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Startups •Jazzed about doing something new •Ability to be both strategic and execution-oriented •Comfortable with uncertainty and flexible enough to take on a series of undefined roles and tasks •Biased toward action •Analytical toward optimizing your own time/resources •An aptitude and interest in playing a broad role and evolving your career as the business morphs •Willing to hustle and go beyond the call of duty, even if it means sacrificing personal time •Comfortable with rapid decision making in uncertain situations
My dad also wanted every one of his employees to care deeply about the company. If they were to walk through the entrance and pass by the front desk and see a staple on the rug, he wanted any of them to bend down, pick up that staple, and throw it out. When you’re in a big company and you walk by a staple, you think, “Oh, Cleaning will get that.” My dad wanted everybody to think like an owner—to look around and see what needed to be improved, what needed to be fixed, what needed to be better. He wanted them to ask, “How do we make this place even more awesome?”
Those two attributes—pushing the limits and thinking like an owner—are critical for all startup employees. If you can program your mind to internalize those two attributes, you can fit into every startup out there.
In a startup, you become emotionally invested. There’s a greater sense of adventure. There’s a greater sense of mission and purpose. There’s a sense that you’re all banded together against all odds to try to achieve something no one has ever achieved before. And your work actually matters: every day, you’re doing something that materially impacts the value and success of the company.
You’re inventing. You’re creating. There are no rules. No one is giving you the playbook. That’s why I love StartUpLand—because in it, nothing is “just the way it is.”
Many use the term pre-product/market fit to characterize this nascent stage of a startup, which means the product is not yet being embraced by customers and there is more work to do to figure out how to fit with what the particular market requires.
When you’re on the dirt road, you are typically post-product/market fit and you are starting to find a repeatable business model and address the early challenges of scale.
startups are usually high-tech, dynamic, fast-growing, and ambitious. Ambition is the difference. Ambition is the key.
The title is often a signal of what is expected of the individual when the company grows rather than what the job looks like at that moment. In other words, if you expect the employee to
In a startup, the sheer pace of decision making and the impact of those decisions can grow your skills so much more quickly than they would otherwise. I used to joke that I was on “startup time”—I was so dramatically challenged every day, it was like working in “dog years”—every year was the equivalent in experience of seven with an established company.
To manage the uncertainty that confronts technology startups, entrepreneurs must shape their business to fit the market—and simultaneously shape the market to fit their business.
As an effective business development executive, you’re a strategist, deal maker, and brand ambassador all rolled into one.
A well-prepared business development team goes to partner meetings armed with a model projecting incremental value to the partner—quantifying either increased revenue, cost savings or customer loyalty to both sides as a result of the deal.
Savvy business development executives rely on their personal and professional networks, and they also leverage the networks of their firm’s senior executives, board of directors, investors, and advisers.
After securing a first meeting—which often will be with a counterpart on the potential partner’s business development team—the selling process begins.
It is crucial to find a senior champion at the prospective partner’s organization in order to ensure that the deal remains a top priority. In a smaller company, the champion might be the CEO; in larger organizations, it could be a division manager, the CFO (when the deal might meaningfully impact the partner’s profit and loss [P&L] profile), the CIO (for IT products), or the CMO. Gaining the support of senior line executives of the larger organization is critical, since they—unlike Business Development—control the resources and develop and secure the budget needed to approve and implement a
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You also need to run an internal sales effort to ensure there will be an executive champion and cross-functional support within your own organization.
BD executives will often team up closely with a product manager to build internal support for the partnership, and a product manager may even be assigned to a large partner to own e...
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To ensure that both sides are on the same page with more complex deals, a letter of intent (LOI), signed by both parties but usually legally nonbinding, may specify—without employing “legalese”—the deal’s key objectives and the main rights and responsibilities of each side. With the LOI for guidance, you can draft and negotiate a definitive agreement.
After the deal is negotiated and signed, you may lead the internal implementation process, although this responsibility is sometimes handed off to another function.
It’s common in startups to realize that it’s easy to sign a deal, but hard to implement it. The priorities for both sides may change, so partnership performance against expectations needs to be monitored constantly.
At a startup’s earliest stages, it focuses on understanding the ecosystem and on building initial relationships. Sometimes those relationships are opportunistic as much as strategic—a startup might work with a partner because of a connection in the network or perhaps because they are simply willing to work with them. Mid-stage, biz dev tries to be more intentional about selecting partners and works on accelerating the pace of deal making. Initial deals will often have particular terms that require custom development work. Eventually, though, more deals will follow a standard template. At a
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business development was simply sales without the quota, particularly because you had no idea how to sell the product yet and so it required a lot of creativity.
