Many white-collar workers end up sending slight variations on the same email over and over again. Web application startup Tout has announced a new integration with LinkedIn that could be a major boon to a number of potential power users in fields like sales and PR. Read More »
Tech
As a company grows from a “seat of the pants” entrepreneurial company to a process-driven, mechanized one, the sales process has to change, too. Mark Suster lists the most important things sales teams need to standardize, based on the lessons he learned from his own startups. Read More »
Salespeople who have been with a startup since the beginning intuitively know how to overcome the hurdles that potential customers put up to avoid making a purchase. Mark Suster shows how a growing company can codify this knowledge to more effectively arm its sales team. Read More »
For startups to grow, they need to adopt some big-company practices, especially concerning the sales team. In the first post of a three-part series, entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster shows how growing companies should assess the deals in their sales pipelines and help sales teams focus their time. Read More »
Groupon says it expects to end the year with as many as 25 million subscribers and $400 million in sales. Chief operating officer Rob Solomon also says the company’s promotional campaign for The Gap was so successful it has been fielding calls from other national advertisers. Read More »
I had separate lunches this week with two serial founders, both of whom happened to cut their teeth working at the foot of that tyrannical, yet irrepressibly successful, nearly-but-never-richest-man-in-the-world software mogul whom everyone loves to hate only slightly less respectfully than Bill Gates:
Using old school voicemail to sell our technology is a lost art. How many of us dread the voice mail prompt?! While closing a deal may be a stretch for beginners, plodding forward with good outbound messages can, and will, close deals. Before… Read More »
So now you’ve racked your brain to divine the Product; sold your soul to fund It; crushed yourself and staff to develop It. Well, now you’ve got to sell It. Sales may not be the most taxing of your grey matter as a founder, but… Read More »
Our friend Ben Yoskovitz, whose launch at DEMO we followed here (Presenting at DEMO: 12 Do’s. 5 Don’ts) and on GigaOM (Standout Jobs Aims to Engage), has now written a great post on what happened after his big splash at his Instigator Blog. Ben… Read More »
I read a nice story in Crain’s Small Business today about Scott and Mitch Silver, and their marketing firm Printable Promotions, in Chicago. The piece outlines why the Silver brothers abandoned managing “activities” through their org chart hierarchy, in favor of a flat,… Read More »
Veteran VC Ray Rothrock, of Venrock, said something refreshing to me yesterday: “Venture Capital is really all about pattern recognition. We look for patterns it the market, patterns in entrepreneurs, cultural patterns at the startups pitching us.” Rothrock’s pattern recognition thesis is important for… Read More »
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