Thoughts, ideas, and lessons learned from real-world customer engagements and interactions...
Their loss may be your gain
13 Oct 2009 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Competition
As a business, are you using all of the tools that you have available to you in order to keep on top of your competition and to uncover new opportunities? If not, then there really is no excuse considering all of the tools and technologies that are available to us today.
The best way to communicate this point is with a true story that happened today. First off, one of our clients is building a new electronic download/distribution solution. In essence it is a turn-key solution that will help small to medium sized companies to get their software, video, audio, documents, or data solutions hosted and downloadable/viewable from any platform including through the web and on mobile devices. Anyway, while doing some research to help connect our client with some real-world customers, I did a quick Twitter Search. What appeared was a bunch of tweets talking about how one of the current leaders in this industry recently lost a contract with one of their key customers (one of the largest software companies in the world). After sending out the information to our customer to make sure that they were aware of some of these developments, I then went to LinkedIn and did a search on the name of the person from the company which cancelled the contract that was quoted in one of the articles. I noticed that I did not have a direct connection with this person, but did notice that I had a two degree separation from one of the other executives. I then picked up the phone and called them, and then sent them a note through LinkedIn just to see if it would be possible to have a conversation with them. The goal of the conversation is not to “sell” them on using our customers solution, but rather simply to open up the dialogue with them to better understand what they liked…and disliked about the current market leaders solution. This information is extremely valuable to our client so that they can ensure that they deploy and market a solution that truly meets the needs of all of their clients including larger prospects like this major software company.
Building Start-up Sales Teams:Tips for Founders
17 Aug 2009 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Operations
Recently I was involved in a conversation on LinkedIn that was focused around the question as to when is the right time to hire a VP of Sales. I am a bit opinionated about this as there really is a “right time” to do this. Many people argue that you need to have a VP of Sales right out of the gate with your company, but I actually disagree. The focus and money should be spent on getting closer to your potential customers to better understand their needs and requirements. Once you have this nailed, and have built a solution that meets these needs and demonstrated that customers will actually pay for your solution, then bring in some sales talent to help you get some traction for your solution. Then go out and hire your VP of Sales.
Anyway, one of the answers to the question pointed to the following article Building Start-Up Sales Teams:Tips for Founders written by Dharmesh Shah who is an entrepreneur and founder of the OnStartups.com blog. I think that this article does a great job in putting this decision into perspective….so why reinvent the wheel, as Dharmesh has done a great job in framing this discussion. I particularly like items 6 and 14.
