Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2011

I’m comfortable with introductions and then getting into the demo.&#. I believe in this so much that, despite my post advising you to be prepared for the *norm* in VC, I wrote a post about a company that came in for a presentation and never even got the slides out or presented a demo. Just jump into the demo after intros.

Venture Capital 299

Venture Capital Slides Technical Advisors Startup 299

InfoChachkie

JULY 4, 2011

Man or woman, the tactics deployed by Sam are applicable to any sales situation and can be put to use by any salesperson, irrespective of their gender. Right from the start, Sam must endure the most painful of all forms of sales rejection, the personal attack. He continues smiling and deploys a rudimentary sales technique.

Sales 219

Sales Entrepreneur Startup Product 219

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2010

The path I went down after a few years was to hire more process driven people and devolved more daily operational ownership to people running individual functions such as product management, sales management, finance, etc. One of the most obvious places where you see this is in sales & marketing. Ditto the CFO.

Sales 296

Sales Pricing Startup Customer 296

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. Specifically, 1.

Startup 319

Startup Sales Course Competition 319

InfoChachkie

JUNE 24, 2013

One that he particularly struggled with was "word-of-mouth marketing,”which he consistently referred to as "mouth-to-mouth marketing." We adopted his phrasing and made it our mission to devise creative, mouth-to-mouth marketing initiatives. I now realize why guerrilla marketing is not for the timid. we sure do.

Marketing 133

Marketing Conference Startup Oracle 133

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them. In sales there are also three rules: Qualify, qualify, qualify.

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Funding Startup Sales 332

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 1, 2009

In my previous post, The VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) I wrote about the reasons why the VC market came to a screeching halt in September 2008 and remained largely shut until at least April 2009. There are now signs the VC market has gathered pace meaning it’s a great time to be fund raising. This is one book-end of the cycle.

Venture Capital 255

Venture Capital Marketing Startup Social Network 255

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Some readers have commented that in today’s world you shouldn’t even need a PowerPoint presentation – in this era you should always just demo your product. I also recently wrote a post about a company that came in for a presentation and never even got the slides out or presented a demo. How big is the market?

Venture Capital 238

Venture Capital Slides Startup Sales 238

SoCal Tech Calendar

APRIL 19, 2012

It has tutorials, presentations, demos and discussions for new and seasoned developers, researchers and data analysts, business managers and sales marketers, come to join us to play with data and share knowledge! See [link] (more)

Conference 113

Conference Research Web Organization 113

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 8, 2010

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.

Startup 350

Startup Sales Framework Organization 350

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 6, 2023

The Founder needs to remember that meetings up to this point have been primarily off-site, with staged demos, and managed personally by the CEO or a small team. A smart investor will take an independent final reading in the market on barriers to entry, active competition, demographics, and price sensitivity.

Technical Review 118

Technical Review Startup Satisfaction Invest 118

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

One other big tell for me is the CEO’s grasp of the sales pipeline. I can’t tell you how many CEO’s I’ve met with who can’t walk me through the details of their sales pipeline. One of the large parts of the burn was PR, Marketing and attending conferences. Who does sales report to?

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur Startup CTO Hire Sales 286

InfoChachkie

MARCH 16, 2015

Dreamforce is the conference for sales and marketing professionals. 131% of team’s goal for demos – proving that booth traffic wasn’t comprised solely of swag bandits. Sexy Slogan + Interactive Demo. Instead, you have to push the envelope of propriety to cut through the noise. OK – so what. you get the idea.

Conference 100

Conference SaaS Ideas Sales 100

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 24, 2021

The Founder needs to remember that meetings up to this point have been primarily off-site, with staged demos, and managed personally by the CEO or a small team. A smart investor will take an independent final reading in the market on barriers to entry, active competition, demographics, and price sensitivity.

Technical Review 151

Technical Review Startup Satisfaction Invest 151

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2009

million which closed the first week of March 2000 – a week before the market crashed. We hired a head of technology, a head of customer service, a head of marketing, a head of strategy (which no startup should ever hire) a CFO and, ugh, 33 developers. We built 4 products simultaneously with no market feedback.

Startup 299

Startup Venture Capital Technical Review Training 299

TechCrunch LA

OCTOBER 22, 2018

As for what will happen at the store, Fifth Wall’s Adam Demuyakor tells me “There will be deployment of scooters, charging of scooters, and some sales of apparel and accessories that are related. There will be demos, tutorials, and presentations on how to be safe.”

Santa Monica 221

Santa Monica Startup Technical Review Education 221

Tech.Co

AUGUST 16, 2017

Finding potential customers continues to be a huge challenge not only for established marketing and sales teams but also for startup executives and solo entrepreneurs. A study in 2013 showed that 61 percent of marketers found it hard to generate high-quality leads. Team – for agencies and marketing teams, $149/month.

Tool 79

Tool Startup Help Template 79

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 24, 2016

I’m simply pointing out that by numbers more startups are founded in that younger demo). Today we have all of my past videos with categories so you can more easily explore topics like: fund raising, HR, VC advice, negotiations, sales, marketing, etc. Just that Snapchat is less crowded. Why would Suster do that!!

Snapchat 200

Snapchat Blogging Venture Capital Writing 200

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

I’ve raised in boom markets and when everybody thought the Internet was a fraud. Fund raising (as is much of life) is a sale – pure and simple. As with any sales campaign you need to: Qualify your buyers early so you focus your scarce resources on people likely to buy your product. . ” (Zig Ziglar).