Business Development tends to be pretty flexible in how it is defined. Some founders swear by hiring a BD person at the early stages to help figure out the partner ecosystem and strike the initial deals that lay the groundwork for scaling product distribution. In searching for product/market fit and validating their hypothesis for the business model, founders may be applying crucial assumptions about the willingness of target partners to commit to the venture that need to be tested early on.
Once they have achieved product/market fit, startups generally hire a dedicated BD executive to help accelerate growth.
The most important thing you need to know going into any discussion or interaction with a big company is that you’re Captain Ahab, and the big company is Moby Dick … When Captain Ahab went in search of the great white whale Moby Dick, he had absolutely no idea whether he would find Moby Dick, whether Moby Dick would allow himself to be found, whether Moby Dick would try to immediately capsize the ship or instead play cat and mouse, or whether Moby Dick was off mating with his giant whale girlfriend. — MARC ANDREESSEN
When early-stage startups negotiate deals with large corporations, they usually have to cope with some asymmetries in bargaining power.
As a startup, as soon as you’re reliant on another company for success, it’s going to be tough. Nobody was going to move on our time frame, so we were not in control of our own destiny.”;
Be patient. •Don’t obsessively position any deal as a “do-or-die” proposition. •Be wary of bad deals. •Be aware that big companies often care more about other big companies’ plans than about closing deals with startups. •Hire a business development professional who knows how to handle big company executives. •Never assume that a deal is finished “until the ink hits the paper.” Once a deal is signed, the startup must be on guard against signs that the big company is simply using the partnership to learn about a new technology or product, in order to accelerate the in-house development of
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For a marketing executive, being customer focused means paying attention to your internal customers as well as your external ones.
The two most expensive functions at a startup are the product team and the sales team.
Marketing profoundly affects them both: on one side, it heavily influences product design; on the other, it focuses and supports Sales.
So the marketing function is like the productivity engine of the startup. When a startup has a great marketing function, the product and sales teams both look...
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Everybody typically credits the head of Sales and the head of Product, but behind the scenes, it’s Market...
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Marketing, in other words, is the unsung hero...
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Strangely, startups often hire marketing people too late.
When a startup misses its sales numbers, the salespeople get blamed. But the problem, typically, is not that the salespeople are incompetent; it’s that the startup lacks marketers who can generate leads and acquisitions for those salespeople. As a result, Sales is either getting bad leads or no leads at all. They’re lacking the good, competitive weapons that skilled marketers can provide, so they’re struggling to win. That’s when the company needs Marketing. It needs Marketing to provide support for Sales.
Why things didnt work out @ BPI
before the initial product launch, even if the entire function is one person who serves as a generalist.
Because it is so easy to equate Sales with revenue, startups tend to overinvest in Sales and underinvest in Marketing.
Let’s say that every additional sales rep at a hypothetical startup adds another $1 million in revenue. The math is easy; if the startup wants to grow $5 million more in revenue, it should just hire five more salespeople. As it turns out, however, one or two marketers who can help create demand and pull can take a startup from $1 million per sales rep to $1.5 million per sales rep—because marketers help the sales team become more efficient and more productive.
This is key. Marketing increases sales efficiency
Ramping up your marketing requires more creativity. Maybe that’s a person who does content marketing. Maybe it’s a growth hacker. Maybe it’s an evangelist. Maybe it’s a community manager.
Startup marketing is all about a dynamic blend of creativity, analytics, and science.
At the top of the funnel, you generate awareness and interest in your product. In the middle of the funnel, you educate prospective customers and establish preference, getting them to engage with you to learn more. At the bottom of the funnel, you try to convert prospects into actual customers.
Content marketing, inbound marketing, and social media marketing now have enormous impact. With their nascent brands and immature distribution channels, startups focus on breaking through the clutter by generating high-quality, engaging content that leads to discovery and awareness among prospective buyers.
Many people who have never responded to a telemarketer or a direct mail piece will respond to a piece of informative content they read on the web or a piece of content they saw on social media streams.
people research a product online and purchase it as a result of content they discover. Because of this, content marketing and inbound marketing have exploded and marketing departments at startups are looking for greater expertise in those areas.
The ideal startup marketer is a good writer, effective at crafting emails that yield engagement; competent at generating slide presentations that inspire easy sharing; skilled at producing webinars and videos; and, all in all, able to drive awareness and interest through a deep understanding of the customer.
marketers are not just skilled at writing long-form material (white papers, website copy, product data sheets) but also producing creative short-form content that fits into the typical social channels.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
in the era of “big data meets marketing,” that problem is no longer prevalent.
