Whether or not you’re able to quickly map buying influencers, remember that someone always plays the roles of the economic, technical and user buyers in B2B. Maybe a single person plays all roles in a small business, but those influences can always be found. Mapping
“Selling only to engineers is like nerd-to-nerd selling, and it doesn’t usually work. You can get stuck in endless cycles of non-decision.” – Ken Morse, MIT Entrepreneurship Center Founding Managing Director, 1996-2009 In every organization, you’ll find gatekeepers actively trying to block sales. A gatekeeper
This past month, I took some time to research the evolution of 12 Billion-Dollar B2B startups looking at everything from their early designs, first websites, and their current product offerings. It was a very time-consuming process looking at Wayback Machine updates, blog posts and archived
The best salesperson is the founder. Others won’t have the passion for it. – Bill Aulet, Disciplined Entrepreneurship author and Serial Entrepreneur There are different types of salespeople. There’s a kind that sells a clearly defined product following an established process, and then there’s another
Many entrepreneurs start off as consultants to pay the bills while they explore business opportunities. Working as consultants gives them visibility into the business problems of companies, build proximity with customers, and allow them to develop domain expertise around their consulting services, which can then
Although The Lean Startup methodology works really well, the book’s near-exclusive focus on consumer startups like IMVU, Zappos, Dropbox, and Grockit has led many big-ticket B2B entrepreneurs to misinterpret its lessons. The Challenges of Applying The Lean Startup in B2B While the core principles of
When doing customer development, selling is not enough. You need to learn why clients buy to be able to reproduce sales in the same market with the same model and the same pitch. In other words, you’re looking for a repeatable and predictable model. To
