HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Thursday, March 08, 2018
Wednesday, March 07, 2018
New INC. Magazine Blog Post by 1871 CEO Howard Tullman
Why Startup CEOs Still Have to Make
Sales Calls
It's not your strength, or maybe be
even what you enjoy doing. But being on hand to show the flag--and close the
deals-- isn't something you can simply hand off to the sales team.
CEO, 1871@tullman
I wrote a while ago
about when and how the founder in a startup should decide that he or she no
longer needs to be making every sales call. My focus then was on the importance
of understanding and quantifying your product's state of development and
relative maturity. The idea is that until you know exactly what you're selling
--by doing it over and over again and not as a one-off-- and know that it can
be sold consistently by others, you'll need to stay in the field and keep selling.
That's because your product is still being developed on
the fly and continually redesigned/reconfigured to better suit the real
requirements and demands of the customers. And, the fact is that
ultimately only you can make the critical design and development decisions and
you'll do a much better job of that if you are hearing it directly from the end
users and not from a bunch of whiny salespeople. But once you do reach that
point, you need to kick yourself upstairs and focus on other things. I encouraged
CEOs who spent too much effort selling to
better use and optimize their time. I suggested that they
needed to find competent sales managers and others who could tee up just the
right meetings for them - not "opening" meetings which are a dime a
dozen - but "closing" meetings where the deals got done.
Finding these sales meat-eaters isn't easy; they are the hardest
hires for any startup, but it's absolutely critical to have them onboard if
you're going to build a viable business. There's no more challenging job than
being the person who has to fire people. Everyone else gets to talk about what
a tight-knit, stick-together group the company is (just like a "family"
of friends), but the sales manager is the one who has to deliver the bad news
over and over again. This essential role doesn't win any popularity
contests and - just to be clear -most CEOs suck at it. They're more focused on
leading the charge forward and being the business's biggest cheerleader rather
than handing out the monthly pink slips. (See handing out the monthly pink
slips.
When you're hiring sales talent, you need to also be careful to
avoid the empire builders. There's a whole generation or two of sales
management types whose experience is in large organizations. I have found
fairly consistently that they are the wrongest guys possible for a startup
because they grew up in a system where they measured their value and their
success by the sheer number of people they managed rather than the results that
those folks delivered. Nothing kills a young business faster than bloat and
bureaucracy and having too many sales people sitting on their hands and not
selling is the worst kind of poison. So be careful what you wish for and who
you hire for this critical job.
And, at the other end
of the spectrum, I'm also seeing more and more startup CEOs who discover way
too soon that they don't like the wear and tear, the travel, and the rejection
that are all crucial parts of selling a new product or service. So they
retreat, thinking they can run their businesses while they're sitting on their
butts behind a desk back in the office. That's not how this game works; that
behavior is a formula for failure. You may not be an extrovert, you may not be
the world's greatest storyteller or presenter, and you may not even know the
technology that underlies your business as well as half the other people in the
company. You are, however, the boss and today that fact alone means a
lot, at least to the people who make the final purchasing decisions.
Remember that these buyers are typically older than you, they grew up in
strictly hierarchical systems where titles count, and they need to be made to
feel important and respected if they're gonna sign off on your deal. No offense
to any of the members of your team, but they don't want to deal with the
monkey-- they need to see the organ grinder. That's you.
Why? For all the
obvious reasons. (1) People don't really care how much you know until they know
how much you care. Showing up shows them that you actually do care. (2)
Startups are notoriously scattered and in a hurry. Focus and attention to
detail are scarce commodities and the customers want to know that you
personally are connected, paying attention, and directly engaged with their
business, their concerns and their problems. And finally, (3) they want to hear
it from the horse's mouth. Not second hand. They want commitments and
assurances from you (since they know that the sales guys will tell them
anything and promise them the world) that you will stand up for and stand
behind your product or service and make good on whatever they've been promised.
The buck always stops with you.
None of this is very
tough. You just have to say what you're going to do and do what you said you
would and everything will be hunky-dory.
