Rolois in the Sales Force Automation Industry

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"When You Take VC Funding, the Clock Often Starts Ticking" Entrepreneur Jack Smith on Exiting Vungle

"আপনি যখন ভিসি ফান্ডিং নেন, ঘড়ি প্রায়শই টিক টিক শুরু করে" উদ্যোক্তা জ্যাক স্মিথ এক্সিটিং ভাংলে

„Wenn man VC-Finanzierung annimmt, beginnt die Uhr oft zu ticken“ – Unternehmer Jack Smith über den Ausstieg aus Vungle

"Cuando se obtiene financiación de capital de riesgo, el tiempo a menudo empieza a correr" El empresario Jack Smith habla sobre su salida de Vungle

"Lorsque vous prenez un financement en capital-risque, le temps commence souvent à tourner" L'entrepreneur Jack Smith à propos de sa sortie de Vungle

"जब आप वी.सी. फंडिंग लेते हैं, तो अक्सर समय की गति बढ़ने लगती है" उद्यमी जैक स्मिथ ने वुंगल से बाहर निकलने पर कहा

「VC から資金を調達すると、時間が刻々と動き始めることが多い」起業家ジャック・スミスが Vungle からの撤退について語る

"VC 자금 지원을 받으면 시계가 똑딱거리기 시작하는 경우가 많습니다." 기업가 Jack Smith, Vungle 종료

“Quando você recebe financiamento de capital de risco, o relógio geralmente começa a contar” Empreendedor Jack Smith sobre a saída do Vungle

«Когда вы берете венчурное финансирование, часы часто начинают тикать» Предприниматель Джек Смит о выходе из Vungle

Girişimci Jack Smith, Vungle'dan Çıkış Konusunda "VC Finansmanı Aldığınızda Zaman Sıklıkla İşlemeye Başlıyor"

"Khi bạn nhận tiền từ VC, đồng hồ thường bắt đầu tích tắc" Doanh nhân Jack Smith khi rời khỏi Vũngle

“当你接受风险投资时，时钟通常开始滴答作响”企业家杰克·史密斯谈退出 Vungle

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and His Powerful Billionaire Friends

মার্কিন সুপ্রিম কোর্টের বিচারপতি ক্লারেন্স থমাস এবং তার শক্তিশালী বিলিয়নেয়ার বন্ধুরা

Clarence Thomas, Richter am Obersten Gerichtshof der USA, und seine mächtigen milliardenschweren Freunde

El juez de la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos, Clarence Thomas, y sus poderosos amigos multimillonarios

Clarence Thomas, juge de la Cour suprême des États-Unis, et ses puissants amis milliardaires

अमेरिकी सुप्रीम कोर्ट के न्यायाधीश क्लेरेंस थॉमस और उनके शक्तिशाली अरबपति मित्र

米国最高裁判所判事クラレンス・トーマスと彼の強力な億万長者の友人たち

미국 대법원 판사 클라렌스 토마스(Clarence Thomas)와 그의 막강한 억만장자 친구들

O juiz da Suprema Corte dos EUA, Clarence Thomas, e seus poderosos amigos bilionários

Судья Верховного суда США Кларенс Томас и его влиятельные друзья-миллиардеры

ABD Yüksek Mahkemesi Yargıcı Clarence Thomas ve Güçlü Milyarder Arkadaşları

Thẩm phán Tòa án Tối cao Hoa Kỳ Clarence Thomas và những người bạn tỷ phú đầy quyền lực của ông

美国最高法院法官克拉伦斯·托马斯和他有权势的亿万富翁朋友

So, you realized that “equity and capital” fundraising consultants tend to charge WAY less than almost any broker-dealer you could find (the industry average is around 1-4%) but they won’t take a percentage, and they request substantial upfront payment without any guarantee. If you’re thinking, “Why can’t I just give them a piece of the pie? It’s better money for them, and I can pay if we close; no strings attached. Everyone wins!” Then you’re not alone. For the finance nerds that find their way here: Fundraising consultants in equity, debt, real estate, and other securitized spaces can’t do it, ethically, at least for transactions in the United States or transactions involving US-based investors, FINRA member firms, or US-based fiduciaries. For those not immersed in the depths of finance jargon: Simply put any form of contingency-based payment, commission, finder’s fee, success fee, cut, “slice”, referral bonus, or other names for a “piece of the pie” is off the limits for fundraising consultants—save for those with valid FINRA membership and the corresponding FINRA Series License(s). If you are caught taking that piece of the pie by FINRA or the SEC, they will (likely) make an example of you. Securities don’t just mean tokenized assets, equity, or derivatives. Debt-based funding rounds are still considered securities in many cases—debt is MORE LIKELY to be considered a security if the term of the loan or note exceeds five years, further increasing at the ten-year note mark. Who Determines What Makes It a “Piece of the Pie?” Ultimately, the ecurities and xchange ommission ( ) and ancial egulatory uthority ( ) work together to make these determinations. For a simple litmus test, your consultant may be at risk of taking a piece of the pie if: S E C SEC FIN R A FINRA They don’t have a for your efforts other than a percentage of the transaction. stable, realistic cost basis They or closes successfully. only get paid if the funding reaches a certain milestone This is commonly referred to as “ Basis” Contingency They that you raised. only get paid based on the amount of “Attributable Funding” They on “commissions”. only get paid They before any checks are cut. only get paid a small portion of your price You OR offer to pay them “out of the first check” They if the event isn’t successful. offer a refund or guarantee that you will receive a refund For any reason, except something like on their part. gross negligence Expert fundraising consultants know that generally speaking, any terms like the following may put their neck on the line with regulators in the US: “ ” You only get paid if… “I want a or you will offer us a refund…” guarantee that you will get us funded “I can pay you a small percentage upfront, but I want to know that .” you have skin in the game “ the first check is cut.” You get paid after etc. As a result, most (legally operating) equity, securities, and capital , generally based on the amount of time, effort, and specialized knowledge needed to do the job. fundraising consultants normally charge flat hourly fees or a per-project basis Larger raises often mean more moving parts and added complexity. Some SEC registration exemptions actually won’t allow businesses to raise more than a specific dollar amount per year. For example: ulation ( ) Reg A Reg A Tier 1 ($20m limit per 12-month period) or Tier 2 ($75m limit per 12-month period) ulation rowd unding ( ) ($5 million per 12-month period) Reg C F Reg CF A lot of questions ultimately boil down to the question: Are Fundraising Consultants “Unregistered Broker-Dealers”? The answer is: No, not within a normal scope of work. We provide due diligence for the investors. don’t We manage transactions. don’t We meet with investors on your behalf. don't We fiduciaries or escrow providers (though ethical consultants follow fiduciary best practices, generally speaking). aren’t Why Can Broker-Dealers Charge Success Fees While Fundraising Consultants Cannot? Broker-dealers have special licenses, strict protocols, and specific bookkeeping requirements to ensure that no information falls through the cracks. They also have personal information, bonding insurance, and other things at risk when they are managing transactions. That means there are specific standards and rules they have to follow in order to be broker-dealers. In fact, (including registration-exempt transactions, such as a Reg D issuance) from the time an investor sends it and the moment the receiving party claims it will need special licenses. any party that touches the money from securities transactions . Following the “Silver Leaf Decision,” brokers cannot pay out referral fees if they are contingent on a deal closing. These fees will be considered “transaction-based compensation” and subject to regulation under Section 15 of the Securities Act of 1934, with very few exceptions National Adjudicatory Council (NAC) on June 29, 2019 Complaint No. 2014042606902 “ ” The Silver Leaf Decision “The Hearing Panel also found that Silver Leaf paid transaction-based compensation to nonmember brokers, and failed to establish and maintain a supervisory system reasonably designed to prevent those payments.” This basically means that brokers aren’t allowed to share their success fee with anyone who is involved in the transaction. The SEC has since proposed a series of potential exemptions, based on the concept of “Finders” but has not published any concrete guidance yet. Here’s for “Tier 1” and “Tier 2” Finders. more information about proposed exclusions To be clear, Fundraising Consultants aren’t “Finders.” They may participate in investor relationship management via chats or emails but do so with a clear disclosure that they are working on behalf of the company they are engaged with. Finders are expected to be people that are outside of the company in most cases. It’s not uncommon for larger companies (Series B and so on) to hire an interim CEO or CFO to lead fundraisers. These folks are “insiders” and are expected to lead investor meetings and often take a small piece of the pie. They are also limited to raising with ONLY ONE company per calendar year. This is a special exemption used by companies that are looking to raise and can afford to pay a full year’s executive salary PLUS an equity-based compensation bonus. Fundraising consultants that engage in practices such as charging success fees or requesting other “transaction-based” compensation packages are taking actions that risk placing themselves in the category. “Non-member broker” At best, this can trigger cease-and-desist orders from FINRA. In the worst case, the consultant and their client may be at risk of a civil action or criminal action (in the case of fraud or other criminal activity.) Clients that have raised funds, in exchange for success fees that are paid to nonmember brokers may also be forced to rescind their offering. This requires the “issuer” to repay all investments from all investors 100%. In many cases, businesses have been forced to rescind an offering and ALSO pay interest on the funds. Banks (specifically bancorps) often hold “money transmitter” and “Money Service Business (MSB)” licenses on a state-by-state basis—usually alongside other requirements. If you’ve heard about crypto projects getting regulated in the US, it’s mostly been about them getting approved for money transmitters and/or MSB licenses. Broker-dealers have several more stringent restrictions on what they are able to do, as compared to fundraising consultants. For example, a private placement transaction may be exempt from SEC filing requirements ( ) A broker-dealer will still be subject to certain parts of Section 15 of the Securities Act of 1933. you still have to file Form D under Regulation D exemptions. It’s worth noting that only a select few circumstances will allow a fundraising consultant to legally participate in connecting investors to businesses. Part of these circumstances include: In most cases, broker-dealers are bonded to an investment banking job. They normally require a minimum term commitment in order to accept the risk and vouch for Series 7 hopefuls. You (Series 7, etc.) without a FINRA-regulated firm backing you. cannot even for becoming a licensed broker-dealer take the tests Interested parties without having the backing of a FINRA member firm. The SIE is a prerequisite for all Series exams. are able to sit for their Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam Series-Licensed Broker-Dealers (BDs) Licensed Broker-Dealers are involved in structuring deals, as well as the range of services provided by fundraising consultants. A few added responsibilities include specialized marketing channels and relationships with investment banks. BDs may also pre-purchase and sell a client’s securities (unless they are restricted securities.) Most of the time, BDs come from an investment banking background, meaning that, commonly, they have a Rolodex of potentially relevant contacts. Most BDs are also limited to selling general securities. The term “General Securities” typically covers corporate finance instruments such as: Equity Corporate bonds (debt) Mezzanine Financing (debt with equity-based collateral) Etc. Other relevant licenses include the licenses. If you’re in doubt about whether or not they have legit licenses, use FINRA’s BrokerCheck site. Series 7 and Series 24 FINRA Number (CRD Number): Central Registration Depository FINRA BrokerCheck If they aren’t listed or don’t have at least one of the following licenses, be aware that they may not know they are working outside the bounds of the law. Series 7 Series 8 (these are no longer issued) Series 9 & 10 (This combination has replaced Series 8), or Series 24 Equity and Capital Fundraising Consultants: Scope of Work Fundraising consultants have a specific limitation on their scope of work. They can assist in creating collateral, reviewing materials, and conducting investor outreach & relationship management activities. Fundraising Consultants can NOT commit to any deals or offers on behalf of their clients UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Further, fundraising consultants or investment advisory activities, such as recommending their clients’ offerings to non-accredited investors, outside the scope of any related exemption, such as Reg D 506(b/c). should not be present in due diligence activities Many fundraising consultants prefer to maintain exclusivity by involving accredited investors in their clients’ raises. only Here are a few things that bar fundraising consultants from taking their piece of the pie: Securities Act of 1933 Section 12 (Broker-Dealers, Control Persons, Registered Persons) Section 15 FINRA Rule Section 2000 For example, (Payments to Unregistered Persons) Rule 2040 (Transactions With Customers) Subsection 2100 (Suitability) Rule 2111 (Communications and Disclosures) Subsection 2200 (Communications with the Public) Rule 2210 In short, between the steep pitfalls that come with accepting any form of performance-based bonus, fundraising consultants generally prefer to stick with hourly-based or per-project compensation structures. So Why Would Anyone Hire a Fundraising Consultant? We often come with more deeply specialized skills, tend to communicate more effectively with the C-level, and seldom send associates (that we don’t have) to do the work for us. Beyond the skills or preferences you may otherwise have, fundraising consultants are, generally, MUCH cheaper to collaborate with. You might pay a fundraising consultant $25k-100k per month, but they tend to rely on much faster workflows and lines of communication. The deal is usually done in 30-90 days. If you raise a Series A at a normal $2-4m deal against a $10-$20m valuation, expect to pay a broker-dealer: 4-8% of funds raised (1-4% is normal on deals that exceed $5-$10m raised); AND 1-3% of offered equity, whether outright or as “warrants” at a steep discount. That 4-8% may amount to $160k-$320k in addition to the equity you paid to “sweeten the pot.” Deals can also take up to a year or more to close. Fundraising consultants are very similar to BDs in their scope of work, but generally for a much more modest payoff and in a much shorter timeframe. Fundraising consultants usually step away once the contracts are closed for your raise, so you only pay them for the term of the engagement.

