Both Sides of the Table

JULY 21, 2014

For what ever reason we’re wired to have amnesia during the run up and prescient memories of how we ‘knew it all along’ as soon as the slide begins. ” It helps to have seen the way down twice before to know many of the signs. Have sales bonus plans based on more than just sales targets.

Marketing 354

Marketing Case Study Metrics Sales 354

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2011

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. I think the norm in the industry is still to see Powerpoint slides and I wouldn’t hold this against anybody.

Venture Capital 299

Venture Capital Slides Technical Advisors Startup 299

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 14, 2018

No amount of tracking when she read your deck is going to truly help you get inside her head so those benefits are oversold. There are a million ways to make graphics lighter or resize your file without a huge impact on the quality of the slides?—?after I’m sure that some VCs and others do love online viewers when they read a deck.

Funding 239

Funding Venture Capital IP Email 239

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 15, 2011

This might be a VC meeting but also might just be a sales or biz dev meeting. It’s any meeting where you are in a small room and are being called on to present on some form of overhead slides. Even the best behaved of recipients can’t help themselves but to flip ahead to see what’s coming. Yes, it’s rude.

Tips 392

Tips Screening Slides Venture Capital 392

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2013

In my first enterprise software company we developed a methodology for sales that we called PUCCKA , which I wrote about previously. Having a good sales methodology can help you ensure your company runs more disciplined campaigns and focuses scarce resources on your best opportunities. But how would I use it?”.

Sales 336

Sales Startup Competition Customer 336

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

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. It’s the same as in any sales-oriented meeting and make no mistake raising money is sales. I need something structured like slides or a demo to orient me. Very few people ask.

Venture Capital 238

Venture Capital Slides Startup Sales 238

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. Maybe it helps that I love controversy and pushing the boundaries so people felt it was OK for them to do it as well. “Why?&#

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Technical Review Slides CTO Coach 414

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2010

For extroverted people I recommend that entrepreneurs have an “executive summary&# slide up front that cuts to the chase. Don’t dwell on this slide for ever. If I have an hour with you I want to maximise the time we have a discussion so I want to get through the slides quickly. It’s in their personality type.

Slides 358

Slides Venture Capital Startup Summary 358

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 27, 2022

Dini, tied together several threads I have often seen in my own experience of mentoring and helping aspiring entrepreneurs. Only a few of these slide into farming, as the company grows in employees and products. Farmers have a narrower view of what is required, to optimize quality production, customer satisfaction, or close a sale.

Entrepreneur 124

Entrepreneur Marketing News Slides 124

InfoChachkie

JULY 7, 2016

Fool A Fool – I sold surgical robots from PowerPoint slides in the early 1990’s, before the robots existed. Sales Mode – Demos intrinsically cause Founders to launch into sales mode. Our approach, which is certainly not unique, often results in sales, partnerships and otherwise productive relationships. Share and Enjoy.

Venture Capital 176

Venture Capital Product Software Review Technical Review 176

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 24, 2018

controlling your psychology ) you no doubt have heard me say that raising capital is a sales & marketing process. If the questions aren’t organically flowing you have “pocket slides” after the main deck you can pull out to share more information or analysis. This is Sales 101. Maybe they even help you meet other partners?

Venture Capital 314

Venture Capital Technical Review Invest Slides 314

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

The number is much higher for those who choose to go it alone, without help. I recommend a ten-slide pitch to start, reviewed by friends and advisors, to be expanded to a ten-to-twenty-page business plan with opportunity sizing, cost and price details, competitors, marketing and sales strategy, financial projections, and resources required.

Ideas 94

Ideas Slides Technical Review Patents 94

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2010

You should think of PBW’s in the same way as you think about employee options – they are an incentive for an important partner in your business to help you achieve success over time. If you simply to a revenue number (say hitting $1 million in sales) and they hit it in year 1 then you’ve lost your carrot for year 2.

Startup 298

Startup Sales Slides Metrics 298

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 10, 2011

A perfect round number is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. If you can’t get the message across in ten minutes, more time and more charts won’t help. Here are the ten slides you need: Problem and market need. Fuzzy terms like “not user-oriented” or “too expensive” are not helpful.

Slides 93

Slides Competition Sample Sales 93

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. I was the laggard.

Sales 296

Sales Pricing Startup Customer 296

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. I started by trying to think I could explain my concept without having to patronize everybody with artificial PowerPoint slides. Slides, please.” Couldn’t be helped. I was wrong.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Blogging Startup Slides 274

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 10, 2014

The founders are (or should be) the most valuable resources in the company and scaling implies that you bring in others to help accomplish tasks that allow the founders to get more leverage. The best ones bring in more executive leadership so you can appropriate allocate resources across sales, marketing, product, engineering and support.

Startup 381

Startup Resource Venture Capital Activity 381

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 13, 2016

As a startup advisor and investor, I recommend a pitch deck with about 10 slides backed up with a written business plan of approximately 20 pages, both containing quantified answers to the following key questions. Good causes such as feeding the world’s hungry may help your marketing but may not sustain a business.

Invest 108

Invest Startup Slides Equity 108

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 1, 2013

Of course, you can’t predict everything, but writing down what you know will identify existing problems sooner, and allow other team members to help. Neither banks nor investors will help you on this one. Seasonal sales fluctuations eat cash. Fluctuating sales means more inventory is required to cover the ups and downs.

Startup 114

Startup Sales Layoffs Slides 114

Berkonomics

JUNE 2, 2010

Each month, at the monthly company lunch for all, I’d greet everyone with “Hello shareholders”, and proceed to show the assembled throng slides of high level financial statements, pointing out progress against plan. Email readers continue here.]

