November 16th, 2008
Building a strong referral base is critical to every entrepreneur. A referral is an introduction to a prospect with an endorsement. They come from shared success with your customers or colleagues, someone who knows your potential and can vouch for you or your team’s ability to deliver. These individuals are the best way for you to get new business. However, it requires time and energy to build and maintain the relationships that grow your referral networks. When someone give you a referral here are a couple tips on how to nurture it.
- Model your relationship after the Save-the-Children Sponsor Program
- Pictures
- Thank you Letters
- Be proactive with Thanks
- Communicate on Progress
- Keep Them in the Loop
- Manage their Reputation
- Deliver for them
- Remember
- they are sponsoring you
- reputations are hard to build and easy to dent
- you are creating “customers in common”
- Be clear on service demarcation (small overlaps are better than gaps)
November 1st, 2008
Many start-up founders believe that the sales process should be this straightforward:
- Get the phone to ring (or e-mail inbox or skype or web contact form)
- Tell your prospect about your offering
- Take the order
Alas it is normally not this simple, especially if you are selling to businesses. We do encounter some startups that are looking for “smarter prospects” who will buy after they explain their offering but the typical business customer has a more complex buying process. At a minimum the prospect needs to understand your offer, to believe you can deliver the benefits that you promise, and to act based on an important if not critical business need.
It will normally take multiple interactions with a prospect to turn them into a customer. For business customers this may take weeks to months. This means that you will need to keep track of more than one prospect and more than one contact with each of them. Even for those readers blessed with a powerful memory this will require a system and a systematic approach. There are number of software tools available to track contacts/prospects:
Any of these are acceptable provided that you enter a minimum amount of information for every prospect and every contact with them. To be able to determine if a particular lead generation approach is working you will need to track the source of each prospect’s call and whether or not you ultimately won their business. This allows you to reinforce methods that are working with more time and budget, and to adjust or discontinue methods that fail generate calls that lead to revenue.
We believe that you need to be tracking the following:
- Opportunity (Contact Name, Company, E-Mail, and Phone): If you are selling to a business you may need to group several different contact names under one company or opportunity name.
- Source (e.g. Person, Event, Ad, URL): Be sure to track the path that each prospect followed to find you. Ask if it was a referral (if so from whom), a search engine query, an advertisement, a paper or blog post, or a speaking engagement.
- Status in sales process (e.g. Initial Contact, Percolate, Pitch/Demo, In Evaluation or Benchmark, Quoted/Proposal)
- Next Action Date: Always get clarity with a prospect on when you will contact them next, even if they plan to contact you (e.g. “If I don’t hear from you by Wednesday I will call you Monday of the following week). This should be less than six weeks and is normally one or two weeks for an active prospect.
- Quoted - Proposal Expiration Date. Never put a quote or proposal in front of a prospect without an expiration date. This sets up two natural follow up points: before it’s due and after it’s expired. This also allows you to have a discussion about their decision time frame (e.g. “How long would you like the quote good for?”).
- Win/Loss: Always follow through and determine if they ultimately selected another vendor and if they did buy, why did they buy.
Startup founders with an engineering background tend to focus much more on the tool, and selecting a tool, and less on the daily follow through need to track essential information for each contact with every prospect. For most of the firms that we work with, until they are really scaling up, Excel or an on-line spreadsheet will work just fine. If you have less than 100 leads–not suspects but firms that have actually contacted you and demonstrated interest and a business need–just use Excel and bake the update process into your daily practice.
September 30th, 2008
I have followed Herb Reiter’s consulting career over the last five years or so: there aren’t very many business development consultants who work with EDA firms, fewer who have the mix of semiconductor and design background that Herb accumulated on the way to honing his business development expertise. He is personable, methodical, and always interested in talking with new start-ups. He gives good advice informed by a perspective on both industry and technology trends. When he met with PicoCraft a while back he mentioned that he had been part of the team at Synopsys that helped to establish PrimeTime as a de facto standard for STA (Static Timing Analysis), building on experience he had gained doing the same for Motive at Viewlogic before they were acquired by Synopsys. I caught up with him recently and asked him to tell the story of PrimeTime’s early customer development and lessons it may hold for other EDA companies, especially start-ups. What follows is an edited (and hyperlinked, good blogging is good linking) transcript of our conversation.