Friday, March 02, 2018
New INC. Magazine Blog Post by 1871 CEO Howard Tullman
Why You Should Never Let Kylie Jenner
Endorse Your Product
Authenticity, not hype, is the best
way to build your brand.
I'm sure that it was a major PR and ego blow to the team at Snap
-- and apparently to Snap's market cap --
when, to the utter surprise and amazement of the social media morons who
breathlessly track and "report" on all this commotion and noise, one
member of the hyper-alliterative Kardashian family (does
it really matter which one?) abruptly decided to abandon her
stupefying Snapchatting in favor of some equally superficial
and petulant posturing on Instagram. This news somehow disturbed the social
media universe and the stock market at the same time. More importantly, it also
confirmed once again that having your product or service in Facebook's sights
is never a good place for any young business to be.
I'd say that you can
really begin to believe the end of the world is near when the allegedly
rational and arguably analytical stock market reacts instantly, if
thoughtlessly, to trivial and wholly manufactured "news" like this
and immediately erases a billion dollars of value. True, this is a stock that
was and continues to be grossly overvalued. I guess, in that respect, you could
say, "no harm, no foul," since this was a business which deserved getting
its just rewards. Or maybe the better way to put it is that, if your whole
business is built on social media hype and
fundamental lies from Day One, then it's entirely fitting that
your future fortunes should live or die based on the same artificial factoids
and frenzied reliance on the feeble functionaries who make up this make-believe
world.
But the good news is
that I think we may finally be coming to the belated realization that the vast
majority of the world -- including most of the people who pay attention
(engagement, not eyeballs), really buy things (actual revenues), and matter
materially to marketplaces (making money, not made-up metrics) -- just don't care
about celebrities any more.
Movie stars don't
matter much when movie theater attendance is at a 20-year low. Traditional
TV is in the toilet, with half the millennials now totally disconnected and
cutting the cable so TV "stars" are also toast. And since so many of
us no longer believe what we see on the tube anyway, the credibility of our
newscasters is colossally low. Amazon is now the most trusted brand in the U.S.
and because we all get our news from social media channels -- not TV -- the
traditional networks' "brands" are busted -- most people couldn't
tell you the actual source of any news they know, but they can typically tell
you where they saw it on social media.
We just don't care what any of these people do or say; their
inauthentic product endorsements and touching tributes are increasingly
ineffective and not worth the inflated costs of securing them; and as their
recent, and massively counter-productive, political involvement convincingly
demonstrated, we certainly don't care what they "think," if that's
what it can be called. YouTube lost about $300 million learning these new
realities a couple of years ago when it tried to launch 100 celebrity-based
channels and no one showed up to watch.
And when you move
downstream from the arguably talented film folks to the cretins that pass for
reality-TV celebs, things get even worse. It's hard to imagine that anyone
could care about the actions, antics, attitudes and altercations of these
C-level, no-talent bozos who are unceasingly foisted upon us by the people who
program cable and curate the new digital media channels. If the people in the
control booths think that we identify with these idiots (rather than laughing
at them), they're even more out of touch than anyone suspected.
Humiliation TV jumped the shark years ago, but clearly not
everyone got the message. The current cast of characters on most of these shows
are people we're much more likely to pity than to regard as peers. Ignorance in
action is never attractive when we're trying to learn something of value.
Interestingly, if you track the evolution of Shark Tank, the shift is very clear. The balance of
featured businesses has moved dramatically toward winners and celebrations of
success, and no longer do we see anywhere near the number of clueless creators
who used to be a big part of the program.
Peer-to-peer
programming, people we can relate to and respect, and enhanced mediated
connections are where we're headed. There's a very good reason that Netflix,
which is totally data-driven and responsive to our demonstrated desires, is now
bigger than cable. We're looking for substance, not sparkle. Live streaming
media -- whether it's interactive education, practical conversations, or group
exercising -- are the models for the future. We want a sense of community, we
want shared experiences, we want real and valuable content, and we want
authentic communication and sharing.
The Kardashian krash
tells you that most of the media guys still haven't gotten the message. That's
why the medium is such a mess.
Thursday, March 01, 2018
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