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How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle and Avoid Wasting Time

Both Sides of the Table

If you don’t have a good sales methodology already in place in your organization you might try reading that last link. You need to align your selling cycle with a buyers purchasing cycle otherwise you’re wasting your time and theirs. If they’re not buying you need to be marketing to them not selling to them.

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What’s more important: product or sales?

Version One Ventures

It’s the age-old debate among start-up circles: which is more important to the success of a start-up: the strength of the sales/distribution strategy or the quality of the product? To be successful, a stand-alone company needs a top-notch product and a clever distribution/sales strategy.

Sales 144
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7 Key Factors Obscure Your Customer Acquisition Costs

Startup Professionals Musings

What if someone sees an ad, visits a web page, watches a video, downloads a brochure, responds to an e-mail, and finally buys a product? Long sales cycles obscure beginning and end of costs. More empowered buyers have resulted in longer sales cycles. You have to determine how to share these costs and credit.

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Why Real Learning is Outside the Building, Not Demo Day

Steve Blank

While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of our class final presentations is “ Lessons Learned ” – about product/market fit, pricing, acquisition/activation costs, pricing, partners, etc. We heard consistently that the product looked good and solved a problem, but it was not an important problem.

Lean 322
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Common B2B Challenges and How To Solve Them

ConversionXL

From long sales cycles to trying to stand out from the sea of sameness, B2B companies face an uphill battle from the start. I recently surveyed and interviewed over 200+ B2B executives, marketing & sales leaders to find out exactly what challenges they currently face and what they are doing to overcome them.

B2B 150
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Scaling Sales: Arming & Aiming – A’s, B’s & C’s

Both Sides of the Table

But what happened to me and what I think happens to others is that this tacit knowledge of how to sell your company’s products is not as institutionalized as you think. The new hires that you pick up will use your same sales decks created by marketing but will have less impact and you often don’t realize it’s happening.

Sales 286
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Pricing determines your business

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Price is as important as any other feature to determine product/market “fit.” ” How many times have you seen someone struggle with an inferior product because they cannot afford the better one? Price is inextricably linked to brand, product, and purchasing decisions — by whom, why, how, and when.