I have written many posts on what it takes to enter the US market. Most of my past posts have been around sales and marketing. However, there is a much more fundamental, one might say visceral, approach to entering a new market. How committed are you to it? As the famous anecdote goes of the hen laying an egg (the hen is involved) vs the chicken that gets cooked (the chicken is committed). Does...
The 25th playbook roundtable held last week (01 March 2014) brought together about 14 startup practitioners to discuss and gain insights on some of the challenging aspects of Sales in product companies. This roundtable was hosted at Accel Partners office in Bangalore, and was led by Aneesh Reddy, from Capillary Technologies. In a span of about 5 hours, a diverse set of topics were discussed...
Why Buy Mine? This is the question I have kept asking myself ever since Pallav and Paras did their “Global Lean Sales” session at the #PNCamp in November. I used to send a long email before and often had to explain a lot to why we charge higher. Now I just use the below message and it does the job. There is nothing different from what we were doing earlier. But our message to our market is now...
When it comes to a successful negotiation, which is more important: strategy or skill? The definition of the verb, negotiate, is to “deal or bargain with others, as in the preparation of a treaty or contract or in preliminaries to a business deal.” In a sales context, the key definition is to “bargain in order to create, or culminate, a business deal.” Sales professionals are often negotiating...
There are many solutions that are targeted at a niche, that solve a specific problem. Selling these is relatively easy. You know the target, you know the problem. The challenge comes with the horizontal solutions, or ones that apply to wide variety of industries and business problems. There is tremendous potential opportunity there and yet they are devilishly difficult to sell for a small company...
Vivek from iCreate facilitated yet another juicy round table with lessons learnt ‘from the trenches’. While this article provides a distilled summary, it cannot do justice to in-person learning. I strongly encourage you to attend the next iSPIRT round table. Vivek started off by saying that there is no silver bullet. Every product exists in its specific market conditions. Different things work...
The first call you make to a prospect is critical. It could make or break you. And yet, I find capable, well-meaning, highly intelligent people not putting in the effort to prepare for it. While it is obvious, and most definitely not rocket science, it helps to have a checklist to go against. I recently put together a short checklist for a client of what to think about when making the first call...
It’s a conference….it’s a summit….it’s a camp! Being a startup ourselves, we constantly listen to our customers (who are startups as well!) and try and come up with initiatives that solve their problems and address their pain points. In that regard, the genesis and the program design of the ProductNation Camp has come from what we’ve been hearing from you – the Indian product startup...
Exactly a month away from the inaugural #PNCamp and as schedules and attendees are being finalized, we are getting a lot of questions about what exactly is going to happen on D-Days, especially since we have told everyone we are not going to have one-to-many speaking sessions and workshops that have been the norm. I spoke to Pallav Nadhani(FusionCharts) today, who is planning and designing the...
The biggest challenge a start-up faces in its first year is not discovery but assertion. Assertion comes from customers agreeing that the product is of value and can provide RoI for both time and money. While advertising dollars can bring your audience to you, only quality can keep them engaged and interested. As a SaaS based solution, your website is THE most important avenue for your customers...
