the sales process, they continually probe and modify their sales approach, based on the bride's feedback.

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