What The F*CK Do You Mean Fundraising Consultants Can't Take a Percentage?

F*CK আপনি কি বলতে চাচ্ছেন তহবিল সংগ্রহের পরামর্শদাতারা শতাংশ নিতে পারে না?

Was zum Teufel meinen Sie damit, dass Fundraising-Berater keinen Prozentsatz annehmen können?

¿Qué diablos quiere decir que los consultores de recaudación de fondos no pueden tomar un porcentaje?

Qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire que les consultants en collecte de fonds ne peuvent pas prendre de pourcentage ?

एफ * सीके क्या आपका मतलब है कि धन उगाहने वाले सलाहकार प्रतिशत नहीं ले सकते?

The F*CK とは、資金調達コンサルタントがパーセンテージを取得できないことを意味しますか?

F*CK 기금 모금 컨설턴트가 일정 비율을 차지할 수 없다는 게 무슨 뜻인가요?

O que diabos você quer dizer com consultores de arrecadação de fundos não podem obter uma porcentagem?

Bağış Toplama Danışmanlarının Yüzde Alamaması Ne Demek İstiyorsunuz?

Ý bạn là cái quái gì Các chuyên gia tư vấn gây quỹ không thể lấy một tỷ lệ phần trăm?

F*CK 你是什么意思筹款顾问不能拿百分比？

BUENOS AYRES AND ST. FE

The has long been considered a fairly light and simple solution for developers to use to create robust and creative web applications. In fact, that’s as true now as it has ever been as the past few versions of PHP have made the language more appealing than ever. PHP programming language Like many other languages, PHP has the ability to take advantage of the power of , and it’s actually a pretty simple and straightforward process. MariaDB But talk, text, in this case, is cheap. So to demonstrate this I’ve created a called to manage contacts. simple PHP web application Rolodex In this article, I’m going to highlight, from a high level, some of the fundamental details of using PHP to connect to and communicate with a . Everything I’ll be exploring is based on the code for the application, and if you’d like to dive into the code you can check it out . MariaDB database Rolodex here Preparing the Database Before jumping into the PHP code for the application it’s important to note that it uses a single database called . rolodex CREATE DATABASE `rolodex`; The database contains a single table, , that is used to store basic information. rolodex contacts CREATE TABLE `rolodex`.`contacts` (
  `id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  `age` INT(3) NOT NULL,
  `email` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
); The SQL necessary to run the Rolodex application can be found in the . schema.sql file If you don't have an instance of MariaDB up and running yet you can find more information on how to get started in this . MariaDB Quickstart Guide Configuring the Application To facilitate the use of a MariaDB database within the Rolodex PHP application, I’ve created a new file called that contains the configuration settings and database connection object that can be reused across PHP pages. Connecting to and communicating with an underlying MariaDB database is facilitated by the . config.php mysqli PHP extension <?php
// Basic connection settings
$databaseHost = '<host_address>';
$databaseUsername = '<user_name>';
$databasePassword = '******';
$databaseName = 'rolodex';

// Connect to the database
$mysqli = mysqli_connect($databaseHost, $databaseUsername, $databasePassword, $databaseName); Within the config.php file I’ve started by defining variables that hold the host address, username, password, and default database that are used to create a new , which contains a variety of configuration options that you can use to tailor to your environment. mysqli connection object Executing SQL Using, and reusing, the connection within is as easy as including it within a PHP code block on another PHP page. mysqli config.php <?php
// Include the database connection file
include_once("config.php");
...
?> Then, with an established connection, you have the ability to use a plethora of capabilities from the mysqli extension, including executing queries using . mysqli_query Selecting data <?php
// Include the database connection file
include_once("config.php");

// Fetch contacts (in descending order)
$result = mysqli_query($mysqli, "SELECT * FROM contacts ORDER BY id DESC"); 
?> Selecting contacts using mysqli_query Or, in the case that you need to handle dynamically inserted parameter values, you can use . mysqli_prepare Inserting data $stmt = $mysqli->prepare("INSERT INTO contacts (name,age,email) VALUES(?, ?, ?)"); Inserting contacts using mysqli_prepare Updating data $stmt = $mysqli->prepare("UPDATE contacts SET name=?, age=?, email=? WHERE id=?");
$stmt->bind_param("sisi", $name, $age, $email, $id);
$stmt->execute(); Updating contacts using mysqli_prepare Deleting data $stmt = $mysqli->prepare("DELETE FROM contacts WHERE id=?");
$stmt->bind_param("i", $id);
$stmt->execute(); Deleting contacts using mysqli_prepare As you can see, getting started with PHP and MariaDB is easy, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. If you’d like to see for yourself what else is possible with PHP and MariaDB, start by checking out the full source code for the Rolodex application in the new . PHP Quickstart GitHub repository Learn More And if you’d like to learn even more about what’s possible with MariaDB be sure to check out the and the new . There you can find much more completely open-source content just like this spanning a variety of other technologies, use cases, and even programming languages. Developer Hub MariaDB Developer Code Central GitHub organization You can also dive even deeper into MariaDB capabilities in the . official MariaDB documentation And, as always, MariaDB is deeply rooted in open-source and would be nothing without their awesome community! If you’d like to help contribute directly to MariaDB you can find them on , send feedback directly to their Developer Relations team at , or join the conversation in the new ! GitHub developers@mariadb.com MariaDB Community Slack Happy coding! Also Published Here

How to Quickly Get Started With PHP and MariaDB

This article is for all my friends and acquaintances, co-workers and aspiring product managers, mentees and anyone else who has ever asked me — “How do you get your speaking engagements?” — with the implicit inquiry around how can they get the same. What people don’t realize is that to get invitations to speaking engagements or to sit at panel discussions or to get requests for interviews does not happen overnight (Disclaimer — I’m not tooting my own horn here; I’m not even a tiny speck amongst the people who earn serious money out of these engagements or get invited to the most talked-about events & conferences in the country). Just as you don’t ask a surgeon how did they manage to snag a free parking space in the most competitive garage at the hospital, so too you don’t want to sound ignorant by asking someone point blank on how did they get invited to a give a talk at an industry [ ]. insert : event, conference, meetup, workshop .. For getting invited to these engagements is a secondary outcome of painstakingly building a personal brand over several years. My Medium blog is a prime example of this brand. Hence the correct question to ask is — “How do I build a Personal Brand just as you have?” And I’m more than happy to answer that. When I started writing on Medium about technology and product management primarily, I didn’t really have any experience of writing “business” articles beyond the business case studies, pitch decks, presentations and user stories I used to create at my job. I was still learning about product management back then after being a product manager for a couple of years. I started following various product leaders who had had an early start in their product careers, who were very good at their jobs and had built a following of readers/collaborators by extensively writing articles about product management and various other topics. They shared their learnings and insights over the years, especially things that they learned at their jobs, analysis on industry trends, deep dives into their favourite products, reviews about the recent books they’ve read or their journey through an MBA program. And over the years, they had inadvertently become leaders and experts in their fields. Organizers wanted them to come speak at their conferences, hosts wanted them to grace various podcasts and students wanted them to deliver talks at schools and colleges. And I understood. It was not about how do I get to be the next interviewee on a podcast or a key note speaker at an industry event, but about how do I build my personal brand, sustainably, around things that I love to do, enjoy and share. Write (or create content) Thus I started writing. Also because writing was one thing that came naturally to me. There were people out there who built their personal brand through networking, talking (eg. starting a podcast, short videos), volunteering or channeling other hobbies such as photography and film (eg. YouTube videos). However, I’m an introvert, and I wanted to share my story, my findings and my work through words and sentences. I thoroughly enjoyed Product Management, and I thought why not write about it? I even wrote a about the psychological void (and the resulting frustration) between engineers, designers & product managers in 2016. controversial article It began slowly, initially with little or no attention, with one article here, another thought there. However having consistently written over a period of four years now, I guess I’ve accumulated a mass of thought material that helps me to pitch ideas quickly, point potential stakeholders to my “portfolio” or showcase my wares on social media to get some eyeballs. I’m speaking at the this fall because one of their organizers came across my ‘ ’ article and wanted me to get involved! Re-Work conference Ethics of using AI in the Financial/Banking industry Thus began my journey towards building a personal brand. And there were a host of other things that helped me along this tumultuous journey (by the way, my personal brand is still a work in progress even now) — Finesse your story The first item in my agenda was to create my brand story. Just as the curiosity of an Atlantic pharmacist led him to experiment with a distinctive tasting soft drink which got baptized as Coca-Cola, so too I had to tell (and believe) my story around my multi-geographical experience across India, Dubai, Singapore and North America, how serendipity plucked me from a marketing role at a financial betting startup in Malaysia to a product role at a publishing house in Singapore, and how the failure of my fledgling P2P startup company (that connected expats and home-chefs with home-cooked meals) led me to migrate to Canada. This brand story not only helped me control my narrative in my job interviews, but also helped me craft a compelling value proposition for myself — adaptable across work cultures, quick learner in fast paced environments, curious to learn and absorb, fearless to conquer new horizons. My talk on was the result of me reflecting on my story, finessing it over the years and spouting it pat down whenever the need arose. Fearless Product Management Network Networking makes me anxious. Being an introvert is another major reason for me not wanting to be around large groups of over-eager people. However networking is a two way street — you’ll receive as much as you’re ready to give. I had networked a bunch during my B-school days, however hadn’t really cared to form new connections after that. Until 2016 that is, when I tagged along with my friend to a major networking event —pure networking, no talks nor panel discussions— filled with confident people schmoozing with their small shrimp cocktails and martinis, overstuffed in straight cut jackets, balancing on stripy sandals, talking tech, finance, venture capital, investments and the next big startup. I was overwhelmed. I sat at a stone deck feigning nonchalance, deep down dearly wanting someone to come and talk to me. It wasn’t the best night for me as you can guess (my friend had conveniently left me to pursue his own networking agenda), and there have been other sub-par networking nights where I just didn’t want to speak to anyone, expend time and energy on small-talk. However there have been other events where I’ve made an effort, introduced myself, listened to what the other person had to say, smiled more, made some connections (even though networking was the last thing on my mind; I’d have rather got home and curled up with some comfort food on a cold winter night) and added some relevant contacts to my digital rolodex. Networking has helped me experiment with my brand story and narrative, test it in real life and meet some amazing new people who’d potentially invite me to collaborate on a project — I started on my with a person I met at a networking night and received an invite to speak at an through someone I met at a social innovation networking event. sustainability project event My articles on networking & . here here Ask Networking is a substantial part of building your personal brand, however shamelessness is another. The number of times I’ve asked organizers if they wanted any speakers at their events (at the start of my brand building journey) is hilarious. I got a few breaks early on, which were disasters — one was a product talk about innovation at a local tech event and another was a product pitch at a local startup competition. I was nervous, maybe not prepared enough, didn’t know how to coolly talk to the audience and laugh at myself if I stuttered a word. However that ‘asking’ became less frequent as I moved up my career ladder, gave more talks (even internal company ones) to build up my confidence and started getting invited upfront for speaking engagements without me having to ask. Find your Niche I had a personal (Blogger) blog on travel and lifestyle way back in 2013. It was all about the 10 things you need in your bag, my travel story to a secluded beach in southern India, the delish chicken rice meal I had in Malaysia and how I celebrated the Hungry Ghost festival in Singapore. It was fun and carefree, but after sometime, it felt too personal. When I started writing again in 2016, I wanted to create content around what I was an expert on and what I found comfortable sharing with an audience. I chose product management and technology since I was living the job day in and day out, and much later segued into finance, AI, leadership, innovation, team building and more. I’m still trying to find my niche and evolve as I learn new things, however my holistic content around technology, product & innovation, I believe, has found a small audience or has the potential to a future large audience! Creating content around your niche works wonders because that’s what you enjoy doing, are passionate about and get inspiration from. And that’s how you build an audience who might want to hear you speak on a stage because you’ve built a community around you on mutually relevant subjects, themes & topics. Fill up those speaker forms I still fill up those speaker forms on conference websites and there is absolutely nothing wrong about that! One conference (amongst several others) that has alluded me year over year is the annual Women In Product (WIP) conference. The kind Elizabeth Ames (Founder of WIP) sends me a long sincerely apologetic email every year, informing me about how she truly appreciates me applying to speak at her conference and about how it was a damn tough choice, but how my proposal was not a fit for the programming for this year’s conference. I do God hope this is just a generic email blast to all the non-invitations ( ). NOTE : I’m just being a prat! What that long winded rant really meant was that I love WIP and I so want to speak at your conference! Building your personal brand has it’s own charm — you get to showcase your abilities, your vulnerabilities, your authenticity and your story. So don’t worry about those speaking engagements, create your trademark, and let those gigs come to you.

