Scott Dorsey: 5 ideas to sell better
Scott Dorsey in his 2013 address at the Chicago Ideas Week spoke about 5 ideas to sell better.
Sorry, I have other plans.
As an entrepreneur you need time to just sit and do nothing. Sleep. Read a book. And not go out and party. Or group watch a movie. Or even take care of the kids. Managing ones scarce unscheduled time is crucial. It is one of the most valuable resource that you have.
What makes Great SAAS leaders Great?
Looking around for attributes while building great Saas teams I came across this post by Brad Feld (Oct 2017). He writes about a Keynote by Scot Dorsey the founder of ExactTarget (sold to SalesForce for $2.5Bn in 2013) and currently the Managing Partner of High Alpha, a venture studio for next generation Enterprise Cloud companies.
AI Startups. Keep a close watch.
There is normally a lot of hype around any new tech that comes into the horizon. Specially those VC’s think will deliver the next bunch of Unicorns. Last year it was Blockchain (and the mad rush of ICO’s when unthinkable amounts of money was raised on the back of white papers). This year it is AI/ML. There is hardly a product that does not have a customer slide on AI. And how their cutting edge disruption will be driven by AI. A lot are deep fakes. Some are onto something. A lot simple decision tree based outputs.
Ownership is out. Access is in.
Lisa Gansky, published her book “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing” and co-founded Mesh Ventures. One key point she made in her TED TALK was about Access Vs Ownership. This basic shift can be arguably credited with the growth of most developments that are driving enterprise and customer conveniences world over. AWS and a host of other cloud services ushered in the era of cheap experimentation and thus extreme low cost threshold for testing, validating and launching a business. Ditto for Airbnb or Uber or WeWork or Zipcar. Dropbox, eMail (started with Sabeer Bhatia and Hotmail), Netflix or Maker spaces.
To Sell – Show Up.
Sometimes we believe complex is better. Not Jason Lemkin. It is not without reason his answers in Quora crossed 50mn views. Here is another column you will love for the in-your-face simplicity. The question was :
For someone just starting out in SaaS sales (entry level Salesforce in November), what are your tips to accelerate growth/ability in early stages?
Being emotional at work? This is what it really means.
Liz Fosslien is the Co-author and illustrator of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. She recently spoke to First Round Review and explained the myths that we carry around about feelings and how “Follow your head, not your heart” is hurting the person as much as the workplace. Specially in startups. She elaborates on the seven emotions which we are told are deadly in the workplace but could be your secret career superpower. The cost of ignoring emotions at work is steep. “Part of the reason why emotions have such a bad reputation is that we’ve tried to keep them out of the workplace for so long. We suppress everything we feel, which means we don’t resolve issues while they’re still manageable.” says Liz.
Rethink your SAAS Business Model
Jason Cohen, the CTO and co-founder of WP Engine wrote a very interesting POV on “The Unprofitable Saas Business Model Trap” exactly about 6 years ago. Now you will think that articles written so long back must have lost relevance – but surprisingly for SAAS startups there is a lot to mull over.
Whales. Not Unicorns.
Some one had to call it out. Fred Wilson did. Why call the “highly valued venture backed startups” Unicorns? In his post yesterday in his much read blog avc.com he suggests ‘Whales’ instead. Whales are rare but whales are real. Just like the highly valued startups.
Ctrl+Alt+Del
David Bradley was the 12th member of the 12 member team in Project Acorn – the IBM race to build a PC in record times. It was the spring of 1981 and engineers were going crazy as the prototypes will crash regularly and the boot up will take for ever as every time it had to go through a series of memory tests. Bradley was entrusted with a way to trigger a reset without the memory tests.
