Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 16, 2023

Contrary to popular opinion, viral marketing has not eliminated the need for old-fashioned lead generation to bring customers to a startup. His professional background includes having held marketing-executive roles at big companies as well as startups. Email marketing. Direct mail marketing.

Marketing 114

Marketing Invest Social Media SEM 114

TechCrunch LA

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

But LA-based performance marketing agency MuteSix didn’t wait that long to build its business around scaling DTC brands. If you have growth marketing agencies or freelancers to recommend, please fill out our survey !). In today’s highly competitive ad environment, both content and data are kings. The key takeaway?

Commerce 211

Commerce Content Marketing Startup 211

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 4, 2023

The world of marketing is changing faster than technology these days. Winning entrepreneurs have long since supplemented conventional print and video “push” marketing with digital online interactive “pull” marketing, and a while back added social-local-mobile ( SoLoMo ) to the mix. Proactively seek out win-win alliances.

Marketing 107

Marketing Technical Review Startup Innocal 107

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 30, 2021

While you all recognize that reacting to weak market signals is critical to staying in business and staying competitive, I find that many don’t have the skills and focus to trigger change decisions on a timely basis. When sales fall off, you need to dig deep for the “why,” rather than just assuming the price needs to go down.

Marketing 162

Marketing Social Media Metrics Customer 162

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. 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. I boil it down to this: sales people are sales people.

Sales 316

Sales Startup Pricing Customer 316

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 3, 2022

In my role of business advisor to startups, I often recommend these to increase initial brand identity and market penetration. With the rate of market change today, and the advent of worldwide competitors, you need every strategy you can muster to keep up, and respond quickly to new threats.

Marketing 119

Marketing Social Media Mentor Conference 119

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 21, 2014

Since 2009 we’ve been in an unequivocal bull market. You’d imagine that companies selling tons of shelfware would quickly meet their deserved fate in the market, yet the spin around a category of software can fool buyers into thinking they “must have this product to compete.”

Marketing 354

Marketing Case Study Metrics Sales 354

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.

Sales 289

Sales Startup Training Pricing 289

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 10, 2020

The world of marketing is changing faster than technology these days. Winning entrepreneurs have long since supplemented conventional print and video “push” marketing with digital online interactive “pull” marketing, and a while back added social-local-mobile ( SoLoMo ) to the mix. Proactively seek out win-win alliances.

Mobile 173

Mobile Marketing Technical Review Startup 173

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.

Sales 286

Sales Newsletter Technical Review Activity 286

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 20, 2020

Contrary to popular opinion, viral marketing has not eliminated the need for old-fashioned lead generation to bring customers to a startup. His professional background includes having held marketing-executive roles at big companies as well as startups. Email marketing. Direct mail marketing.

Customer 146

Customer Custom Marketing Startup 146

Berkonomics

APRIL 19, 2012

Professional investors laugh when they hear an entrepreneur state, “We have no competition.” Perhaps buyers cannot obtain attractive financing in the current market. If you are training your sales staff, work especially hard on responding to emotional and factual counters to a final close of a sale.

Competition 189

Competition Slides Sales Ideas 189

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 29, 2010

Competitiveness - One attribute that I believe most VCs look for in entrepreneurs is competitiveness. If you stumble on to a really good idea believe me it will get competitive really quickly. It amazes me how quickly a modest success story gets replicated and any initial product / market advantages get narrowed.

Competition 296

Competition Entrepreneur Startup GRP Partners 296

Berkonomics

APRIL 9, 2020

If it takes eighteen months to get a new product out the door and into the market, and if a product’s gross margin is ten dollars but the corporate overhead is a million a month, it will take the sale of 67,000 more units to break even than if it were to take only six months to market. A critical question for you.

Competition 156

Competition Sales Marketing Product 156

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 19, 2020

Instead, they need to validate a customer problem and real market need first. Smart entrepreneurs build market-driven solutions, per the following principles: Size the opportunity and customer interest first. Your passion isn’t enough to create a market. Disruptive technologies require customer education to create a new market.

Technology 127

Technology Marketing Social Media Customer 127

socalTECH

MAY 23, 2016

Santa Monica-based TrueCar is continuing to bolster its links to automotive dealers, as it looks to improve its relationship with the auto dealer industry, saying this morning that it has named Paul Edmonds as Senior Vice President of Dealer Marketing and Opeartions. READ MORE>>.

Truecar 124

Truecar Marketing Santa Monica Pricing 124

Tech.Co

SEPTEMBER 25, 2015

From apps to hardware, to KickStarter successes and international startups, we’re inching closer to finding out who will take home the title of Startup of the Year competition at our annual Celebrate Conference in October. Among the dozens of participants that applied for the online competitions, only a few progressed into the semifinals.

Competition 123

Competition Mobile Startup Technical Review 123

TechCrunch LA

APRIL 9, 2020

general manager ( Stefano Benatti ) — filled more orders in the first two months of 2020 than all its sales for 2019, according to Cevolini. The venture is also one of the few e-motorcycle companies drawing engineering tips from competition. Track competition is a secondary arena for Energica. Image Credits: TechCrunch.

Technical Review 277

Technical Review Competition Demand Sales 277

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

Your marketing launch is the most important element of startup success these days, to get customer attention in this world of information overload. Even great products need great marketing “content” to fuel the ascent of their online message. Lacks a sales angle. People won’t flock to marketing materials.