Get More Speaking Engagements By Building Your Personal Brand - Here's How

How to Launch and Sell a Fintech Startup in Less Than 4 Years —Interview, Ankit Singh

Every product or company goes through a similar set of steps on the path to success. In previous posts, we’ve looked at different aspects of going to market — from launching to building and measuring a funnel to pricing — with some ideas about how to measure things and know when you’re off track. In this post, we’ll take a step back and walk through all the stages of GTM that you’ll typically experience. Programming notes: this post is n in a series of indeterminate length on GTM topics mainly for startup people, mainly leadership, mainly coming from non-GTM backgrounds. There’s a list at the end. Going To Market What did you make? Who is it for? How does it make their life better? How do you find them? How do they find you? What will get them to try or buy? How much do they have to spend on you? How will you sell it? How many deals do you need to close or users do you need to acquire in a month, a quarter, a year? What is your (real and desired) sales motion? < — All your answers to these questions are only put to the test and can ultimately (for a while) only be arrived at by going to market. Going to market is the sense mechanism of your business. It’s how you know whether you even have a business and provides the only relevant* input to developing that business. Everyone thinks it’s great, but no one wants to pay for it? That’s not a business. A niche of users in the 100s loves it and will pay a small amount for it, but no one else cares? That’s not a business. A niche of users in the 100s loves it and will pay a very big number for it. That might be a business. Millions use the free version and 10s of 1000s pay for premium features such that revenues are growing faster than costs? That might be a business. * Raising money from VCs is not a substitute for going to market. Someone’s, even an expert’s, opinion of whether you might have a business is not a substitute for the market reacting to your proposed business by giving you money (or growth) or rejecting you. Stages of Going To Market What follows is from a B2B angle. B2C is analogous, but the mechanics can be wildly different depending on whether you’re growth and indirect revenue (like from advertising) predicated or direct revenue (user = customer) predicated. There are many models, but this one is mine. :) Discover Problem There’s something out there that’s broken, someone who’s needs are poorly or not served, or just something that could be so much better if someone just built ___. This is where it all starts. And it’s usually . You have the issue yourself or someone you know does. personal Validate Market Ask some people if it’s true. Talk to experts and specialists and the people who would be the users, influencers, and buyers. Maybe do some research, see if anyone else is already solving the problem and how. Find out how big the market might be, how many users on earth or just in your country might exist. Or not. Just solve a problem that you have on the presumption that you represent a set of users or customers big enough to sustain a business through revenue or data or users to sell to advertisers, eventually. Product Build the thing.* *Once you start, you never get to stop. Product Market Fit [Price Discovery] See if the people you built it for like it! If it does the thing you expected. If they want it. If they’ll — signing up, changing something they do, paying some money — to get it and keep it. overcome some friction At base, this is Product Market Fit*. A core function of PMF in products that are supposed to make money is discovering what price your market will bear, or is competitive, for the value you provide. *Depending on who you talk to, PMF requires GTM Fit [see below]. Network Sales Sell it to people you know, people your staff knows, people your investors know. 1–2 degrees away with warm intros. Some companies only ever do this and build solid businesses this way. Growth in the hockey stick sense happen this way.* does not *A lot of sales and biz dev hiring in ye olden days — and more often today than anyone would admit — is simply buying access to a person’s network and the positive disposition of that network towards them. This is not materially different from an advertiser buying eyeballs. You’re paying for at-bats. Novel Customer Acquisition Novel, because it’s not based on your existing rolodex. Now you’re doing lead gen work that exposes new people to your product and costs real money, either in hard currency or in paying for staff/contractors. This includes: sponsoring events, speaking at events, running ads on podcasts, SEM, buying contact lists and emailing them, hiring SDRs to contact people, running meetups, investing in content marketing for inbound search driven traffic, etc. Natural Market Limit Discovery There is a point early in your company at which you will fall off a cliff of diminishing returns on making sales or acquiring users. This will manifest as lead gen effectiveness failing or increased effort to convince prospects who fit a given profile to give your product a shot or poor conversions rates at the middle and bottom of the funnel regardless of what’s happening at the top or any general stalling of growth that seems impervious to the marketing and sales you’ve tried to date. You are discovering the bounds of your Natural Market*. Natural Markets consist of: Have the problem and know they have it, or so close that if you point at it they know they have it Want to solve it Will pay to solve it Have the authority and responsibility needed to spend their own or their team’s or their company’s money to solve it or the influence over such a party to cause it to happen Who you can reach If this happen, you are on a rocket ship — right product right market right team. In which case, your biggest (only?) risk is success. does not *Natural Market is an idea that I got from Tae Hea Nam of Storm Ventures in a board meeting. It is the single most useful thing I’ve learned from a VC. CAC Ramp Usually you don’t know you’ve hit your Natural Market bounds. It will just seem like you’re experiencing the normal diminishing returns of a particular marketing tactic(s) or marketing strategy or playbook or GTM strategy. Most teams will start with the assumption of a fading marketing tactic and try others. Whether you layer on more tactics, like adding display advertising on top of search ads, or out more resources on an existing tactic, like going from one big event sponsorship every six months to one big one every quarter — this inevitably results in more $$$ per customer acquisition.* *This is separate from the fact that CAC is rising for everyone in general due to the sheer number of products and services vying for people’s attention that all ultimately arrive at a small set of channels to do it. This is a secular trend. Tactical Experimentation A kind of flowering of marketing and sales tactics, including potentially larger GTM bets like sales partnerships, takes place in response to the challenge of rising CACs. In the B2C world, if you’re experiencing outstanding user growth, there’s an infinite appetite on the part of investors to fund that growth. Even with rising CAC. Strategic Instability Usually in parallel, you will start questioning your marketing and sales strategies. Maybe the entire GTM model, including core things like who your customer is and is this even the right product. Example: If you thought you had an inbound, inside sales business, you might start playing around with field marketing and outside sales. GTM Fit Exploration Do you have a GTM model that can be executed and scaled sufficiently to get you from where you are right now to your next stage of growth? Then you have GTM Fit. The hallmark of GTM Fit is having predictability in terms of resources in, like marketing dollars or AE headcount — and results out, like users or logos or dollars. *GTM Fit is an idea from Tae He Nam and Bob Tinker. It’s best summed up in this video . I agree with every last thing Tinker says in this talk and have found it to be true both at startups and when shipping new products at places like IBM. Playbook Scaling When you’ve locked into a GTM that works, you’ll pour resources into it to achieve maximal user or rev growth. Diminishing Returns [Again] Just like running into the limits of your Natural Market, you’ll eventually find the a peak in yield from a playbook. This will tend to look more like a slow decline than falling off a cliff.* The market will saturate, at least for you, as you hit max possible penetration and fight harder for smaller gains. Sales and marketing tactics will become less effective. Etc. *If you’re pouring millions+ of dollars and hundreds+ of people on the fire of a working playbook.. it’s more likely that you’re going to fall off a cliff. Operational Discipline If you have great GTM Fit, you’re scaling incredibly fast and just trying to stay one step ahead of your own success. In this situation, everything you’re doing in marketing and sales is massively inefficient and your funnel is leaking everywhere. It just doesn’t matter because growth is so rapid. When you start to hit post GTM Fit speed bumps, all of a sudden people will start caring about operations, analytics, process, and discipline. This is severely normal. Bloomberg didn’t have a formal marketing function until it was 1B+ in rev. New Relic didn’t have an enterprise sales team until many years after it was a tech household name. Most CFOs, CROs, and CMOs of startups in spitting distance of an IPO could not tell you what their sales efficiency is or what the conversion rates are for their funnel stages with even the slightest bit of confidence or accuracy (ask them!)*. *If you don’t have great GTM Fit, if you’re way early with a product the market is not ready for yet, or if it’s just a grind in the way that enterprise businesses are — then you’ll often end up with a great grasp of what to measure and optimize for and the resultant operational discipline much earlier, because you had to in order to survive. Market Expansion You have gotten all you can get out of a particular GTM, so it’s time to expand who you sell to, what you sell, or both.* New channels, such as distribution deals with a partner or being bundled with another product or being sold by consulting companies into accounts/geographies you don’t have access to or leverage in. New segments, such as going after enterprise where you had only been selling to SMB. New verticals, such as selling into Financial Services where you and only been selling to CPG. New products you build or buy that can be sold into your existing markets and/or give you access to new markets. Companies that you buy, get bought by, or merge with to give you access to new markets, or new products that you can sell to your existing markets or new markets, or that you effectively buy revenue streams or users or eyeballs that you can add to your own. *All attempts at Market Expansion basically start a new cycle of GTM with its own Product cycle. I’ve left that out because depicting interacting loops in a serial text format is damn near impossible. Exit or GTFO Eventually, most people want to Exit.* Your early investors want liquidity. Your employees want liquidity. You want liquidity. You might just be tired and ready to dissociate from the thing you’ve spent years and years building. Exiting is a GTM stage because, regardless of how you exit, you will have to hit specific GTM measures around costs, revenues, and growth to do it. *If you don’t want an Exit, you might have a lifestyle business. Or something bootstrapped you want to do forever. Or you’re going to buy out your investors. Or you’re going to take on some private equity (not necessarily PE) investors who get dividends. Or etc. More power to you. Final Note The road is winding and often non-linear. Posts in this series (and templates) Marketing 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction Marketing 102 for Engineers: Roughing Out a Funnel Marketing 201 for Engineers: Messaging & Positioning Marketing 202 for Engineers: Launching Marketing 203 for Engineers: Sales Enablement Marketing 204 for Engineers: Generating Demand Marketing 301 for Engineers: Strategy & Planning Marketing 302 for Engineers: Hiring Marketers Marketing 303 for Engineers: Pricing Frame Marketing 401 for Engineers: Stages of GTM Marketing 402 for Engineers: Diagnostics & Troubleshooting Sales 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction PR 101 for Engineers Analyst Relations 101 for Engineers Basic Messaging Template [Google Doc] Basic Funnel Metrics Template [Google Sheet] Basic Launch Timeline Template [Google Doc] Basic Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Detailed Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Basic Marketing Calendar Template [Google Sheet] Basic Marketing Ladders Template [Google Sheet] Reading List and Resources Bob Tinker’s GTM Fit and Talk Slides Tomasz Tunguz Tren Griffin Startup Marketing Playbook First Round Capital: PR & Marketing Magazine First Round Capital: Sales Magazine Max Olson: Advantage Flywheels Go-To-Market Fit: The Missing Link for Enterprise Growth HubSpot: Top 10 Sales Methodologies Image credits [in order] Photo by on 2Photo Pots Unsplash Expensify Value Proposition Diagram from Tom Tunguz Bob Tinker on GTM Fit and Talk Slides Using Price & Demand Curves from Tom Tunguz