Slides 216

Slides News Equity Writing 216

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 20, 2019

Dini, tied together several threads I have often seen in my own experience of mentoring and helping aspiring entrepreneurs. Only a few of these slide into farming, as the company grows in employees and products. Farmers have a narrower view of what is required, to optimize quality production, customer satisfaction, or close a sale.

Entrepreneur 95

Entrepreneur News Slides Startup 95

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 12, 2010

We then walked through our sales pipeline and discussed major campaigns. You put some update slides on things like key hires or biz dev deals being negotiated and you didn’t plan to talk about them. But they were in a slide and people asked you questions so it ended up chewing up 30 minutes. Then competition.

Startup 331

Startup Slides Guide Writing 331

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

My real goal is to help others not comprehensively thank all of our great teams. It freed up Ophir to grow out our sales organization, to work more closely with agencies, to innovate on product and to raise capital. They can help you understand gross margins and how to avoid signing bad deals. They can help you with pricing.

Outsource Development 150

Outsource Development Metrics Startup Sales 150

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 17, 2016

Of course, you can’t predict everything, but writing down what you know will identify existing problems sooner, and allow other team members to help. Neither banks nor investors will help you on this one. Seasonal sales fluctuations eat cash. Fluctuating sales means more inventory is required to cover the ups and downs.

Startup 64

Startup Sales Layoffs Slides 64

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 27, 2018

Certainly a slide or two needs to carry over describing the product and features at a high level. Potential investors love to see gross margins in the fifty percent range or greater, with recurring revenue through subscriptions, follow-on sales, or services. Customized marketing strategy and realistic sales plans. “If

Product 58

Product Slides Entrepreneur Invest 58

SoCal CTO

MARCH 12, 2012

" Typically, this requires quite a bit more information for me to be able to respond and provide real help. Your technical advisor can likely help. They often can help a lot in navigating to expertise and to possible resources. I'm focusing on the sourcing ("lead gen" on her slide) aspect.

CTO Hire 211

CTO Hire CTO Coach Startup Equity 211

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

Because they’re street smart, most great entrepreneurs tend to prefer getting out and talking with real customers rather than sitting in a cubicle all day doing beautiful PowerPoint slides. The CEO helped identify the one key product that had huge value as confirmed via customer feedback and he built the organization around this.

Entrepreneur 306

Entrepreneur Startup Outsource Development Customer 306

socalTECH

JULY 10, 2019

Spencer Price: Halla is the only software company to dynamically profile human tastes so we can help people make better choices. Halla exists to help people understand a more curious world. When you say you help people make better choices, what does that look like to a user? Spencer Price: That's a fair question.

Pricing 113

Pricing Startup North Hollywood Platform 113

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2009

When you do get time the advisers are often too removed from the details of the company to help. Let’s face it, to help a company you really need to understand the details. But I would argue that you can develop relationships with many advisers, mentors and VCs that will help with introductions for no equity.

Startup 306

Startup Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 306

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 19, 2009

But in that moment of hearing the news, I tried to remind myself that dwelling in the negative never helps, that in fact every kick to the head provides motivation to crank it up. He … said that his fund would actively help in getting us the next round. Many entrepreneurs struggle with their setbacks.

Entrepreneur 288

Entrepreneur Startup Slides Seed Funding 288

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 24, 2016

If you provide these slides in advance you give board members a chance to reflect and come prepared for a real discussion. Even the best intentioned board members sometimes ask very detailed questions out of curiosity or thinking they are helping and in effect take the meeting off course. It’s helpful. Hope that helps a bit.

Guide 196

Guide Startup Metrics Conference 196

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 28, 2015

Dini, tied together several threads I have often seen in my own experience of mentoring and helping aspiring entrepreneurs. Only a few of these slide into farming, as the company grows in employees and products. Farmers have a narrower view of what is required, to optimize quality production, customer satisfaction, or close a sale.

Entrepreneur 106

Entrepreneur News Slides Startup 106

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 8, 2017

Let me be quick to say that a plan doesn’t have be a book, and probably should start as a “pitch deck” of maybe a dozen slides which cover all the right bases. Marketing, sales, and customer experience. The details can be added later. Now let’s talk about the bases that need to be covered.

Startup 65

Startup Writing Patents Competition 65

socalTECH

JUNE 13, 2012

You can slide it onto the corner of your iPhone, or you can flip it over, and it you get a wide angle lens. They also went out, and spread the word, and helped us take this to the masses and give us recognition. One last thing with Kickstarter, is the group of people I brought in to help me. Patrick O'Neill: Not really.

Patents 191

Patents Ideas Design Startup 191

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 12, 2014

Dini, tied together several threads I have often seen in my own experience of mentoring and helping aspiring entrepreneurs. Only a few of these slide into farming, as the company grows in employees and products. Farmers have a narrower view of what is required, to optimize quality production, customer satisfaction, or close a sale.

Entrepreneur 109

Entrepreneur Startup News Slides 109

Xconomy

OCTOBER 10, 2016

Cho made his case for Revolve, a digital instrument created for biology labs that combines the features of an upright microscope (for viewing glass slides) and an inverted microscope (for viewing live samples in a petri dish). Cho, a former sales manager for Nikon Instruments and Vala Sciences, founded Echo Labs in 2014.

Tech Coast Angels 40

Tech Coast Angels Technical Review San Diego Software Review 40

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. new features need to go into the sale people’s slides so that they know the latest and greatest about how to differentiate from the competition. As the CEO you can personally help manage deadlines and the Agile process.

CTO Hire 400

CTO Hire Fractional VPE Startup Outsource Development 400