Q: Can you give me a brief bio and some background on the events that allowed you to establish static timing analysis as a viable new tool in the ASIC design flow and PrimeTime as a key player in that market?
I spent almost 20 year in semiconductors, I have seen the consequences of insufficient design tools. For example, in the early to mid 80’s I was part of National Semiconductor’s plan to bring their impressive portfolio of micro controllers, communication chips, and other ASSPs as mega-cells into the rapidly growing ASIC world. A lack of good tools was the primary reason for this failed attempt.
When I joined VLSI Technology in 1989, VLSI had the best cell-based tools and flows. Their design centers were world-class, working with leading edge IC design teams at very successful companies. I got a close up view of the challenges the development of ASIC core technology represented. As VLSI’s lead in cell-based design methodologies waned, revenues and profits declined and eventually Philips acquired VLSI. After VLSI I joined Viewlogic. After I had been working there for a year, successfully encouraging many ASIC vendors to qualify Motive STA and VCS gate-level simulation as sign-off methodologies. Then Synopsys offered around $400M to Viewlogic’s shareholders and we merged with our former competitor.
Q: It’s rare that a larger EDA firm is able to develop and launch a new product in a new area. As you said, you were part of the Viewlogic acquisition at Synopsys. How did you build internal support to enable PrimeTime to achieve not just traction in the market, but ultimately dominant market share?
At Viewlogic we had been winning accounts with Motive against Synopsys/PrimeTime at Viewlogic. When I “changed sides” many members of the PrimeTime team were interested in our approach. The first thing that I did for Motive and then for PrimeTime, was to narrow our focus from dozens of potential partners to the top dozen technology leaders. Both at Viewlogic and Synopsys my team used the same basic formula: We worked hard to understand our partners’ requirements, developed trust relationships with a dozen ASIC semiconductor vendors. This allowed us to make Motive and then PrimeTime an integral part of their ASIC design flows and the key to timing sign-off.
Just like my semiconductor partners, I had engineering sites all over the world, I wanted my people to be as close to these partners as possible. One of my engineering experts even worked at TSMC in Taiwan, and was instrumental in implementing Dr. Ping Yang’s vision of TSMC’s reference flow number one.
We also waived the PrimeTime training fees for the ASIC Design Centers of our partners. Synopsys’ product group gladly covered the training department’s exploding expenses and was rewarded with a flood of PrimeTime bookings from these Design Centers and their many ASIC customers. Just like TSMC’s first and second reference flows–which were dominated by Synopsys tools–increased Synopsys revenues at fabless IC vendors, these ASIC Design Center seminars did the same at our big partners and their ASIC customers. Most of the smaller ASIC vendors adopted PrimeTime quickly, after seeing its benefits giving their larger rivals a competitive advantage, and a de-facto Timing sign-off standard was established in about two years.
Q: What were a couple of lessons learned?
Introducing new EDA design tools is a lengthy and difficult process. Gate-level timing simulation was the proven and trusted methodology for timing verification through the 0.35 micron process node. But at 0.25 micron chip complexities and clock speeds increased the challenge of chip level timing closure, 0.18 micron was even more difficult, such that simulation run times approached eternity. Mask and re-spins costs, coupled with the economic impact of being late to market meant that an exhaustive method that guaranteed timing closure was urgently needed. PrimeTime’s static timing analysis offered a comparatively very fast way to do exhaustive timing verification and the product group as well as my team offered excellent support during this transition.