Content 146

Content Newsletter Competition Writing 146

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 4, 2019

Marketing is everything these days. Yet I see many technology entrepreneurs that focus on the basics of marketing too little and too late. I like the guidance from marketing coach David Newman’s classic book “ Do It! Don’t fall into the marketing-speak trap. Good marketing is not rocket science.

Marketing 97

Marketing Entrepreneur Startup Technical Review 97

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 2, 2022

The most common failures are solutions looking for a problem, lack of a defined market, or an inadequate revenue model. Target market. A target market is the group of customers that the startup plans to attract through marketing and sales their product or service. Sales/Marketing. Competition.

Sales 102

Sales Customer Custom Outsource 102

Berkonomics

APRIL 16, 2020

Raising money during this crisis will be almost impossible, even from friends and family shocked by the stock market declines. Do you still need marketing costs when there is no-one out there buying new product? Are you salespeople making few if any sales because your prospective customers are distracted by their own problems?

Layoffs 218

Layoffs Sales News Marketing 218

Berkonomics

NOVEMBER 24, 2022

In one industry I know well, the dominant player with 22% market share was acquired by one of the largest companies in the technology world. What if you had abandoned that market, reallocated your resources, and focused instead upon other non–competitive geographical or industry segments? Quietly abandon a niche?

Resource 156

Resource Competition Examples Customer 156

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 19, 2019

Image via Flickr by jardenberg Your marketing launch is the most important element of startup success these days, to get customer attention in this world of information overload. Even great products need great marketing “content” to fuel the ascent of their online message. Lacks a sales angle.

Customer 93

Customer Custom Marketing Tips 93

socalTECH

MAY 21, 2021

According to the company, its new education program, SparkED, is aimed at educators and students in a traditional education environment aspiring to achieve data science skills and bolster their resume, and career changers wanting to upskill for a competitive edge in today's job market.

Education 113

Education Training Competition Software Development 113

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 21, 2013

Startups are usually so focused on selling more of their branded product or service to their own customer base (organic growth) that they don’t consider the more indirect methods (non-organic growth) of increasing revenue and market share. Economies of scale also apply to marketing, distribution, and sales.

Organization 97

Organization Competition Startup Acquisition 97

socalTECH

OCTOBER 11, 2010

Last week, the University of Southern California 's Viterbi School of Engineering announced that it had established a new, business plan competition, the Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition ([link] specifically aimed at students in the engineering school. Why a business plan competition, and why in engineering school?

Competition 154

Competition Southern California Mentor USC 154

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.

Sales 226

Sales Customer Custom Pricing 226

TechCrunch LA

DECEMBER 8, 2020

He did note that in the four markets where the company has gone live since launching its business in January 2019 — San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire , and Sacramento — has yielded an annualized revenue run rate of over $400 million in gross merchandise value (the total value of home sales transacted on its platform).

Sales 282

Sales Demand San Diego Funding 282

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 14, 2021

If your innovation is real, it brings added value to the table, so most customers, especially early ones, are willing to pay a premium over competitive products. Elon Musk and Tesla are prime examples of this approach, when the market for all-electric vehicles was new. Offering a lower price to penetrate the market.

Pricing 145

Pricing Startup Competition Examples 145

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. If you hire truly talented people you end up definitionally with a lot of competitive peers who will inevitably jockey for resources and control. Do you hire more sales people?

Entrepreneur 385

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Startup Sales 385

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 26, 2023

Even though many of these can be mitigated by testing and early customer feedback , you will find that it pays big dividends to do your homework before building and rolling out every new initiative: In today’s customer data overload, marketing is essential. Even more important than solution marketing is building your brand.

Product 141

Product Services Technical Review Artificial Inteligence 141

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 10, 2023

Entrepreneurs need to document a process of responding to a market need, sizing opportunity, assigning a specific business model, and planning for marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. Marketing, sales, support, and service operations. No mention usually means no plan and not competitive.

Outsource Development 115

Outsource Development Startup Competition Ideas 115

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 31, 2012

Jeff (also an HBS alum) co-teaches the LTV course with Professor Eisenmann about a student of theirs who had written a blog post about sales taking on some of my previous assertions. That student is Erin McCann who formerly worked in sales at Google, so she has some ground to stand on in her assertions.

Startup 319

Startup Sales Course Competition 319

Tech.Co

MAY 31, 2023

But while competition remains fierce, the advancement and accessibility of smart solutions are making it easy than ever for startups to find their feet. Yet, with so many tools vying for the attention of business owners, navigating the over-saturated market can be overwhelming. From its 4.3-inch

Tool 131

Tool Startup Software Review Technical Review 131

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 13, 2014

Of course, one sale isn’t really enough, so you need to get the first customer to recommend you to a second, and make sure the rate of sales ramps up quickly enough to keep the business alive and growing. I believe in pre-selling and early marketing, but make sure you don’t oversell what you can deliver. Marty Zwilling.

Sales 99

Sales Customer Custom Entrepreneur 99

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Projecting financials is a natural extension of the homework every entrepreneur needs to do on customer opportunity size, product costs, pricing, competition and customer value. Forecast sales-volume expectations. Project based on your market size how many widgets you will sell in every channel.

Startup 116

Startup Pricing Sales Statistics 116