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To customers, to investors, to press, to team members, to potential hires, to partners. Get rid of the negative stereotypes around sales. You can be an introvert and be great at sales. You can be an engineer and be great at sales. You can have massive imposter syndrome and still be great at sales.
When customers are left waiting for updates, responses, or resolutions, their trust in your business erodes. In the fast-paced startup environment, where every customer counts, delays can quickly spiral into lost opportunities and tarnished reputations. Teams waste time manually sharing information instead of focusing on customers.
Yet in this age when customers have a thousand alternatives, and are overwhelmed by a multitude of messages, sales efforts can make or break a business. In fact, I believe modern entrepreneurs need to be super sales people, in the most positive sense, to their team as well as customers. No pain usually means no sales.
Yet, as a business consultant, I often find minimal focus on improving employee engagement and assessing their customer-facing performance. For example, I commonly see metrics to keep track of revenue per employee, overtime, and absenteeism, but I don’t often see measures of overall customer satisfaction with individual employees.
I see lots of new software put together on a shoestring as a “proof of concept” – but then gets rolled out to customers “asis” due to lack of time or money to “harden” the product. Sometimes the problem cause is that startups forget the technical standards and quality processes that every Internet rollout must follow to reduce the risk.
How To Sell Customer Experiences Not Customer Service written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Jeannie Walters In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeannie Walters. and the necessity of building a customer-centric culture.
Startups must tackle challenges from scarce resources to changing customer needs proactively. These systems apply complex algorithms to parse sales data, forecast demand trends, and manage stock levels efficiently. This helps prevent excess inventory and shortages, boosting operational effectiveness and customer happiness.
Consult with Ease: Personalize Your Customer Stragtegy Using AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with David Edelman In this episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing David Edelman , a seasoned digital transformation and marketing expert.
Offer Early Payment Incentives Late payments from customers are one of the most common reasons startups struggle with cash flow. For instance, offering a 2% discount for invoices paid within ten days can motivate customers to prioritize payments, improving cash flow.
Every new business I know dreams of building momentum in their business, where growth continues to increase, customers become your best advocates, and employee motivation is high. Unfortunately, with limited resources, this isn’t possible, and it frustrates customers and the team. Focus first on finding more of the right customers.
Very few entrepreneurs have the range of skills and experience to be the solution creator as well as business creator, or operational as well as sales leader. Look at the big picture first of development, finance, and marketing/sales. The challenge is to recognize and recruit that ideal partner match early with minimal cost and risk.
Finding a customer for your product in the Department of Defense is hard: Who should you talk to? Looking for DoD customers How do you know if they have money to spend on your product? How do you get their attention? It almost always starts with a Program Executive Office.
Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.
Businesses require an equally elegant business model, with the right price, messaging and delivery channel to the right target customers to keep the dream alive and growing. The founder had simply not done the work to validate a price and customer segment. Focus on collecting customer references.
Manage customer service. They probably have arbitrated differences many times before in their lives, and know how important it is to remain calm and soft-spoken in the face of emotional customers and processes that are not working. Marketing and sales to Gen-Y customers.
The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer. Joint venture with distributor or beneficiary.
I like the summary of the competitive reality in a new book, “ Rethinking Competitive Advantage: New Rules for the Digital Age ,” by Ram Charan, who relates a wealth of current experience from global clients: Customers expect a personalized experience. Features, availability, and brand are just the price of entry.
Sales Professional. The best sales people in any company are highly focused, and self-motivated by the commissions they can earn by closing a few big deals. Investors don’t fund entrepreneurs offering services, since these don’t scale, don’t have large margins, and need just a customer contract to start.
But ops & customer support is another 17-20% of revenue and arguably you couldn’t run the business if you took that away. Sales and marketing has been 30%+ basically forever, though undoubtedly Airbnb has enough brand recognition and loyal customers that if you turned off marketing spend then revenue would drop but not to zero.
I suggest looking for painful problems to solve, rather than “easier to use” or “nice to have” solutions, for customers with money. Customers line up to believe and buy from people who are viewed as leaders or experts relative to a specific solution. Collaborate with customers to tune your solution.
Others schedule exhaustive training sessions for everyone on the team, including showcase customers, to make sure that everyone paints a consistent picture. Due diligence always involves on-site visits, informal discussions with any or all members of the team, vendors, and good customers as well as bad. Traction in the marketplace.
You can have the best technology, but if customers don’t know you exist, or they don’t know how your technology solves a real problem for them, your startup will fail. How many customers will have any idea what this means to them? You need to clearly convey what makes your startup the only choice for your customers.
A business plan is the outward facing definition of the business you hope to drive with your hardware solution, with a hardware overview in the intro to highlight customer value and competitiveness. Use non-fuzzy terms to quantify customer value. Provide specifics on the customer business model.