Marketing 401 for Engineers: Stages of Going to Market

My "Tough Love" Talk To Founders Who Are Struggling To Raise Capital We have over 1,500 startups raising capital on , and in any given week I talk or text with dozens of them. Often, it's when the Founder is frustrated because his/her fundraising has stalled, or is going slower than expected. Foundersuite It's at these moments I give my "tough love speech." In short, it goes something like this: fundraising is brutally hard, you're going to get rejected constantly, and the stress falls solely on your shoulders. Deal with it. You're asking people to give you money, so suck it up and push forward. - Yoda "Do or do not; there is no try" Here is the longer-form "tough love" talk: I do a monthly "Funding Hacks" talk where I start off setting some context: when I raised $1M for Foundersuite, I pitched over 200 investors and ended up with 1 seed VC and 10 angels. 1. Rejection is the norm (not the exception). Do the math– that's a 5% conversion rate, or put another way, This is the reality of raising capital – these results are pretty typical. The remedy? Make sure your "funnel" or list of potential investors is sufficiently large (2-300 for seed/pre-seed, 30-50 for Series A/B). I was getting rejected 95% of the time. I was (and still am) a solo founder, and I tend to have a strong independent streak – I like to get the job done myself. (Side note: this might be one reason I'm an entrepreneur... I have a hard time working for others :) But when the time came to raise money, this "DIY" mentality needed to go out the window. I called in favors from... literally... EVERYONE. I was struggling to raise the round, but I made a pact with myself that I would not quit until I had turned over every stone, tapped every angle, and leveraged every contact in my rolodex. 2. No one does it alone. The cool thing is, people are actually pretty awesome when you ask for help. This is especially true with fellow founders, but also some investors and service providers will go out of their way to open up their rolodex and make introductions... there's a "pay it forward" + "return the favor" mentality, often since those founders invariably got a lot of help when they were raising money. A direct corollary to the point above is that while people can be surprisingly, incredibly helpful, you can't outsource this job. It's 100% your duty to move it forward; no one is going to raise the capital for you. One vibe I pick up on – especially from "frustrated founders" – is that they expect people to work on their behalf. This is a huge turnoff. If someone makes an introduction for you, treat it as a blessing and be exceptionally grateful. But no one owes you anything. "Entitled" founders don't get funded. 3. No one is going to do it for you. As an example, it's your job to build out the target investor list. This is tedious, hard work. To put it in perspective: prior to launching Foundersuite I spent 10 years as a fractional CFO and funding consultant, and I would often get hired to help build the list. It would take upwards of 50-100 hours of research across multiple databases (Foundersuite, AngelList, CrunchBase, VentureWire, etc.) and then another 20-30 hours on LinkedIn mapping connection paths. But in the end I knew exactly who we wanted to target and how we were going to reach each person. In contrast, many founders start by asking everyone they know... "do you know any angels you can connect me with?" It's a logical approach. But it's lazy. As SF-based VC Hunter Walk tweeted: Fundraising is driven by momentum, and investors can "sense" if a deal has heat, or if it's turning stale. When you strip away everything else, your job as CEO is to generate momentum for your deal. A deal with momentum gives you leverage – it allows you to set the timeline and terms and to pick which investors will join you on the cap table. 4. You have a single job: get momentum. If your deal is getting stale or never really catches fire, you're either not going to get funded, or you're going to be forced to accept a unfavorable term sheet, or take money from investors you don't want. So how do you get momentum? You hit the funding trail with a good (fundable) team and product and a killer pitch, then you build a funnel and "run a process." You treat fundraising like a full-time job and put in the blood, sweat, tears and hustle. You get 'er done. (For more on running a process, check out this blog post.) fundraising tactics That's basically it. I give them the talk, give them a little kick in the pants, and send them back on the fundraising trail. And more often than not, within a few weeks they come back with a term sheet (or two) to show for it.

