The first rule of fight club is….
I often advise early stage entrepreneurs to check with real customers that their perception of the value of the product is correct. This means speaking to people. BUT how do you do market research, on your new product idea, without giving away the farm? It’s very easy to give a clue to a prospective customer [...]
Hiring a sales guy is like buying a gun
Don’t worry it’s just an analogy…If you were to buy a gun, for arguments sake, and tried to do some target shooting but failed to hit anything you aimed at. What do you think the gun shop would say if you took the gun back claiming it didn’t work, because it kept missing the target? [...]
It’s in your customers’ interest to pay royalty fees
I spent quite a few years selling technology in my career both in products and as licensable technology. In the latter part I spent 6 years acquiring technology for a large semiconductor manufacturer. This experience gave me a good perspective, from both sides, on the subject of paying royalty fees for licensed technology. I remember [...]
The answers Yes, what’s the question?
In tough times the temptation for small companies is to become driven by customers every demand to develop products on their request. In my own past experience I’ve said to customers “The answers Yes, What’s the question?” and they love it! This may seem a fine strategy and may get you some short to medium [...]
Ensure the Price is Right for you
In many early stage companies the price for a high value premium product is often set too low. In my meetings with Entrepreneurs a standard tip is “try raising the price and see what happens”. Later on I often see that many come back to me surprised that the customers did not query the higher [...]
Be careful not to telegraph your “tell”
In a negotiation you want the process to be a fair exchange of terms on both sides. Newcomers to the negotiating game often give too much away early on and have a fight to get back to a reasonable position later in the relationship. It’s often impossible to raise a price back to a preferred [...]
There’s a skeleton in the elevator
Elevator pitches are a key part of business, both for raising investment and winning customer approvals that 90 second explanation of your proposition can make a huge difference. The elevator pitch was coined, originally, in the USA to describe the opportunity arising from the chance encounter in an elevator (Lift for UK readers) with a [...]
PCWorld don’t sell Pizzas
Apologies to PCW as I’m sure they could sell Pizzas if they really put their minds to it! This point is related to the importance of choosing the right sales channel for your product based on skills and customer recognition. Two main problems with selecting the wrong sales channel, firstly the channel may not be [...]
37% of strategies fail
On reading a Harvard Business Review article by Mankins & Steele in 2005 I found it very useful to study the causes for failure in strategy development and implementation. The word strategy has become an overused and misused term in modern business. We attempt to make something more important by attaching the word strategic to [...]
Your investor proposition is like a 3 legged stool
As I regularly prepare companies for investment readiness I’m asked many times what investors are looking for. This is a tricky question especially in these credit squeeze times. However many significant investment funds were financed before the current crisis and may be in a position to invest if the proposition is right. So what is [...]