Develop 366

Develop Development Funding Venture Capital 366

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 22, 2010

File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. Oh, and Demo charges the startups $18,000. Guy Kawasaki said it best (paraphrasing), “you can’t do great marketing with a bad product.&# Given a choice of your marketing person or talking to you (the founder) there’s no competition.

Tips 307

Tips Startup Press Blogging 307

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 27, 2012

Here are the ten slides you need: Problem and market need. Make sure to communicate the relevance of your product / services to market needs. Define the characteristics of the overall industry, market forces, market dynamics, and customer landscape. Investors like $1B markets with double-digit growth rates.

Slides 99

Slides Competition Sample Sales 99

Tech.Co

SEPTEMBER 25, 2015

Tech.Co: Since launch, what was the most challenging part of gaining market traction? However, demonstrating that value to clinicians without a DEMO or a pilot is a challenging aspect of the market adoption. We know our product, market, and value proposition inside and out. Habra: Practice, practice, practice.

Competition 122

Competition Mobile Startup Technical Review 122

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2011

Justin Bieber is unbelievably entrepreneurial and most of you will never know it because he serves a target demo that doesn’t include you. You need to be great at something: technology back-end, front-end design, usability, sales, marketing, quantitative analysis, leadership –> whatever.

Entrepreneur 398

Entrepreneur Startup Writing Blogging 398

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 4, 2013

In other words, once they are convinced that the product works, they assume their price, sales channel, and marketing will bring in the customers. You won’t succeed with a product that is too expensive for the market. He better be so pleased that he is willing to provide a testimonial for your real marketing campaign.

Product 94

Product Pricing Customer Custom 94

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company. The first attention we started getting was after we launched the company publicly at Demo on September 25th of this year. The first VC I met with came from attending DEMO. I was wrong.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Blogging Startup Slides 274

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 30, 2012

In other words, once they are convinced that the product works, they assume their price, sales channel, and marketing will bring in the customers. You won’t succeed with a product that is too expensive for the market. He better be so pleased that he is willing to provide a testimonial for your real marketing campaign.

Entrepreneur 99

Entrepreneur Pricing Customer Custom 99

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 10, 2011

Here are the ten slides you need: Problem and market need. Make sure to communicate the relevance of your product / services to market needs. Define the characteristics of the overall industry, market forces, market dynamics, and customer landscape. Investors like $1B markets with double-digit growth rates.

Slides 93

Slides Competition Sample Sales 93

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2010

We held a 90-minute demo session where 150 of LA’s VC’s and senior technology executives watched the LPLA V2 group present in small groups of 12-15 each. But at the highest level they’ve created a marketplace for “flash&# sales. DataPop : DataPop was founded by performance marketing veterans from Yahoo!,

Company 276

Company Companies Startup Southern California 276

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

I recently wrote a blog post here in which I argued that the best VC meetings are discussions and not sales pitches. Many people agreed and added that even the best sales meetings are also discussions and not pitches. We talked about measurable marketing. This is part of my ongoing series, “ Pitching a VC.&#.

Venture Capital 288

Venture Capital Startup Advertising Yahoo 288

Tech Zulu Event

FEBRUARY 8, 2012

After some pre-game mingling, we began our evening with demos from companies that had been picked from months of company submissions. Leftronic , our final company to present demo’d their impressive data visualization platform that displays information in real time and within browser windows, meaning, no software to download.

Technical Review 94

Technical Review Idealab Startup Mobile 94

InfoChachkie

DECEMBER 10, 2012

If we hadn’t done well on Hacker News we would have needed to have some serious product/market fit discussions.". to actionable user feedback, "Just went through the demo. Although social media news sites can be effective market validation tools, they are not without their downsides. You definitely have a nice start.

News 198

News Sites Startup RSS 198

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 15, 2011

In other words, once they are convinced that the product works, they assume their price, sales channel, and marketing will bring in the customers. You won’t succeed with a product that is too expensive for the market. He better be so pleased that he is willing to provide a testimonial for your real marketing campaign.

Startup 93

Startup Pricing Customer Custom 93

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 19, 2010

Here are the ten slides you need: Problem and market need. Make sure to communicate the relevance of your product / services to market needs. Define the characteristics of the overall industry, market forces, market dynamics, and customer landscape. Investors like $1B markets with double-digit growth rates.

Slides 94

Slides Competition Sample Sales 94

socalTECH

APRIL 13, 2015

You point out that there''s a lot of folks in this market, why jump in with a new service? We had already begun this process, when that dislocation occurred, which enabled us to assemble a team that not only came from engineering and architecture, but also sales. He''s truly the Derek Jeter of the endurance space.

Software 100

Software Activity Startup San Diego 100

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2010

I usually say something like, “I know this market reasonably well so feel free to pick up the pace and drop from 50k feet to 5k feet. OK, I understand your market is big. Can we do a really quick run through your deck so that we save tons of time for a product demo & questions at the end?&#. Then I’m jumping in.

Slides 358

Slides Venture Capital Startup Summary 358

Tech Zulu Event

JANUARY 18, 2013

A traffic jam of expensive cars lined up to pull into the packed parking lot of MuckerLab for its second graduating class demo day. The demo is the ceremonial end to the structured part of it, but our focus is really on building a really great business. RocksBox , a new discovery and sales channel for designer fashion jewelry.

Class 100

Class Startup Tech Coast Angels CTO Coach 100

Tech Zulu Event

AUGUST 21, 2011

The coolest part about these products was that most of the were live working demos. Cool Car Pools for example, an application to help co-workers locate each other that they could carpool with, demoed an entire use case for us. Several junior sales associates to handle online customer acquisition and orientation; and, 3.

Santa Monica 90

Santa Monica Startup PHP HTML 90