Fundraising: No One is Going to Do It For You

( Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash ) Navigating hiring tradeoffs We’ve spent a lot of words in this series talking about understanding and operating marketing functions, but almost none on people. The common challenges with startup marketing [and sales!] hiring look something like this: No go to market strategy →No scope for a role, which looks the same as too much scope for a role →No sense of the kind of person to look for →No clarity in job descriptions or in direction to recruiters →No standards by which to evaluate candidates that connect to actual business goals In this post, we’ll talk through what it takes to hire the right-est marketer for your company in your market serving your users and customers. Programming notes: this post is n in a series of indeterminate length on GTM topics mainly for startup people, mainly leadership, mainly coming from non-GTM backgrounds. There’s a list at the end. Marketers go to market All marketing exists within some go to market [GTM]. What are you selling? Who is going to use it? How will it make their lives better? Who are you selling to? What industry are you selling in to? What is your intended sales motion? Who are your competitors? What will your funnel look like? Is it low-cost-entry, bottoms-up, land-and-expand or is it open-source, community, usage-growth, commercial-support or is it..? If you don’t have answers to these questions, you haven’t gotten to the part of building a company where you actually go to market. And you really should not be looking for a marketer unless you have a ton of money and are hiring execs before you launch OR you’re very clear about finding someone who can help you answer all these questions and then execute on the answers [rare!]. Why? Because the person you hire to come up with or execute a for GTM A will not be the same as for GTM B. The same holds for sales. marketing strategy Example! If you’re selling enterprise software into hospital groups that costs $250k a year at its cheapest and takes three months to pilot and get through HIPAA reviews with an additional three months to integrate and successfully onboard a customer with the help of sales engineering or professional services once they’ve signed a contract — you will have a marketing strategy (and tactics) compared to a freemium product for ISRs selling into unregulated industries with initial buy-in for a paid tier of $100 a year with a 14-day free trial and self-onboarding guided by docs and in-app tutorials that takes on average less than 30 days. very different Anecdata! Notice how much turnover there is in sales and marketing at startups: early when they are trying to figure out product market fit, later when they’re trying to figure out go to market fit, later when they pivot the product or the GTM or at different stages of growth ($0–5M, $5–20M, $20–50M, $50–100M, $100Ms). Whenever there’s a material change in GTM, Marketing and Sales have to be reworked. Marketing and Sales people, for better or worse, tend to be single track operators and are not effective across different go to market models and industries.* *Note: This is definitely not true for all sales and marketing professionals. But it is true often enough that crossing boundaries, like going from B2B → D2C, is extremely difficult for sales and marketing professionals. It can be easier to change careers altogether than to get someone to give you an opportunity to do that. Define the role Do you want one marketer who will design, builds, and maintain a static website using Github and Hugo while designing a logo and visual identity and figuring out how what your demand get strategy is while running email campaigns out of mailchimp and traveling to events every month to give talks or run your booth while developing your product messaging and helping sales position the product against customers while researching keyword inventory and running search ad experiments while writing press releases and building relationships with tech journalists while interviewing customers for case studies and some other things too? This is not a thing. You might find someone who will do all of this for you, at least half of it poorly, and burn them out in short order. But you won’t be happy. Neither will they. In the : words of Arielle Jackson Most marketers who aren’t new to the field specialize in either the so-called “soft” or “hard” sides of marketing, focusing more on brand and communications or growth, analytics, and channel optimization. “Even CMO-level candidates typically tilt more heavily in one direction,” she says. “I’m not sure where this desire to have it all in one package comes from — you wouldn’t expect an engineer to be amazing at front-end and back-end, but unfortunately this expectation exists for marketers.” So you have to decide which things are more important to do most well for this role right now: product marketing, demand gen, pr/comms, or brand. At an early or pre-growth startup, say <100 people and pre-C, the answer to this is almost Product Marketing or Demand Gen. From First Round’s: So You Think You’re Ready to Hire a Marketer? Read This First. Know your GTM B2B enterprise SaaS product with an inbound events-driven funnel and land-and-expand inside sales? D2C high-end design-forward travel gear with an inbound social-media-and-influencer-driven funnel and self-service sales? Three-sided marketplace connecting chefs to kitchen-having-venues to private-party-holding-people with an inbound SEM-and-brand-sponsorship-and-referral-driven funnel and inside sales? B2B IoT sensor-and-SaaS package for civil engineering with an outbound relationaship-based-rolodex-calling funnel and top-down-whale-hunting field sales? This is key for recruiters, for your network, and for putting at the top of your job description. Stack rank the functional work Organize what you think they will have to tackle by immediateness and impact and then write it out. Is growth of usage for your free tier more important than revenue? Is brand recognition more important than usage? Is getting into a magic quadrant more important than technical blog content? Example! Campaign Strategy and Execution: Develop, this coordinate, and drive execution of demand gen campaigns with a focus on SEM, social ads, and influencer marketing Operations: Select and build out the marketing stack, develop reporting to evaluate the performance of marketing activities Leadership: Recruit and hire a marketing team to run growth Advice! Any set of priorities has a half-life. Typically, your primary goal is to hire someone who will get you from PointA, where you are right now, to Point B, whatever the next big business milestone is — for example from 0 to $5M in ARR. You’ll look for someone who’s done that and also the next stage of growth after that in the same or a similar GTM context. The danger with this person will be that they will simply repeat what they did at their last job at your company without employing any critical thinking or consideration of the specific challenges with your specific GTM. More Advice! Make sure everyone who’s screening or interviewing candidates totally understands the jobs to be done and weights a candidate’s attributes and abilities proportionally. Passing over a great candidate just because they don’t have experience in a low priority skill for the role for now is an unnecessary mistake. Figure out the non-functional work Now that you know what the person needs to do in the role, what do they need to be able to do that on team? functionally your Is this an individual contributor [IC] or manager or manager of managers role? Is it a combination of IC and management? Will the role start at one level of contribution but transition to another in the expected future? Will this person set strategic direction, decide on the tactics, create all the plans, and also run/do all the execution.. or some subset of that? Do they need to hire and build a team? If so, what’s your ethos about management styles and team structure and what are you expectations for a new manager to conform to those? How involved do you want to be in managing this person? Will you set direction and leave them to their own devices or do you want to be intimately involved in the details at the functional strategic or tactical level? Is this person an exec? Will they be in board meetings? Will they be expected to collaborate, and tangle, with execs? Are there existing ICs or managers that will report in to this person? Who will they work most closely with? What are the personalities and work styles involved? What’s the right kind of complementary style? Do you intentionally want to introduce someone into the mix to shake things up or cause a little hopefully productive friction? Will this person be external facing? Will they need to interact with leads, customers, partners, press, analysts, or investors? Will they be developing and giving talks at meetups, conferences, and other events? Will they need to interact with or manage contractors? Will they be expected to travel? Will they be expected to be in the office every day? Just like your functional requirements, these too have to be stack ranked and clearly articulated both internally and to recruiters. Most of these things will never make it into a job description, but the ones that will help someone self-select . That includes: details about seniority and management, expectations about being external facing, and travel vs distributed vs office time. should Looking for good people You want a person who has some experience in your sector with a company at your stage and maybe the next one, who can competently and effectively execute against the top items in your stack ranked priorities for the role while meeting the non-functional requirements you think are necessary for success in your specific go to market with your specific challenges. It’s highly unlikely that such a person exists that you can afford them that they will work for you. and and So, trade offs. Be very explicit about which items on the list are absolutely necessary, which are highly desirable, and which are only nice-to-haves. Make sure everyone in the hiring process knows. Advice on seniority tradeoffs! The more junior the role, the less experience and record-of-previous-work you will have to go on. Which means more weight has to be given on how fast they’ll climb the learning curve, how well they might perform, and how well they can grow to be successful in your particular environment. Advice on recruiters! If you’re working with recruiters who don’t ask you the details of your needs and priorities and acceptable tradeoffs for a role, those recruiters will not find you the people you need. Recruiters who do dig in are generally expensive. Write good job descriptions A job description should have everything a candidate need to self-select in or out of talking to you about the role. Look at it the same way you do copy on your website or in ads or on the side of a bus. It’s part of your top of funnel and you want qualified leads who are good fits for the role and your team to self-select in. What’s the job? What’s the essence of the company, product, and market? What value will the role deliver to the company? What value will the company deliver to the person in the role? What are the expectations and requirements? Which things are deal breakers and which aren’t? What kinds of people will be successful? Where is it located? If you’re hearing from or receiving candidates that are all wrong, the problem is with your job description, your choice of recruiters, or how you’ve trained recruiters on the role. In other words, . it’s your fault Understand the language of marketing seniority Marketing roles and responsibilities vary quite a bit as companies get grow and deep specialists become more highly valued over generalists. Here’s a very . basic ladder in a template that you can copy and modify for your company On “Assignments” If you’re asking anyone to do material work that you might put to use, pay them for it. Otherwise, everything should be doable within the context of an interview or interview time. Examples! Put up a website or walk through some slides in a pitch deck and ask them to reverse engineer the messaging, personas, and GTM strategy Ask them to critique a product page on a competitors website Ask them what their favorite app or product is, then to sketch out a cold outbound email to a prospect pitching it Have them rough out a social media plan for a new feature launch Have them rough out a product launch timeline Sketch out a funnel with volumes and conversion rates with a clear problem, then ask how they would go about debugging the funnel Interview by being interviewed The more senior the role, the more likely it is that you are being interviewed and not the other way around. The kinds of questions the candidate asks and what they choose to dig into are strong indicators about how they approach the role and where their interests or expertise lie. Examples! These are the lines of inquiry I expect from senior roles: What does your funnel look like today? What do you want it to look like? The more detail they dig into the better. Who do you position against in your marketing? Who do you compete against in real life? They should ask about some key metrics like lead volumes, sales cycles, ACVs, CAC They should ask about lead sources and channels, what’s known to work and not work so far They should ask about the sales motion and model, better if they ask you to be specific like is it inside or outside, land-and-expand or big deals on day one, small teams or entire departments, etc What are you go to market gaps, or what risks do you see on achieving the business results you want? What do you want this role to accomplish in year one? What’s the structure of the marketing team today? What’s the structure of the sales team today? How is that expected to change over the next year? What’s the runway/burn? When are you going out to raise again? What do you need to show in order to raise and what’s the gap between today and that? What are the keys to success for this role? What are the risks, or what would cause someone to fail? Final Notes The things I’m looking for in any hire are: Do they have the chops or can they learn on the job fast enough Can they think about all the parts of the work and how it intersects with other teams Can they bring structure or do they need to be provided structure, and how much Are they able to condense, explain, and talk about things in the forms necessary to effectively communicate to different audiences and drive a desired action What is the mix of experience, competence, potential, and management overhead? And finally, specifically for external facing roles: how well can they work a room and be an effective communicator in person or to an audience? Posts in this series (and templates) Marketing 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction Marketing 102 for Engineers: Roughing Out a Funnel Marketing 201 for Engineers: Messaging & Positioning Marketing 202 for Engineers: Launching Marketing 203 for Engineers: Sales Enablement Marketing 204 for Engineers: Generating Demand Marketing 301 for Engineers: Strategy & Planning Marketing 302 for Engineers: Hiring Marketers Sales 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction PR 101 for Engineers Analyst Relations 101 for Engineers Basic Messaging Template [Google Doc] Basic Funnel Metrics Template [Google Sheet] Basic Launch Timeline Template [Google Doc] Basic Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Detailed Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Basic Marketing Calendar Template [Google Sheet] Basic Marketing Ladders Template [Google Sheet] Reading List and Resources First Round: So You Think You’re Ready to Hire a Marketer? Read This First. Kelly Watkins: How to hire your first head of marketing Josie King: Scaling Product Marketing at a High-Growth Startup — Product Marketing Summit Tom Tunguz on marketing

Marketing 302 for Engineers: Hiring Marketers

… and extensions won’t ease the pain. Browsers have evolved to become the central way we do pretty much anything: shopping, scheduling, invoicing, monitoring, calling, texting, reading, watching, listening, writing, sharing: . Along the way, as billions of people were shifting to the browser as their main work tool, it started to show some weaknesses. you name it At , our sole & only focus is to ease our user’s workday. As part of that, we’re trying to identify the small defects in the browser that could help us refine our product. Station We quickly realised that After all, if so many people are proactively choosing to add a third party component to their main work tool, it must have some kind of usefulness… one of the best way to identify potential improvements in modern browsers is by looking at their most popular extensions. Let’s take a closer look. 1. Blocking ads & trackers Why it matters , users say security, focus & speed are their main motivation behind adblockers usage (privacy’s way behind). they want websites to load fast and they don’t want their focus to be disrupted, be it by a popup, a banner or a malware… When surveyed People are basically saying that they value efficiency above everything: Where it hurts Ads & tracking scripts help software providers earn money & improve their apps but this happens essentially at the expense of users: _Visual annoyance_The very characteristics that make ads more noticeable also make them more annoying _Increased page load time_Despite recent efforts to reduce the size of ads, lots of websites’ are still bloated with oversized banners & animations. _Decision fatigue_Advertisements force you, repeatedly & on a daily basis, to make micro-choices about wether to click or not. The more targeted the ad, the harder the decision: willpower is a muscle that ads tend to tire… Extensions that ease the pain , uBlock Origin, , , Poper Blocker, AdGuard Adblock Plus Ghostery AdBlock Users under medication 230+ millions 2. Screenshooting & screensharing He didn’t have the right screensharing tool Why it matters that individuals have internalised.Because we share so much content so often, our tools should be straightforward & easy to use. As work gets increasingly collaborative, the velocity & ease of content-sharing becomes a key success factor Where it hurts The browser, who’s the canvas for most our work tools, isn’t really helping us on that. _Too much friction_Natively, sharing a screenshot is a 6 step process: open your OS screenshot tool > take a screenshot > save it > share it > delete it **“**Can you send me that screenshot again?” No sharing history _No access control_Restricting access to photos after sharing them can sometimes prove useful (ask Kanye West, Joe Barton, Anthony Weiner & a couple of others…). Extensions that ease the pain Fireshot, Web Clipper, Nimbus Screen Capture, Web Clipper, Screencastify, MrColes FullPage Screen Capture Evernote OneNote Online Users under medication 25+ millions 3. Copywriting & spell-checking Why it matters Because it is representative of the inflation of daily interactions we have.We chat, mail, text & blog more than ever and it has a huge impact on our working habits. Where it hurts Producing texts that are well written & mistake-free at a high throughput -which is basically what we’re asked to do everyday - is a tremendously difficult task. _Spell-checking in context_Sometimes a word is not spelled correctly but quite often, a correctly spelled word is used in the wrong context. Those pesky ones are called “homophones” and we all fall in their trap: there/their/they’re, its/it’s, lose/loose… _Grammar checking_Most grammatical errors are benign but some of them can actually be quite complex to detect (subject-verb agreement, modifier placement, etc.). Extensions that ease the pain Grammarly & Hemingway Editor Users under medication _2_0+ millions 4. Managing tabs Sunglasses on heroic quest for survival Why it matters This is pretty interesting because it highlights a recent change that had a profound effect on our workflow: What previously existed in the physical world (the phone, calendar, rolodex, …) or as a desktop app (Photoshop, Office, iTunes, …) is now mainly accessed through a website. the amount of web-apps used at work is dramatically increasing. Where it hurts In spite of its many obvious advantages, this market evolution can be a real productivity killer if you don’t adapt: Multitasking has been proven to greatly reduce cognitive abilities & increase stress. Constant context-switching _Window overload & tab-fatigue_Having too many open windows further expands the time needed to find the right information. _Computer slow-downs_Because each open tab is an independent process, opening a lot of them puts a lot of pressure on your CPU. Extensions that ease the pain The Great Suspender, OneTab, Toby, Session Buddy, Tab Resize, New Tab Redirect, Save Tabs. Users under medication 15+ millions 5. Managing passwords Don’t worry, we all do… Why it matters Also related to the explosion of SaaS is the inflation of virtual accounts pretty much everywhere. on websites we don’t really audit. With our trust mostly driven by reputation or lack of time, securing credentials becomes crucial. We’re basically scattering huge amounts of personal & professional data Where it hurts The proliferation of logins induces multiple new challenges: _Increased attack surface_This one’s pretty basic: the more 3rd parties you trust with the storage of your passwords, the more you put yourself at risk. _Viral breach_Being lazy mammals, we tend to reuse the same password (or combination of words) on multiple platforms. Hackers, belonging to the same specie, know that & capitalise on previous breaches to steal multiple accounts of the same user. _Access management_With employee turn-over being at an all time high, keeping track of shared passwords becomes a necessity: off-boarding employees means revoking accesses; while welcoming newcomers requires creating new passwords. Extensions that ease the pain Dashlane , LastPass, 1Password, Keeper Security , RoboForm Users under medication 10+ millions The future Most of the features these extensions provide will be natively offered by your browser: if a pain is commonly shared by a large proportion of your user base, then your product should solve it by itself. Browsers already made a couple of steps in that way by integrating popup blocking, basic password management & spell-checking. Some of them, like Safari & Brave, went even further by blocking ad-trackers. At we think that’s not enough. By creating a one-size fits all experience, we feel that browsers loose their focus & efficiency. Chrome & Firefox are definitely incredible products but . Station a single software can‘t really provide a delightful experience for that many use-cases That’s precisely why we’re building a platform solely dedicated to work: an “ ” that will help the modern worker access his tools, switch between them & get stuff done. We still have a long way to go & our product is largely perfectible but we really believe that, by maintaining this focus, we could help millions of people get cozy at work 😊 OS for SaaS Thanks for your time! Dig deeper Most facts presented in this post are sourced from these reports & articles.If you which to learn more or make your own opinion, I think they’re a good starting point. - has for you to read. Context switching Larry Kim great insights - wrote on that topic. SaaS explosion Sam DeBrule really interesting stuff ’s taught me a lot. Adblockers’ usage - PageFair thorough report - ’s is a gold mine. Ads effect on page load Ad Lightning ad quality report published on that. Decision fatigue - The New York Times a long article - & Add-on platform. Extensions usage Chrome Web Store Firefox About Station Based in Paris, we’re whose sole ambition is to ease your workday. We’re laser focused on providing the best user experience on the “work hard” side; as others handle the “play hard” side better than us. a team of 9 Our only product is in one neat & productive interface. It has been thought & designed as a work-only, distraction-free platform that helps you get stuff done. a free desktop application that unifies all your web tools 🏆 We’re Product of the Year 2017! (courtesy of )👉 Product Hunt Give us a try!

