If you sell through a channel, that channel is your customer, not the end user. They have needs and actually those needs (not desires, needs) are more important than the end users' -- if your channel doesn't sell the product it doesn't matter how much you've worked to add that end-user feature.
Have the entire exec team go on a sales call once a quarter (not all together on the same call!). They don't have to say anything in the call (in fact it's much better they don't). I remember a CFO I told to go on a sales call telling me it was the first time in his career he had been in front of a customer, and that he really had had no idea what the customer thought about what we did. It makes the team far more effective.
Don't allow inter-departmental sniping. We all know it: sales guys won't sell the product and always want stupid one-off features; engineering is lazy and won't write what the customers actually want; marketing is just lying all the time. Instead make sure everybody understands that without sales folks, no paycheck. Without engineers, the sales folks have nothing to sell. Without marketing, who will know that they need our product, and how can we prioritize which features to build? That mild-mannered A/R clerk is the real difference between paycheck and no paycheck.
Don't do free pilots for enterprise. There's always someone interested in new products and technologies. If they can't put some skin in the game they aren't serious. Ideally cover your costs, but in any case make sure the number is larger than the person you're talking to is automatically authorized to spend (this means they'll need to get some buy in, PO, contract etc). They don't have to give it all to you up front, they just need some commitment and desire to do business if the pilot works. And they have to give you some payment up front, a meaningful amount.
Don't have one customer be all of your revenue (ideally don't have one customer be more than 20% of revenue). Edit: note that Google has this problem: 80+% of revenue is advertising, and Google is a large part of the overall advertising market. They have been trying, and failing, to fix this for more than a decade. This is a case where you want to be able to say "we aren't google".
Don't go in too high in the organization. If your first call is to the CEO and you convince them to try your product, it will be handed off to someone who likely only cares because the CEO said so, and would be quite happy to screw around a little and then tell the boss "yeah, we looked into it but it didn't work out". Follow the standard enterprise sales playbook and go in at the right level and find your "coach": the person who is committed to getting your product into the company because it will make their life better (perhaps promotion, but at least better execution).
This is for when you are bigger: If you work with another company, and your company meets with their CEO, your CEO should go to that meeting. Until you're Apple-sized, always treat your partners and customers as peers. If not, why are you working with them at all?
> Until you're Apple-sized, always treat your partners and customers as peers. If not, why are you working with them at all?
A friend founded a startup which licensed software to the first generation iPhone. He still has a copy of the voicemail: "Hi. This is Steve Jobs...from Apple..."
Is it really a bad thing if you hyper-grow by just focusing on one client? It takes time to get a lead, so why not focus on the leads you don’t need to get?
If you have no customers you'll work on your project and eventually give up. If you have multiple customers you have a business of some sort. If you have only one you are in a dangerous place.
A case study from last year. I'm on a board of a company that had a small product under way but got excited by a much larger market. They even got a customer who paid a small down payment (~75K). So they spent more than a year developing the new product (several engineers on staff) in close partnership with this customer. We board members kept urging the CEO to find a second customer but he was more interested in engineering than sales. You can guess what happened: after a year the customer declined to make the second payment of ~75K. So I called the customer and he said he wouldn't pay but would just buy the company for a pittance (less than had been spent on development). The board declined, and as I predicted the customer attempted to recruit the development team, so we just fired the customer. He was quite irate because he had built this into his own development plans, but fuck him. The one fun part was that he couldn't re implement what he needed himself as we had patents they would need.
If that wasn't bad enough, the customer's use case was quite specific and not adequate for the broader market. So further development was needed (development that would already have been done had there been marketing and product management) before the company could even try to enter the market.
In the end I had to come in and do a restart and spin out. A regular starup would have died.
It doesn't have to be as bad as that. But a big company can be committed to you and then cancel a whole product for whatever reasons that have nothing to do with you.
And I wasn't kidding with the Google example. They have struggled to develop new lines of revenue, even pulling puny old Nest back onto their balance sheet for an extra percent or two of non-advertising revenue. With a more diversified revenue stream wall street analysis would drive the stock price up. If there's a secular change in the advertising market they really would suffer. So this advice isn't just for startups.
If I am a genius (thanks!) it's only because I initially failed to do this and was screwed each time until I figured out why. Don't be like me; make your own mistakes instead.
Don't be too hard on yourself. Over the years I've come across a few folks who never figure out how not to smash their thumb with that hammer (and never figure out that what they need is a screwdriver).
We used to have all hands meetings in which everybody talked (not the CEO yakking) explaining what they were doing and what they planned to do.
Our A/R clerk explained what she did. She managed to get almost everybody to pay on time (cough not the assholes at Sun though). Her avg was something like 35 days (we wrote everything net 30 or less). The next quarter she reported that she'd gotten the average down to something like 23 days, and got a standing ovation! For a ~60 person bootstrapped company that meant a lot, and this exercise meant everybody appreciated her work.
Almost certainly. Though the music industry's "Artists and Repertoire" (sometimes abbreviated AR, sometimes A&R) is a not-particularly-close second.
To make matters worse, I have seen A&R being used to mean "Accounts and Receivables", which is just WRONG (except in the context of tertiary education institutions).
If you sell through a channel, that channel is your customer, not the end user. They have needs and actually those needs (not desires, needs) are more important than the end users' -- if your channel doesn't sell the product it doesn't matter how much you've worked to add that end-user feature.
Have the entire exec team go on a sales call once a quarter (not all together on the same call!). They don't have to say anything in the call (in fact it's much better they don't). I remember a CFO I told to go on a sales call telling me it was the first time in his career he had been in front of a customer, and that he really had had no idea what the customer thought about what we did. It makes the team far more effective.
Don't allow inter-departmental sniping. We all know it: sales guys won't sell the product and always want stupid one-off features; engineering is lazy and won't write what the customers actually want; marketing is just lying all the time. Instead make sure everybody understands that without sales folks, no paycheck. Without engineers, the sales folks have nothing to sell. Without marketing, who will know that they need our product, and how can we prioritize which features to build? That mild-mannered A/R clerk is the real difference between paycheck and no paycheck.
Don't do free pilots for enterprise. There's always someone interested in new products and technologies. If they can't put some skin in the game they aren't serious. Ideally cover your costs, but in any case make sure the number is larger than the person you're talking to is automatically authorized to spend (this means they'll need to get some buy in, PO, contract etc). They don't have to give it all to you up front, they just need some commitment and desire to do business if the pilot works. And they have to give you some payment up front, a meaningful amount.
Don't have one customer be all of your revenue (ideally don't have one customer be more than 20% of revenue). Edit: note that Google has this problem: 80+% of revenue is advertising, and Google is a large part of the overall advertising market. They have been trying, and failing, to fix this for more than a decade. This is a case where you want to be able to say "we aren't google".
Don't go in too high in the organization. If your first call is to the CEO and you convince them to try your product, it will be handed off to someone who likely only cares because the CEO said so, and would be quite happy to screw around a little and then tell the boss "yeah, we looked into it but it didn't work out". Follow the standard enterprise sales playbook and go in at the right level and find your "coach": the person who is committed to getting your product into the company because it will make their life better (perhaps promotion, but at least better execution).
This is for when you are bigger: If you work with another company, and your company meets with their CEO, your CEO should go to that meeting. Until you're Apple-sized, always treat your partners and customers as peers. If not, why are you working with them at all?