Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

Technology 146

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 146

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. Some sales guy who was too busy to take the meeting was probably retired in Maui on the commissions. Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 272

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 272

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 133

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. The first question to ask is: “Does your startup have market risk or is it dominated by technical risk?” Lean Startup /Customer Development is used to find answers to the unknowns about customers and markets. Does this help?

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

The initial hypothesis for Epiphany (from my much smarter partner Ben ) was that as departments in the enterprise (manufacturing, finance, customer support sales) became automated, the marketing department would eventually get its turn. This is the pivot, a crucial tactical maneuver for the lean startup [.]

Silicon Valley 261

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 261

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

Lean 264

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 264

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show. This is worthy of an open and honest discussion with sales up front. And inviting to the booth/dinner/private demo.

Silicon Valley 139

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 139

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” However, if the founder is still running the company, the last thing he wants is a company complacent with day-to-day execution.

Customer 218

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 218

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. » Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place. , AKPC_IDS += "1128,"; (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Posted in Leadership | Tagged [.] On its first day of trading, Netscape stock closed at $58/share, valuing the company at $2.7

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

We knew from back-of-the-envelope calculations that I would need 3 times the combined marketing and sales budgets of the incumbents for a head-on assault. (I The 3:1 Lanchester Laws said I would need $60M in marketing and sales spending to win. You need to hire the right type of sales people for the type of [.]

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 161

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. We four instructors would grumble and complain to one another about our lack of leadership. Perhaps if you have a union job based on seniority, but not in any startup I’ve ever seen.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. Reply SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards « Steve Blank , on April 30, 2009 at 5:02 am Said: [.] The Potrero benchmark strategy was one component of this creating end user demand through PR.)

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 128

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. Since we had gotten out of the software business when we came out of Chapter 11 , and our sales channel didn’t know what to do with software, we licensed ReelTime to Adobe. We knew something our CEO didn’t.

Video 190

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

If you’ve never seen Eric’s Lean Startup presentation, take a few minutes to at least watch his part. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. The Customer Development talk can be seen here. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The slides are here.

Customer Development 158

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 158

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. AKPC_IDS += "1115,"; (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Posted in Leadership | Tagged [.] carry on reading.

Customer Development 256

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 256

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

However, in catching up with the VP of Sales of Ardent last night, I was reminded one of the few times I did return for closure. In my career I’ve been involved with lots of sales deals, and for some reason losing this was the one deal I never forgot. It was for sale on Ebay. I liked to fail fast, move on, and not look back.

Silicon Valley 214

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 214

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

Customer Development 223

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 223

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. 2) Provide corporate management with near real-time divisional sales reports and budgets that indicated when they deviated from plan. billion in sales in today’s dollars.) One guy really did all of this.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 184

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

I put together a one-page website, a list of 100 people to reach out to, and a cold email script that would make seasoned sales professionals cringe. These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Inversely, if you’re using the agency model to fund another startup or product, you should probably keep things lean.

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan.

Silicon Valley 272

Silicon Valley Product Startup RSS 272

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

But I wrote a post about an iterative, process-oriented approach to high-tech sales and marketing on 2.9.9. Reply Customer Development and Start-up Models « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on March 26, 2009 at 3:06 am Said: [.]

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 120

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. Before you go to a trade show sales and marketing need to agree to measurable goals. Then offer those budget dollars to the VP of Sales.

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 207

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Reply Ray Debs , on April 29, 2009 at 6:55 pm Said: Hi Steve, I am thoroughly enjoying reading your blog posts, and looking forward to more.

Silicon Valley 192

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 192

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Rule 1: In an existing market Customer Development means not only understanding potential customers, but your competitors in detail – their product features, their sales channels, their demand creation strategy, their business model, etc. Me – “So what’s the problem?” We only have 20 customers, and Large Company x has millions.”

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 210

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.&# (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Or simply wishful thinking?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

I took a deep breath and asked, “Ok, if you were, what percentage of your sales do you think these markets would be in 5 years?” “I guess less than 5%,” was the answer. How big are your Mexican and Spanish markets,” I asked? Well, we’re not in those markets today… but we might be some day.”

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 208

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. steve Elephants Can Dance – Reinventing HP » Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place. , I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.)

Silicon Valley 193

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 193

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Just like catching a bug in development is cheaper than fixing it once it has been released, confirming lack of customer demand prior to ramping up a sales engine is cheaper than finding out once you have a paid sales team.

Venture Capital 246

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 246

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. I’m sure at Enron and Madoff there were plaques and posters about ethics. Just remember ethics and values are about what you practice when the going gets tough. Do the right thing. It pays off in the end.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 128

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

He also shared his perspective on M&A (including Uber’s recent acquisitions of Postmates and Drizly), autonomous vehicles, the complexities of working in highly regulated industries, and how his personal and professional background shaped the way he approaches leadership today. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT. He couldn’t come back.

Iran 41

Iran Technical Review Non-Compete Lean 41

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Your goal was to preserve your cash while you turned these guesses into facts and searched for a repeatable and scalable sales model. Your presentation doesn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. They will realize that you have built a startup that’s agile, resilient and customer-centric.

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 270

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Since the training department was part of sales no one really paid attention to the four of us. It was a Friday (about ¾’s through my work week) and I was in a sales department meeting. The VP of Sales gave me a funny look and just moved on with the agenda. VP of Sales? Repeat every day, six or seven days a week.

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 207

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

I knew we were selling through a multi-level indirect sales channel. That’s a mouthful to say that our sales people didn’t sell our products directly to a customer. Instead they managed rep firms (independent sales companies that carried multiple, non-competing products) that called on computer resellers that sold to the customers.

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. Stay hungry, stay lean. I don’t want to be hungry and lean (nor do I want to be full and fat). It was an odd feeling at that time, we thought we have made it and fail to stay lean and hungry. That’s when things went south. Don’t let it happen to you.

Silicon Valley 233

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 233

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. Reply My take on Customer Development and the Lean Startup | Recess Mobile Blog , on January 9, 2010 at 5:29 am Said: [.] Reply Yuri Ammosov , on December 15, 2009 at 4:28 pm Said: Hmmm.

Customer Development 288

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 288