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Coffee doesn’t mean what it used to. It’s no longer just a beverage; it’s the most highly leveraged social interaction of our time. model The only problem is, we’re getting lazy in our approach. And this is leading to one of the biggest problems of all today: Coffee abuse. Before you get too excited, let me clarify: I’m not referring to abuse, or substance abuse at all. But I do believe that we’ve been violating a foundational underpinning of the social construct around coffee itself: caffeine The coffee date. In an era where face-to-face time is harder to come by, coffee catch-ups have become coveted commodities. Play your cards right and the right coffee can launch your career in a million different directions. If you mess it up, well, you’ll be stuck behind the barista counter for years to come. (And you wonder why we obsess so much over our lattes.) As a professional networker, let’s be clear: I’m no stranger to wanting to meet a new, specific person. In general, I’m fully supportive of the good, old-fashioned hustle it takes to convince someone you don’t yet know to spend 60 minutes of their time with you. But over the past week, I received five separate invitations from people I only sort of know inviting me to coffee, and something sort of snapped inside. One recent interaction really rubbed me the wrong way. A new acquaintance didn’t even bother to figure out my email address and instead just went straight for the jugular — LinkedIn InMail. Her message read simply: “Hi! I would love to get coffee sometime. When works for you?” When I saw this, my brain flashed with three thoughts at once: Whoa! Talk about forward! Am I a terrible person if I say no? Damn it, I’ve already let her guilt me into saying yes. Hang on — do I even know this person?! It made me wonder: In what other contexts is it appropriate to approach people that way? On the street, do you walk up to a stranger and ask, At work, would you approach your manager and say, Or at home, when trying to give your husband a hint, it’d be super passive aggressive to say: “I would love to get dinner sometime. When works for you?” “So…. I’d love a promotion sometime. When works for you?” “Hey honey, you know…. I’d love to live in a CLEAN apartment… when works for YOU?” For some reason, coffee invitations have escaped all of this social stigma. It’s never rude to ask. After all, it’s What kind of jerk turns down a coffee invite? just coffee. And that’s the trouble with coffee dates, isn’t it? Because as you and I both know, it’s never just coffee. One coffee is a slippery slope that leads to another… and another… and then all of the sudden, you have this entire rolodex of people that you’re keeping up with just for appearance sake. one I recently had someone tell me that they added me to their quarterly rotation of people to email and invite out for coffee. I’ll be honest, while it’s certainly flattering to hear that conversations with me are helpful, when I heard that, a wave of panic rushed over me. I have 6,773 contacts in my work email. It doesn’t take a venture capitalist to figure out that this strategy is just going to scale. never But what are you supposed to say instead? “Well actually, I’d rather…not..” Or maybe just: “Unsubscribe” Ouch. Even times when I I shouldn’t be taking that meeting — when I have something more important to attend or a work projects that’s going to suffer as a result — I still can’t seem to say no. There’s a tiny voice in the back of my head that stops me cold every time and judges me: know “Uh oh, Bethany…. You better not.” And that’s when I start to spiral. “They are going to remember you by this one day, Bethany. To them, you’ll always be the jerk who turned down coffee. And then, years from now, when they make the cover of Forbes 30 Under 30 article — while meanwhile, you’re still holding out for that the 50 under 50 list — the person they’ll reach out to thank for jumpstarting their career won’t be you. It will be that all-star superwoman who DID respond to their cold, LinkedIn InMail and somehow said “yes” when everyone else said no. She’ll say that it’s thanks to that one little coffee that their career launched like a rocket ship, and that she’s paid it forward by offering that coffee date friend a C-level position at her multi-billion dollar company. You’ll never be able to use Twitter again because it will only serve as a constant reminder of the one you disappointed all those years ago. And to think, you could have been there at the beginning. That could have been you. Except that you weren’t. Because you said no. You monster.” But then I gut check myself. Wait a minute. Where do people get off thinking this sort of thing is okay? Why am I so over-sensitized to the importance of a coffee date that the idea of missing just one little thing gives me enough FOMO to say yes when I should say no? Who are these tech titans that have somehow managed to turn a meeting at an Intelligentsia or a Blue Bottle or a La Colombe into a potentially life-changing event, where million-dollar deals are transacted and fed into the fabric of our social consciousness for how business gets done these days and… Oh shit. OH NO. I AM PART OF THE PROBLEM. WAIT. Am *I* the problem!??! I decided to turn inward to the source of all truth: My inbox. In the three years that I’ve worked at Union Square Ventures, I’ve received 150,298 emails. I’ve sent 34,498 in return. And 1,294 have been about coffee. In other words, 4% of all of my outbound email traffic has been related to a caffeinated beverage. (Apparently, yes, this is what VC’s get paid the big bucks to do.) When I dug a little deeper into the archives, it hit me pretty clearly: I’ve been using coffee as my “catch all” for all “catch ups.” Whenever I’m introduced to someone new, I immediately offer to “grab a coffee” or “meet for coffee” or even ” if I’m feeling a little clever. But I also noticed that I use coffee as a scapegoat to get me out of meetings I don’t want to attend. I’ll say things like ”connect over coffee, “Ooohhh…sorry, but I already have a coffee that morning…” Worst of all, even when I know I shouldn’t take the meeting or can’t or don’t want to, I can’t just say no. I’ll just dangle “the future promise of coffee” over them. I once suggested to someone that we should still “plan on coffee.” “In the weeks ahead.” And let’s be real…we all know what means… But we just aren’t saying it: that “No…thank you.” Or: “…actually, I just can’t right now.” Or: “Can’t we just do this over email?” This isn’t easy to admit, but it’s become abundantly clear. The problem… is me. I say — it’s high time to put an end to our over-abuse of the coffee date. Together, we can change this precedent of over-committing ourselves to the world around us. We can say no when we are too busy. We can choose problem-solving via email over coffee banter. And yes, we might even dare to pick up the phone for a quick 15-minute call. dangerous But in the meantime, I’ve heard great things about a new matcha place that just opened in my neighborhood, and I’d love to keep talking about this. When works for you? Originally published at Dry Erase .

Dangerous Liaisons: The Fallacy of the Modern-Day Coffee

As the only multichain stablecoin, we are committed to on all of the best chains. Consequentially, we spend a lot of time researching chains and trying to decide what makes a chain “the best”. building stablecoins and fiat on / off ramps “Ethereum Killer” is a term that was thrown around a lot during the ICO era. At the time the sector generally believed that 1) protocols would capture the lion share of value 2) network effects would lead to rapid winners and losers with technology being the core catalyst of success. This lead to hundreds of large “high risk, high reward bets” being made on high-throughput oriented teams. As the sector has matured it has become apparent that convergence, if it is the cards, is distant. The real challenge, and moat, is adoption. We now live in a world where many of the best and brightest minds in blockchain are at the helms of massive, well-funded projects engaged in a prolonged, possibly pyrrhic struggle for transaction volume. At a high level, there are two buckets of high throughput chains: Those aimed at global consumer adoption and those aimed at enterprise. “Global Chains” are by far the more ambitious of these two buckets as they usually require massive cap x and, unless they see meaningful adoption in the short term, tend to be forgotten quickly. In fact, many already have failed. These chains have generally stuck much more closely to the original sales pitch of displacing Ethereum although the successful ones have usually opted to play to their strengths, choosing to devote resources only to markets in which throughput or transaction cost give them an edge. EOS and Tron are the two most prominent (and successful) chains in this bucket. The second bucket are chains geared towards “enterprise” which means they vaguely plan to do for blockchain what Oracle did for databases and IBM did for computing. More than a few of these started out in the first bucket and opted to reorient as competition heated up. There are currently 50 projects in this bucket that have raised over 8 figures on 9 figure valuations. Enterprise is a slower game, heavily dependent on relationships and sales cycles. There will be many “ ” in this space. The “Enterprise Chains” will also have to compete with forks of the “Global Chains” geared specifically at enterprise, like Quorum. Before going further I want to emphasize the importance of compliance in this sector. In every major enterprise deal, both parties’ lawyers need to sign off. Compliance will be one of the few ways enterprise focused chains can give themselves “unfair advantages”. Clinkles Rolodex Era For the first two years we will be in the “Rolodex Era”. Growth will correlate to the collective rolodex power of the team. Teams with leadership from prominent tech companies and banks will almost certainly have the most success in driving those crucial early contracts that legitimize the increasingly commoditized products. We are already starting to see the conference circuit reorient from fundraising towards partnerships. Strategy Era For the next two years we will be in the “Strategy Era”. Teams that have robust and nuanced go-to-market strategies that haven’t fallen too far behind on during the “Rolodex Era” will be able to break ahead here and will likely end up owning entire markets. There will be consulting firms and advisors that actually deliver real value here. Sales funnels will be powerful weapons. We will start to see blockchain make material differences to bottom lines. Technological Age While this is a contrarian opinion, in the enterprise sector technology likely won’t even be a major factor until around at the earliest year 4. Throughput will not be a bottle neck on any of chains as layer X solutions are rapidly becoming more robust and more portable. This means that what is really being sacrificed is security. Chain security will likely take a long time to be relevant but when it does it will be through regulation, endorsement, and hacks. Similar to what we saw with Blackberry, government guidelines around security create powerful moats as enterprise clients often follow the government’s lead. Real endorsements by real tech companies (rather than the dime a dozen “partnerships” that are bought in bulk with tokens today) will also drive large market blocks towards specific solutions. And, last but not least, “hacks” and outages will massively undermine the credibility of some of the weaker projects. The “Technological Age” will be by far the most exciting and what much of the current academic discussion in the sector is currently, in my opinion prematurely, geared around. The speed of regulation may speed up or slow down this timeline and it also remains to be seen how much of the “enterprise pie” gets eaten by permissioned ledgers. My advice to chains: play aggressively to your strengths. You need to survive the eras in which you’re weak to thrive in those where you’re strong. You can also hire or buy talent or assets to fill specific gaps at specific points in the timeline. For example, we will see large enterprise chains become interoperability layers over better consensus protocols at the end of the strategy era. There will also be more entrants. Some permissioned ledgers will evolve into public ledgers and large tech companies will launch their own solutions. My advice to everyone else in this space: stock up on popcorn.