It’s important to note that static timing analysis had been around for more than a decade, Motive had originally been used for board level design. When my ASIC Vendor team at Viewlogic together with the Motive developers introduced it to the semiconductor vendors, we learned a key lesson: People were not willing to abandon a methodology that is working until it seriously hit their pocket book. Eternal runtimes of 0.18 micron chips and expensive re-spins because dynamic simulation is not exhaustive, helped us win STA converts.
Q: How big an issue was library management for the ASIC vendors?
Huge, ASIC vendors were at first reluctant to take on creating and supporting yet another library. One common complaint that I heard many times from ASIC vendors: supporting different libraries for different process technologies was a never ending effort. This huge effort got multiplied by the number of tools that relied on accurate libraries and, to make matters even worse, required a complete update and re-verification, whenever a new tool revision was introduced. I knew that we had to make it much easier for our customers to manage these libraries.
Q: When you talk about AEware (scripts written by Applications Engineers to supplement and extend the base product?
Already at VLSI I have seen our design centers developing a lot of what you call AEware, primarily to overcome tools deficiencies or extend the life of a proven tool. My SVP team at Synopsys worked very closely with the strong corporate CAD groups at our partners to temporarily give Synopsys tools important capabilities for chip design within existing flows and to demonstrate to the Synopsys product groups the importance of such features–with remarkable success. The product groups, especially the PrimeTime team, adopted many of these scripts and made them integral and professionally supported parts of the next tools releases.
Q: Can you talk about how this experience led you to form EDA 2 ASIC Consulting and what your business is today?
In my role managing Synopsys SVP team I really enjoyed being a bridge between the powerful ASIC industry and the innovative EDA industry. I saw PrimeTime, VCS, TetraMax, Physical Compiler and other Synopsys tools getting accepted widely and really making a big difference for our highly interdependent industries. When I started my own firm in 2002 I wanted to replicate my dream-job: Being a bridge between these two industries and bringing to my friends in the semiconductor industry innovative EDA solutions, now primarily from smaller EDA vendors. In the 7 years of managing my own firm I have been able to make a number of contributions to the semiconductor industry. But I still look back at the work I did at Synopsys. Together with the product group and the training department, we laid the groundwork for PrimeTime’s market dominance as a lasting contribution. PrimeTime is still at 87% market share today, almost ten years later, according to Gary Smith EDA.
September 17th, 2008
Update Tue-Sep-23: Sold Out, No Walk-ins. We will offer it again: you can sign-up to be notified of upcoming workshops
We just finished our last rehearsal for next Wednesday’s (Sep-24) “Financial Modeling for Startups” workshop we are doing jointly with Nathan Beckord of Venture Archetypes. I think it will be a good lunch and learn opportunity (of course I am biased).
The workshop attempts to offer an approach for modeling your start-up that spans bootstrapping and developing a business plan that merits investment. Nathan addresses the first question that many entrepreneurs have about developing a financial plan: Why Bother?
- A good financial model is an operating plan and roadmap for your business…sales targets, hiring plan, marketing, etc…
- A financial model is a framework for thinking through key assumptions regarding growth rates, pricing, costs, etc
- A good financial model is a mark of credibility and can help convince investors of the overall potential of your opportunity
- A well thought out financial model gives you an idea of how much money you need to raise and when, as well as overall ROI.
It’s an interesting mix of topics that address the needs of teams that are bootstrapping and want a roadmap as well as teams that are preparing to seek outside investment:
- Philosophy of Modeling: Top Ten To-Do’s
- Getting Started: Revenue Build-Up
- Cracking The Pricing Code
- Prospect’s View of Cost
- Product Mix Strategies
- Forecasting Expenses
- Hiring Plan Hat Chart
- Roll It Up and Analyzing It
- Adjusting Forecasts for the Real World
- Pitching the Numbers
It’s only $20 if you sign up by tomorrow and includes lunch. It’s Wed. Sept. 24 at 11:30 to 1 at Plug & Play, more details and registration here: http://www.skmurphy.com/services/workshops/financial-modeling-for-startups-080924/