Étienne Garbugli's Blog, page 21

How to Know When You’re Ready to Close a Prospect in B2B

Closing a sale in the enterprise can easily get complicated. With multiple stakeholders involved, it’s essential to build relationships before even thinking of selling. To find out if you’re ready to close a sale, ask yourself the following questions: Am I speaking with someone who has the pain we’re solving? Am I speaking with someone […]

The post How to Know When You’re Ready to Close a Prospect in B2B appeared first on Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want.

What it Takes to Win in B2B

The key to succeeding in B2B is to learn to think like your customers; to think like an insider. It’s only by looking at the problems through the eyes of your prospects that the bottlenecks in their business become painfully obvious. You need to understand how your customers work, what they try to accomplish, who […]

Why Surveys Won’t Replace Interviews for Customer Development

To many first-time entrepreneurs, organizing and conducting one-on-one interviews feels unproductive. It takes away from product development, design and sales; it’s time-consuming. Maybe they have access to hundreds of email addresses from their website or have a following on social media, so the temptation is there to send surveys for validation. Why meet one-on-one when […]

How to Score Customer Problems by Budget Availability

The training stuff (that we were working on) was a cost center. People just said… we don’t have a budget for that, but we do have all these marketing problems. We had to be closer to the money. – Chris Savage, Wistia CEO It’s very likely that many of the prospects you speak with during […]

The Long Awaited ‘Apply the Lean Startup in B2B’ Course

The Lean B2B course has been in the works for a long time. I’m creating a course to help entrepreneurs and innovators apply the Lean Startup methodology in B2B (also the objective of this blog). The course is coming along nicely, but before going in full production, I’d like to get a feel for the […]

The Importance of Setting Deadlines with Early Customers in B2B

When looking for your first few customers, one of the things that your pitch should help reinforce is the credibility of your startup. It should be perceived as reliable and dependable. Although some entrepreneurs sell pilots without committing to a strict deadline, demonstrating reliability is a good way to reduce your prospects’ perception of risk […]

The Challenge of Starting a Business Without Competition

It’s really important not to create a product without any competition.” – Unknown Starting a new business is one of the most challenging things you can do. Unless you’re in it for the pain (possible), it makes sense to try to reduce your risk and difficulty level. Would solving the problems of your prospects mean […]

What to Do When You Don’t Have Enough Credibility to Break in the Enterprise?

At the Problem interview stage, were prospects consistently declining your connection requests, your meeting invitations or were they just not replying to your messages? Although a part of that can be attributed to lack of time or interest, if you’re not even near a 10% success ratio, there might be something wrong with your techniques […]

How to Pivot a B2B Startup

There’s been a lot of buzz around pivots ever since Eric Ries coined the term in a blog post in 2009. Ries says that a pivot is a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth. Pivots imply keeping one foot firmly in place as […]

B2B Customer Discovery Interview Questions – The Master List

For the writing of Lean B2B, I consolidated all the questions B2B entrepreneurs need to answer during the problem interview phase to put a compelling product together. It’s important to have a plan and follow an interview script to gather consistent data points on all your prospects (you can read more on customer interview code […]