One Chain to Rule them All?

OK — you’ve made your decision. You have evaluated the and decided that high-touch, enterprise sales is your path to success, or at least the cohort you’d like to address today. Mission Matrix If you are an engineer-turned-CEO-founder, you have no idea what you are in for. It is much harder than you think it is, it will take much longer to sign the deal than you think it will (by integer units of yearly , and NO — you do not have the right decision makers in the room — nor will you know who they are for quite a while. So, how do you win? quarters) Here’s how: Assemble your team First, structure your team. If you have no experience selling into enterprise, your first reaction is “ . Sure. It’s not hard, just like managing a kindergarten is not hard. But it requires a level of patience you cannot comprehend until you do it for the first time. y_ou are not prepared, and you do not possess the temperament to be successful._ Hire someone who has been there — this is one of those rare times that the island truly can only be found by those who have already been there. yeah, but how hard can it be? It’s all expense accounts and rental cars, right?” Most likely, So step one, assemble a solid, battle-proven team. At least one person, your VP of Sales, needs to be this. What sales method to use? I propose one below, but there are so many to choose from — Challenger, Solution, Shipley — all are great sales methodologies. Any and all are good, you go ahead and do you. At the end of the day, you need to be consulting more than selling, and your expertise needs to match their subject matter expert’s (SME) expertise. For a modern approach, Account Based Sales (ABS) is actually pretty good, and offers an excellent high touch model. So let’s stick with that here. I won’t tell you how many of each to get (but here is to that effect), but you will need the following roles: an excellent post Sales Development Representative (SDR) — These are your deal sourcers. They will collect business cards, do a LinkedIn profile deep dive, and get people for the AE to talk to. Account Executive (AE) — The AE is your closer. As in, “ put that coffee down!” Customer Success Manager (CSM) — Super critical and usually skipped in the team assembly process. You will not be successful without someone working directly w/ the customer to make sure they are happy with the product. And you cannot afford this customer to churn out… However, the ABS model is likely insufficient, as the aforementioned SME is likely not one of the three above. If you can, get an AE that is also an SME, but you will still likely need someone dedicated to targeted and custom customer demonstrations. So, add the following: Sales Engineer (SE) — Luckily they can support many AEs, and the more they get around, the more canned demonstrations they can create All in all — what ratio to go with? I’ll do another blog post for that one day, but this is something you need to figure out. BTW, your SDRs (maybe) and AEs (certainly) might be aligned along industry verticals as well, assuming you have a horizontal product. The biggest trap you face here is that you, the CEO, likely believe you can do this yourself. You can’t, you need a team. You’ll know why if you have done this before. If you haven’t done this before, you will know why soon ( ). *soon means after 6–18 months, assuming you are successful Understand Your Customer To sell into enterprise successfully, you need to identify the following roles in your customer’s organization: Champion — This person is an advocate of your product and company Decision Maker, Business — This person is going to make the business decision to buy Decision Maker, Technical — This person is going to make the technical decision to buy Influencer — This person is a known influencer within the business Purchaser — This person is involved with accounts payable User — This person will be using our products/services Why do you need them? See the PWIN and playbook below. But basically you need to know who you need to be talking to and convincing. Chances are, if you are talking to just one person who says “I am the decider”, they are not the decider, and they may not even be aware of their own company’s internal procurement process. They are even likely new to this. Are there really this many people involved? Yes, at least. Remember there is typically more than one person in each role, especially as the bid value increases in magnitude. Understand Sales Cycles and Spend Authorization Limits Every industry has its own spend cycles, and expect to see alignment with their fiscal year. Generally that means you can expect to see rapid movement at the start of Q1 as that year’s strategic objectives are funded and embarked upon, and they will slow around Q4 because they probably spent all of their money. The time between Thanksgiving and New Years is typically dead space, especially for US companies. For European companies, summer crawls because everybody is enjoying their vacations. And for some reason, Q3 is always slow. But when are Q1 .. Q4 for your customer? Exactly! You need to know this. Some companies may push purchasing decisions after a quarter, for instance if they want to maximize half-year or annual profits (you know the four tenets: invoice early, pay late, buy low, sell high). Conversely, companies may use quarter boundaries to negotiate discounts … which is all fair, choose whether you want the money or the timing, it is rare that you get both. What does this mean for your sales cycle? It means often there is little that you can do to shorten the sales cycle, since there are likely corporate factors gating the expenditure of funds, especially if they are sourcing an initiative for next year’s budget. How long will it take then? Expect 6–18 months. Yes. Yes, but not likely. The only way I know to shorten the cycle of is to engage in — make the customer buy the product like everybody else (but maybe package it nicely for them, e.g. AMI, Kubernetes, etc). However, that is not how large companies buy. 6–18 months? Can it happen sooner? enterprise sales not enterprise sales Furthermore, companies and enterprises often have spend limits associated with absolute contract value, and the higher the cost, the more people need to be involved in the decision to approve and select the vendor — and this is usually . Translation — more time…. Here is an excellent example of spend limits that I found. done sequentially Example of Corporate Spend Limits So be sure to account for this appropriately in your time to revenue predictions (assuming you win the business in the first place). Large companies are often going to have procurement procedures related to authorization limits as well, such as procurement exercises larger than a certain amount require an open solicitation process. Impact? More time, and . Know these limits, and do your best to stack the requirements in your favor. now your competition is notified In fact, as my former boss and mentor used to tell me, “ If you didn’t write the requirements, you already lost.” Perfect the Enterprise Trifecta: Product — Integration — Training & Support What makes Enterprise sales unique is a lot of things, but what all enterprise deal generally have in common is a complex buffet of deliverables. Those are generally going to include the following: Product — This is your primary product(s). Hopefully you are not doing a pure services play. These are the products that you sell to many customers, not just this one enterprise customer. This you are going to price according to your usual product pricing strategy. You will also keep this IP. Integration — Your enterprise customer is going to need to integrate against their own systems and data lakes. This is where you customize your software for use in your customer’s environment. Hopefully you architected your product to accommodate this, and remember that you may have a on-prem, pure cloud, or a hybrid requirement from your customer. This is going to be Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) that you will price on some sort of Time & Materials (T&M) method. See my notes on labor pricing below. You will likely not keep this IP, and you certainly won’t keep your customer’s data. Training & Support — Your enterprise customer will never RTFM. You will need to assemble a team to come in and show your customer how this all works, how they will use it in their daily lives, and answer their daily issues. This can be priced on a per unit basis, e.g. $20k for one week to hold training for 20 people, or $1k per 10 issues filed per year with 1 week response time, $10k per 10 issues filed per year with 24 hour response, etc. Yes, this was really four items, but was much more poetic, agreed? trifecta Develop a PWIN Calculator Enterprise sales requires an objective measurement methodology to gauge the “doneness” of the deal or proposal. For table stakes, every sales opportunity becomes an opportunity only when you have established Need, Schedule, and Budget (NSB). But not every NSB looks the same, so how to you compare two opportunities? Enter the Probability of Win (PWIN) Calculator: Sample PWIN Calculator I put together for you. In combination with the playbook below, you will subjectively score yourself in each of the categories, and from that, you’ll start developing an objective score across multiple opportunities. That’s right — I can’t remove all of the subjectivity, but I can make it objective as possible. It is a delightful trick that actually works quite well by aligning effort across your sales team and designing a common scoring system. After all, it’s not a sport unless you are keeping score. an example I purposefully left out a detailed description of the categories in the example. The spreadsheet holds the formulas, you should be able to reverse engineer them. Don’t stress on the specifics, develop your own PWIN calculator that makes sense for you. Develop Your Playbook OK, we are finally at the main course! What is the playbook? Well … you have to develop it. , and it works well. It is an iterative process where you gather information, analyze information, create/adjust proposal, adjust PWIN, send to customer, repeat. This is one I have used You can read all about it, but here are the key takeaways: Leads are leads until you have identified Need, Schedule, and Budget. You have to have all three. If you do not have all three, you do not have an enterprise opportunity. If you can’t explain what Need, Schedule, and Budget are, you have the wrong team in place. Assess and adjust PWIN at each stage of the process. Use that as your data-driven approach to sales. Your process will benefit as you gain experience scoring an opportunity, and you can also bring this up in sales meetings and say “hey, I have a two here I need to increase — any ideas?”. This is very important — build in a mechanism to at any moment. You have to be aware when winning will be destructive to a useful, generic product for . Keep an eye out for signs of you being column-fodder (meaning a customer is trying to get a price from you to negotiate down the real company they want to do business with). Beware customers who will not sign an NDA! Especially as your proposal process progresses. That is a huge sign that you are column fodder, or just informing their own iR&D group. drop the bid all of your customers When assessing the competition, realize that often of your customer is your competition! Learn how to recognize that, and how to counter it as well. internal R&D biggest and most direct Don’t forget to analyze each proposal at the end — regardless if you win or lose. There is a tendency to never speak of lost opportunities, but you should, in order to strengthen your next proposal or bid. But you are going to have to develop something, the process will be iterative and lengthy. Labor Pricing Option 1: Pick a number. $100/hr. Done. Option 2: Calculate a number. This is going to follow a formula such as: Hourly Pricing = S * (1+GA%) * (1+OH%) * (1+P%) where S  = Salary per hourGA = General & Administrative costs as a percentage of revenueOH = Overhead costs as a percentage of revenueP  = desired profit Example: Joe earns $90,000/yr. He is paid for working 52 weeks a year, 40 hours per week, so 2080 hours total. (This includes the vacation time he is also paid to take). Your company’s G&A is 75% and OH is 12%, and you want 30% profit. Therefore your hourly rate is going to be: 90,000/52/40 * (1+0.75) * (1+0.12) * (1 + 0.30) = $91.87/hr If you go the route of Option #2 (which I highly support, since it ensures a certain level of financial sophistication), then use a role-based salary average from some accredited source instead of Joe’s actual salary. ( Yes, you’ll find terms like G&A, OH, etc., used in US government contracting guidance, but don’t let that scare you off the concept, they are wonderful tools). Option #2 also gives you a range to use in your discount tactics (see above) that you can trade for value-in-kind. e.g. if you remove your profit, your raw cost for labor is $70.67, which you can’t charge less than. But, you could give them a 5% discount to get those marketing rights… Discounts Or more specifically, line-item discounts. Enterprise deals are big and complex, and there is a natural human desire to discount in volume. Read these next lines closely: DO NOT DISCOUNT. If you must: Only offer line item discounts, that you offer to all of your customers.  In fact, you should probably publish them along with your price list. You have worked hard to earn the right to close this deal. 10% off the price isn’t going to make it (or break it), unless you need to price match your competitor, but then you are likely just column fodder, because your competitor will see and raise your discount. Instead, do the following: Offer standard discount schedule for specific volumes, and then only for the portion that exceeds that volume. e.g. Labor rates are at 100% cost for first 2080 hours, 95% for next 2080 hours, etc. Don’t price out your profit! Offer a standard discount for the right to market the relationship, drawn from pre-approved material. Offer a discount for closing within a certain timeframe Generally, I don’t like these discounts to add up much beyond 30% of the total cost, for obvious reasons. There must be specific value for you to give up money, and it must come as trade-in-kind. In the examples above: You discounted on labor volume because it solved an operational issue by ensuring you don’t have extra (non-revenue generating) capacity. You discounted the right to market the relationship because pedigree sells. You discounted to pull in the schedule because you needed to hit numbers and your QBR is tomorrow, and, well, you love that commission check. Contracts If you get to this stage, congratulations! You could be as little as three months away from closing the deal! You will need to work with your legal team and their legal team to negotiate the minutae. Here is what you should do: Agree on high level business details with your customer first. Ask your customer for their standard contract. Trust me on this one — this is a battle of inertia that you will lose because their is much bigger than yours. An enterprise customer is NOT going to use your contract, ever. But .. ask them for theirs and get our your red pen, you can make it bleed. This is actually going to be much easier than you think it will be! m Have your lawyer translate these details into an enforceable contract, don’t bother doing it yourself, you’ll save time. It will take you ten hours at least to do what a good lawyer can do in one hour, and if you are lucky, yours will be half as good. Have your lawyer review their indemnity, liability, and warranty clauses. Enjoy! You will find them unacceptable but you will need to be steadfast and specific in your request to mitigate or change them. Also, negotiate down the liability limits on those insurance riders, but realize you are going to have to start carrying some sort of formal insurance policy with your named enterprise customer as additional insured. You will not get out of this one. Luckily, these are also much easier and cheaper to obtain than you think they are. Also, most companies I have dealt with are sensitive to your predicament as a startup, so go ahead and try to negotiate those liabilities to a number less than your ARR, but $1M is generally going to be a hard bottom limit. If you are going for co-marketing rights or press releases, have the baseline version negotiated as part of a contract appendix and included in the signed documents. Too often have I seen this pushed out after contract and then it never happens, despite assurances “of course, we won’t withhold permission and it will be taken care of ”. Read: they will, because unreasonable is subjective, and means . unreasonably soon yes soon never Companies to Seek Out If you are doing this cold turkey, you must have a rolodex already populated with close contacts in the industry you wish to sell into. Perhaps you are a former executive, otherwise your VP of Sales is. Additionally, look for companies that have strategic investing arm or innovation center. This generally means that the company (a) recognizes and publically acknowledges they have need for product not developed by them; (b) recognizes their procurement procedures are onerous and anathema to startups; and © have formally funded and organized programs to bring technology from small businesses into their portfolio by removing obstacles in the procurement process. Automotive companies are a great example of this, several that I work with have innovation centers whose charter is this specifically. Tools Use a proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that is designed to manage your sales pipeline and customizable against your sales playbook. Your VP of Sales should tell you what she used in the past, just go with it. CRMs are worth every dollar you spend. You wouldn’t ask your engineers to work without an IDE, would you? Don’t get cheap on your sales team — saving pennies here will cost you pounds later. (There are many options available to you, my advice is to index on functionality, not cost). — There is a lot to unpack above. Your VP of Sales should walk you through all of the above. It may come to be that the instructions above give you reason you reverse your decision to sell to enterprise directly. Perfect! Find a channel partner instead! I highly recommend this. Also, is the above post applicable only to certain types of products? Sure, probably. My background is enterprise software, so I know it applies there. But the sales methodologies I mentioned in this post are product agnostic, and they all generally take the same approach. So I think you’ll be fine if you use this to guide your playbook creation. I will update this post from time to time, so please come back. Looking forward to your feedback! — I am an Executive-in-Residence (EIR) at Vonzos Partners . I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and insights. Get in touch at: Twitter: https://twitter.com/hary_mark LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhary/

