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.
Alli McKee, founder of Stick and folks at Gong did a research on what makes a great sales presentation. Stick interviewed 200+ top sales and marketing professionals to come up with 9 presentation points that they swear by. Not surprisingly, Alli’s piece starts with the Andy Raskin formula :
Like most of the people I know, across geographies, distraction has reached alarming proportions. I have multiple tabs open when I work. Multiple notifications, phone, at least 4 different VOIP apps any of which can ring at any time breaking me off from whatever I am doing. The distracted mind also does its tricks. Things I need to do pop up at times when I am focused on something else. The urge to finish those breaks the momentum. The ability to read anything beyond 500 words is interrupted. Pop ups, download and update notifications from numerous softwares and browser extensions – all essential for work, keep jerking the mind around.
Jason Lemkin, Founder SaaStr in a recent Q&A addressed this question. The pro for the selling organisation is obvious. Predictable revenue – irrespective of usage. But is it sustainable and will users continue to pay based on this model? He raises important questions like : “….
….and more.
I am thinking a lot about Startups and the new generation business and how today we can so easily jump start. The cloud, open source, gig economy, co-working spaces. They all make it easier than ever to get us started. You get the drift. That’s quite obvious as I am in the middle of one with Pitch.Link. The challenges of something new that in turn challenges the status quo is for another discussion. Today let’s talk about Value. The Value that we need to deliver to our prospective customers which in turn helps us get to sustainable revenue. That sounds simple, right? It could be the route to Startup Success Rate going from the current 10% to, say 50%. Occam’s Razor!
I will keep it brief. What are the Lessons from SuperHuman saga? Surreptitious tracking of users – call them prospects, call them customers, call them MQL, SQL or PQL – is not acceptable and will come back to bite you no matter what perceived benefits you think you get. Most Sales Tech that offers analytics of user engagement does it without explicit permission of the end user. Whether it is using pixels (99% users do not know of this technology and do not have image downloads disabled by default) and this is not the Wild West Coast anymore that we will hide behind the Buyer Beware signage.
Can you really learn from peers? From reading, from books, form Webinars and podcasts? If you can distill, you can. It is difficult to retain details but the broad idea stays. That’s why mental models are useful for success (Charlie Munger) and storytelling is so effective. The first time I heard Brian Chesky on Masters of Scale talking about customer experience rating and imagining what a 11star experience would be like – it stayed with me. Through numerous retelling (exactly like stories – the ones we like we tell others) it went deeper into my consciousness.
Being an entrepreneur is about taking decisions. All the time. It wears you off specially if you are trying to optimize every single one. Every decision has to be the best decision. Fine tuned. To the T. It can be exhausting if not paralyzing. When is good enough good enough? Most of the time it appears.
At Collision, one of the largest tech conferences in the world which shifted its latest version to Toronto, Des Traynor, C0 Founder Intercom – focused on Retention being more important than conversion. This resonates with me because we have been talking about “Buying is the new Selling” for a while and it sort of dovetails into this major shift happening in today’s transaction ecosystem. Traynor reiterates some known points and makes some new connections :
Getting press and coverage, and in turn building links back to your site is a big challenge startups face. While you are busy building, validating your product, trying to get the first 10 paying customers you are following Paul Graham’s advice and doing things that don’t scale. Add to this for tactical measures as many of them will provide a big pay back.
