
It Must Be A Marketing Problem - prakash
http://steveblank.com/2010/02/11/it-must-be-a-marketing-problem/
======
wglb
These Steve Blank stories always get to the heart of the matter. What was
particularly interesting about this one was that early sales were to friends
and close contacts, totally skipping the "customer discovery" step.

My favorite line is _Note that most VP of Sales’ have world-class antenna for
career danger_.

~~~
imack
That was the part that really stuck with me too. The previous startup I worked
for sold energy-use reduction software and had initial success selling to
local governments who wanted to look "green" and help a local startup (outside
the valley). Once that limited market was sold to they started having trouble
selling to the wider commercial market and didn't make sales targets.
Government wasn't really buying to make a successful return on investment so
perhaps the CD was also "hollow" as with friends and family.

~~~
gridspy
Gosh. Lets just hope that we don't suffer the same fate. Of course it helps
that almost none of our friends or family are industrial scale power users.

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rodyancy
In a small startup the analog to this is turning on a wide-scale Google
adwords campaign with no site optimization, no keyword optimization, and no
idea about what your customers/potential customers want, and watching Google
charge you $2000 in a week.

~~~
bad_user
If you don't know your customers needs, you have no way of doing efficient
"site optimization / keyword optimization".

The lesson everyone should take home is this ... for any buck you spend on
marketing / sales / R&D, you need to have feedback (OK, so you've spent $2000
on Google Ads ... but what's the ROI on that?). Can you measure that return?
If not, it's money going down the drain (startup or not).

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hubert
Kind of sad how they get in a consultant and then won't listen to what he had
to say.

Apart from that: How could you protect yourself from not being mislead from
the first sales through people personally known to the founders? They might
tell their friends etc., when could you assume that they buy it not through a
certain personal link?

~~~
DenisM
In this case the board was complicit - they provided sales leads as well.

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yurisagalov
Interestingly (and probably somewhat obviously), this lines up very well with
Moore's Crossing the Chasm. The company in the example assumed that their
innovators (the friends/family and references of board members) would be
representative of their early adopters, and possibly even the early majority.
It seems to me that they fell into the crack between innovators and early
adopters, without even reaching the chasm.

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nathanh
By itself, why is it bad for sales people in the same company to use different
slide decks or approaches?

~~~
wyday
It's not. But like Steve Blank said:

 _The standard corporate presentation wasn’t working, so the Boston sales rep
made up his own. (I asked for the Boston sales rep because in the U.S. they’re
furthest from the Silicon Valley corporate office and any oversight.)

We call the five other sales people and find that they are also “winging it.”_

~~~
shimon
In other words, there was no repeatable sales model; knowledge about what the
customers want and how to sell to them was not converging.

~~~
gridspy
It seems unlikely that there was even a solid value proposition.

