Étienne Garbugli's Blog, page 26
October 28, 2014
How to Use Other Sales Staff to Gain a Competitive Edge
Find companies targeting your market, get close to them. – Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany Author Unless you’re creating a completely new market, which is very difficult for a start up, you’ll find that there are already people selling to your prospects. These people have done the legwork for you; they’re your […]
October 23, 2014
How to Turn a Full-time Job Into a B2B Business Opportunity
Last week, I was fortunate to be invited to present at the Lean Startup Meetup in Berlin and Leancamp Stuttgart – “Corporate Entrepreneurs meet Startups”. I met a lot of passionate entrepreneurs with very inspiring B2B (and B2C) projects and gave a talk on How to Turn a Full-time Job Into a B2B Business Opportunity. […]
October 16, 2014
What To Do When Your Pilot Customers Are Not Using Your Product
If you made your app easier to use I would start using it. I’m really busy right now but I’ll start using your app soon. If your app was cheaper I would start using it. – David Cancel, Serial Entrepreneur You were able to sell two, three, five or ten pilot projects, but after a […]
October 14, 2014
Why Pilot Projects Should Include a Conditional Purchase in B2B
The goal of any customer interaction is to help move the relationship forward. To make sure that it is during your pilot project, it’s essential to include terms for a conditional purchase of software. To avoid endless periods of pilot trial, it’s best to build in the acceptance criteria for the pilot. A memorandum of […]
October 9, 2014
How to Deal with Long Sales Cycles in B2B
As a rule of thumb, the bigger the sale amount, the longer the sales cycle. For startup founders who have never experienced an enterprise sales cycle, this can be quite unsettling. The average number of attempts needed to make a sale is eight to ten. If you’re trying to reach C-level executives, expect to make […]
October 6, 2014
Why Vontu Chose to Wait for the “Right” Early Customer
Michael Wolfe and his co-founders at Vontu had spent six months doing interviews researching various verticals to validate an opportunity in information security. They wanted to target the enterprise and learn how to make large deals. They needed to figure out early what the ideal customer would be. The co-founders did not have a product […]
October 2, 2014
Are you a Problem-Finder or a Problem-Solver?
Not only is there a correlation between your ability to find problems and your long-term success, there is also a relationship with the potential of your business endeavour. In research done more than 50 years ago and published in the book The Creative Vision, doctors Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago […]
September 29, 2014
16 Tips for Better Customer Interviews
There’s a good and a bad way to do interviews and, unfortunately, to the untrained eye, they look very similar. Here are 16 interview pointers to help conduct valuable interviews: Learn to stay quiet: The best interviews are 90% listening and 10% talking. Don’t feel like you need to talk. Have a plan: Create an […]
16 Tips to Do Great Customer Interviews
There’s a good and a bad way to do interviews and, unfortunately, to the untrained eye, they look very similar. Here are 16 interview pointers to help conduct valuable interviews: Learn to stay quiet: The best interviews are 90% listening and 10% talking. Don’t feel like you need to talk. Have a plan: Create an […]
September 22, 2014
How Entrepreneur Dharmesh Shah Turned a Full-time Job Into a Great Business Opportunity
Before HubSpot and the famous OnStartups blog, Dharmesh Shah worked as a developer for SunGard, a leading software and technology services company working with financial institutions. One day at work, Dharmesh had the idea to create a data conversion tool to allow financial institutions to transfer customers from one institution to another. Dharmesh brought his […]
