When many people think of Lean Methodology they think of manufacturing. But as sales expert Dave Brock explains in this video, lean principles can be applied to sales and marketing efforts, as well — to productive and profitable results.
Lean is something that sales and marketing has really failed to understand and exploit, Brock argues. Traditionally, they think it applies to manufacturing, reducing waste and cost. That’s a mistake, because what it’s really about is maximizing effectiveness in creating and delivering value — something that sales and marketing could benefit greatly from.
Great salespeople talk about their customers’ businesses, not about their products and services.
“Average salespeople talk about their products and services,” says sales consultant Mark Hunter in his Youtube video, but “great salespeople talk about their customer’s business.”
Thinking it might be time to raise VC funding? When considering your options it pays to approach investment as you would a partnership, not just a deal.
After all, securing an investment isn’t a one-time transaction where two parties shake hands and never see each other again. “There’s a deal at the front end, but there’s also a secondary deal hopefully at the back end,” explains OpenView Associate Ricky Pelletier, “And there’s a lot of time in between where you have to be comfortable with the person you’re working with.”
Go with lean product development and skip costly focus groups in favor of the truest test: the real world.
Tom Hulme, Design Director at IDEO, discusses lean product development in a HBR Blog Network video. “Today, we repeatedly hear that we must fail fast, fail cheap, and move on,” Hulme says, but that’s difficult to follow through on when most products are developed inside closed labs and with feedback limited to focus groups. Instead of developing and refining a product in an incubator, he urges you to “release your idea into the wild before it’s ready.”
Most companies are familiar with and benefit from using Scrum to improve their employees’ productivity, but that’s really just one of the many competitive advantages it can bring to the table.
“There are many levers that Scrum pulls, all simultaneously,” explains Alex Brown, COO of Scrum Inc., in this short video. “That’s part of the power of the framework.”
Learn the three key elements of a successful business development strategy and the importance of having your own API to increase your chances of landing partners.
Alex Taub, Head of Business Development and Partnerships at Dwolla, speaks about business development strategy and the power of the API in one segment of Grovo’s “The Expert Series.” Taub says that business development strategy can be broken down into three main parts: building and maintaining relationships, developing the marketing side of it, and, most important to Taub, “finding the point of sale and repeating it as much as possible.”
For many software companies, the biggest spoils in the ongoing war for talent are software engineers. How can your company get a tech recruiting leg up? Here are three tips.
When going after such a highly-coveted hire, it can often pay to leverage resources such as recruiters with a proven track record of specializing and landing these targeted roles, advises OpenView Director of Talent Diana Martz in this short video. Recruiters focusing solely on hiring software engineers can bring intimate knowledge of local software engineering communities, gained from outreach into universities, actively developing internship programs, and hosting numerous networking events.
Get strategies for landing top talent and structuring your company to ensure smooth growth as more passionate employees join.
Doug Mack, CEO of One Kings Lane, discusses attracting top talent to your company in a short video as part of Fast Company’s 30 Second MBA series. Mack recommends you take a top-down approach. “Find your key executives early on, who are going to lead certain functions, and they will bring a network of great employees from other walks of life in their career with them,” Mack says.
One of the keys to establishing a successful lead management and lead qualification initiative is to identify and establish the right baseline metrics for the sales team beforehand.
In order to monitor the effectiveness of any sales program or effort, managers have to first determine exactly what it is that they’re going to be measuring. For lead management, that means breaking down the process into its fundamental stages, advises John Barrows, Co-owner and Managing Partner of sales consultancy Kensei Partners in this short video.