Many passionate entrepreneurs fight to add more features into their new products and services, assuming that more function will make the solution more appealing to more customers. Focus is the art of limiting your scope to the key function that really matters for the majority of customers. It’s tough for an elephant to be agile.
Every startup lucky enough to get some traction gets to the point where they decide to hire some “regular employees” for sales, marketing, and administrative tasks. It’s what every customer looks for in every transaction. Sales will be the organization’s sole focus.” Employees will lose focus on their work.”
In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers. Missions and products that are too broad confuse your team, your customers, and potential investors. Marketing and sales chasm. Customer support chasm.
A strong Rev Ops function is crucial for optimizing revenue generation and enabling marketing, sales, and customer success teams to work cohesively. 11:00] How do you address companies that take a very siloed approach to Sales & Marketing? [13:24] Anything that your customers see, feel, or touch?
In other words, inventions are necessary but not sufficient to create real value for investors and customers. You need a viable business model and customers. Investors expect proof that your invention can be manufactured in volume, and can justify a sales price at least double the cost, to a large customer set that has money to spend.
You alone will never find enough hours in a day to keep with all the challenges of sales, support, and scaling the business, in addition to developing and delivering your solution. With information overload due to the Internet, you need to find your customers, rather than assume they will find you. Survival requires regular updates.
Provide website forums to help customers solve their own problems. Use free e-commerce software and services like PayPal before building an expensive customized solution. Finally, use customer feedback or promotions to attract more and more customers with less and less effort. Generate revenue around the clock.
Often, despite your passion and expectation, customers don’t immediately see the value and need that you see, and you have no idea why the initiative is stuck , and what could be the real customer issue or fix. Customers won’t buy what they can’t find or don’t understand. Customers need supporting approvals to fully benefit.
Contact key vendors and existing customers. This will cover the technology, the current state of development, and customer satisfaction. If the product is in customer hands, expect some customers to be interviewed. Sales and marketing strategy. All need to know who will be there and what you expect.
Others schedule exhaustive training sessions for everyone on the team, including showcase customers, to make sure that everyone paints a consistent picture. Due diligence always involves on-site visits, informal discussions with any or all members of the team, vendors, and good customers as well as bad. Traction in the marketplace.
Another major factor is the seasonality of sales. You can explore Amazon ecommerce fulfillment services to improve customer satisfaction and streamline operations. By using FBA, your products become eligible for Amazon Prime, which can significantly improve sales.
His focus is primarily on improving the results for traditional sales professionals, but I’m convinced that the same principles are equally critical for entrepreneurs selling their startup to investors, strategic partners, and customers. These attributes include the following: Specific moment-in-time indication.
Don’t forget to add all pesky “overhead” costs, with fixed elements, like rent, insurance, and administration, and variable elements, like delivery, customer support, and commissions. If you expect payment in 30 days, many customers will stretch this period to 45 days or even 90. This difference will kill your profit margin.
Most of the machines were custom-built to crack a specific code, and increasingly used a new ERA invention – the magnetic drum memory to process and analyze the coded texts. Sales in their first fiscal year were $1.5 ERAs systems were designed to solve problems defined by their Navy code-breaking customer.
Small businesses rely heavily on customer loyalty to stay competitive. But maintaining that loyalty isnt just about offering a great productits about creating an experience that keeps customers coming back. So, to help you, we will discuss a few innovative ways that you can use to improve your customer experience.
Source: Pexels Source: Pexels Customers Can Always Find You The great thing about having a solid online website is that you will have a constant online presence. An up-to-date website also ensures that your customers can access what they need when they need it. When you do, you’ll simply need to hire a web design agency.
Idea people must surround themselves with people who build momentum and get things done, including production, marketing, finance, and sales. Some entrepreneurs have an abundance of passion, but are short on the realities of customer needs, market trends, and financial constraints. The ability to make timely and fact-based decisions.
billion dollar sale to Oracle from Bozeman, Montana. Exposure to customers, incumbents, and competitors all drive success. Being close to your customers, your vendors, or even your competitors can make all the difference. Finding talent and financing isn’t the only hurdle to overcome on the road to startup success.
2 The Marketing Strategy Pyramid 3 Core Components of the Marketing Strategy Pyramid: 3 Business Strategy 4 Developing a Marketing Strategy 5 The Real Brand Strategy 6 Formulating a Growth Strategy 7 Building a Customer Strategy 8 Implementing a Team Strategy What is Marketing Strategy? We use something called the Marketing Hourglass.
Sales Professional. The best sales people in any company are highly focused, and self-motivated by the commissions they can earn by closing a few big deals. Investors don’t fund entrepreneurs offering services, since these don’t scale, don’t have large margins, and need just a customer contract to start.
Furniture stores encounter obstacles such as inventory management and ensuring top-notch customer service. Enhancing Customer Experience Creating a great customer experience goes beyond offering high-quality products in the world of retail. These observations facilitate decision-making, resulting in enhanced sales outcomes.
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