Managing Email Conversations With Customers
A guest post by Edith Harbaugh that offers a number of practical tips and suggestions for managing email conversations with customers.
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Startup Stages
Prepare and Rehearse Your Answer to “How Do We Get Started?”
Always prepare an answer for when a prospect asks you “How do we get started?” Do this before you hear it the first time so you are ready.
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Our “Entrepreneur’s Guide To Sales” Added To Chicago MBA Coursepack
Mark Duncan and I collaborated on a four page article “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sales” that has been added to the Chicago MBA Coursepack
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Evaluating and Reacting to New Competitors
Intelligently reacting to new competitors requires you to give them the benefit of the doubt but if your prospects or customers are not asking about them then focus on what they are asking you.
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Zero Sum vs. Quid Pro Quo
The essence of entrepreneurship is a free exchange of value–what the Romans called “quid pro quo”–that leaves all parties better off: no one loses.
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Federated Entrepreneurship 3: Play Your Own Game
Federated entrepreneurship groups in different cities should following their own paths that leverage unique local strengths and advantages.
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New Capabilities We Plan To Develop in 2011
To ensure that conversations and requests for help were productive, Anthony Scampavia kept a question at the top of his whiteboard in his various offices at Cisco for more than a dozen years: What is the problem you are trying to solve? Here are three problems we have identified and capabilities we plan to develop
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Traveling Hopefully
For my first post of 2011 I commit to traveling hopefully. I was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s observation “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.”
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Let Men Their Songs Employ
I have been thinking about different kinds of teams and team work. For example a choir has sheet music (“Let Men Their Songs Employ”) that predefines the content and timing of each person’s contribution. In a different way the script for a play outlines the content and sequence of each actor’s part.
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If Money Doesn’t Change Hands, You Can’t Call a User a Customer
Here is another excerpt from my September interview with Gabriel Weinberg. This one focuses on why payment and testimonials are so important to differentiate users from actual customers.
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The Venture Lifestyle Business
“Some buildings need air conditioning because they have air conditioning. Because they were designed to be air conditioned, they have no natural ventilation and would be miserable to inhabit without air conditioning.” John Cook in “Maybe You Only Need It Because You Have It“ I wonder if the same thing happens to some fraction of
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Keeping the Ball Rolling With Prospects
Keeping the ball rolling with prospects requires a mix of empathy for their situation and a project management mindset.
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Narrowcast Early Product Announcements
My bias is to “narrowcast” in the beginning. Choose websites, forums, newsgroups that are tightly focused on your target market.
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Quick Thoughts on Selling For Software Engineers
Some quick thoughts on selling for software engineers. Sell results, not method. Land and Expand. Get clarity on the customer’s view of the problem. Listen.
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Three Tips for Small Talk and Casual Conversation
Here are three tips for small talk and casual conversation: relax, be genuinely curious, be forthcoming about yourself, don’t just ask questions. Three Tips for Small Talk and Casual Conversation “A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.” Wilson Mizner One of the more challenging aspects of entrepreneurship
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Nomadic Entrepreneurs In Indigenous Markets
David Mamet in a 1997 interview with Richard Covington suggests a paradigm for entrepreneurs based on behavior of nomadic people in a new location: make a new solution that hasn’t occurred to the indigenous people because the indigenous people have been there too long.
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Build On Your Passion With A Basic Model And Numbers
What follows is a chat transcript from an hour long conversation I had with a entrepreneur recently. I have cleaned up all of our typos and removed or modified some identifying information. The basic business was for a website to arrange services for travelers. I wanted the entrepreneur to move beyond his passion for the
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Good Decision, Bad Outcome
“Good decision, bad outcome” is a a reminder to judge the quality of a decision by your process and state of information at the time you decided.
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What To Do When An Early Prospect is Excited
Here is another excerpt from my September interview with Gabriel Weinberg. This one is focused on what to do when you encounter a B2B prospect who is excited about your product and this is only the first or second time this has happened with someone who wasn’t a friend or prior associate. The short answer
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Scope and Scale of Plans and Activities
Inspired by Eames’ “Powers of Ten” I explore the scope and scale of plans and activities based on duration. I take a one hour duration as the starting point and look at a factor or 10,000 in each direction: from 1/300 of a second to 10,000 hours.
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