The Enterprise Software Sales Playbook for Startups

What if you could get so good at validating or in-validating product/market fit that it becomes a repeatable, sellable service? What if you could create a new role that can be duplicated at every early-stage startup specifically designed around product market fit the same way that the modern Enterprise Software Account Executive was created? “The number one problem I’ve seen for startups, is they don’t actually have product/market fit, when they think they do.” — a16z article “12 Things about Product Market Fit” The way I define Product/Market Fit (PMF): AEs regularly hitting or exceeding quota Low and decreasing customer acquisition cost (CAC) Minimum need for outbound marketing Price inelasticity High close rate Negative customer and revenue churn “Winning business models are anchored by companies that have the potential to generate lots of revenue with easily scalable, repeatable and profitable sales and marketing strategies. And none of that will be truly determined until you successfully test and optimize your product-market fit with potential customers.” — George Deeb, Managing Partner at Red Rocket Ventures Over the past eighteen months, I’ve learned hands-on the challenges of finding PMF at one early stage B2B Enterprise startup and had in-depth conversations with senior leaders at five others. What all of these companies have in common was they found early PMF in at least one market and started to ramp up sales & marketing investments to sell into new markets. When technology companies decide to expand into a new market whether it be a new vertical, a new use case, or going up or down market, different functional leaders of the business consider questions like: Sales / BD How do we take a high cost of sale to a lower cost of sale as we scale? What partnerships should we focus on based on PMF? How do we know we are on the right track to finding repeatability after the first customer wins? Marketing How does messaging need to adapt to a new market AKA “message market fit”? Which conferences should we attend based on PMF? Which variables should we consider to get a highly targeted ideal customer profile? Product What’s the sales opportunity value of adapting product roadmap for a new market? To what degree do customers like the product without additional (especially one-off) product investments? How will we prioritize product roadmap to test unproven markets? Traditionally, when companies wanted to sell in a new market they hired their first AE and lets he/she figure it out. This person is savvy, scrappy, and leverages both sales prowess and their Rolodex to muster the first customer wins. But here’s the problem with that approach: Enterprise AEs are expensive Ramp time is ~6 months Potentially scale hiring prematurely Traditional AEs lack operational skillset to align cross-functional teams to turn one sale into many If product/market fit is the lifeblood of a startup, why isn’t there not a specific job description for it?? Director of Product Marketing? Doesn’t have the sales mojo needed. COO? Maybe — depending on his/her background managing cross-functional teams. Director of Business Development? Usually focuses on direct sales or partnership piece of go-to-market strategy, but not aligned close enough with Product. My approach to solving these problems is to create a role and/or a service that is an amalgamation of skills that include Operations + Product Marketing + BD + Sales + Product + McKinsey. The Six Stages of How I’ve Found PMF: — “We believe our product will solve ABC problem for New Market because our solution does XYZ and if we solve this, it will provide these positive business outcomes.” Initial hypothesis — What’s the TAM/SAM/SOM of this market? How open is this market to adopt new technology? What are thought leaders in this market saying about the problems we think our product can solve? How much competition will we face? Qualitative and quantitive market research — How many times do prospects in this new market say, “Yes, this is a good idea and I’d buy a product like this!”? Can we get a company to use our product and test the efficacy? Customer validation — Can this customer go on record and profess the value of our product? Is customer willing to pay a premium? How much effort did it take to close? First customer wins — Have we adapted our product roadmap to meet the needs of this new market? What’s the close rate relative to existing markets? How likely are customers to expand and renew? Find Repeatability — How do we maintain high margins as we scale? How do we staff (sales, sales engineers, customer success, etc) for the new market? How do we make internal (salesperson’s guide) and external (prospect’s guide) playbooks for this new market? Operationalize In closing, finding product market fit is no easy task. I’ve seen too many startups (and people) get burned by the negative consequences of miscalculating product/market fit. My big, hairy, audacious goal is to create a repeatable, systematic process to invalidate or validate product/market fit that every startup can utilize. I’m eager to refine this process a bit more by finding success with at least one other tech company so that I claim the process as replicable — and not just an anomaly. Please reach out on Linkedin to challenge my hypothesis or provide an opportunity to execute the strategy again.

Product/Market Fit as a Service

PR (public relations) can be an effective way to drive a lot of awareness around what you’re building, and help your team increase signups, lift sales numbers, or generate interest from investors. And unlike ads you might pay for, PR is earned media, which is free, and can feel more authentic because it comes from an unbiased source. This is a tactical beginner’s guide to PR for developers, meant to help you get started with your press outreach and PR strategy. While we work more with the other kind of PR (pull requests), the following four steps have helped us secure popular articles and blog posts: Create your hook Assemble your press kit Identify relevant journalists Pitch your story This post is part of a four-part series that includes , , and . Product for Engineers Marketing for Engineers Sales for Engineers Create your hook The press care more about stories than they do about products. It’s one of the reasons why you can build something great and still fail to get user traction. Unlike in the movies, if you build it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will come. Tech specs, benchmarks, and research data are important and will help add color, so keep them in your pocket. But start with your hook — that story that draws people in and gets them to root for you. In simple but not condescending terms: what are you building, why does it need to be built, and why is your team the best team to do it? Another way to approach this is to write your headline first. What’s the title of the article that you want to see at the top of and ? NYTimes Hacker News If you can craft a story about the incredible event that inspired you to tackle this problem, or that time you ran out of funding but saved the company with a non-obvious insight, or how your product made a meaningful impact on a customer’s life, then you’ll raise your team’s chances at getting covered by journalists and bloggers. Stories that people connect and identify with can help turn strangers into friends, and friends into evangelists. You still need to build a great product, but a compelling story or mission will help your users feel like they’re a part of something even greater. Assemble your press kit While you can’t write your own stories for press outlets to publish, you can help them, help you by giving them the following resources: : Create a one-page doc that includes your company name and tagline, a brief description of your product or service, a summary of how it works, your hook, and a call to action that tells readers where to go to sign up, make a purchase, or learn more. Company overview : Collect your favorite headshots, candid photos, and team photos with easily readable filenames, like or . Founder photos lyal-avery.jpg pullrequest-austin-office.jpg : Include high-res company logos and app icons. Logos : Create a bulleted list with links to other articles and blog posts that have been written about your company. Press mentions : Take high-quality screenshots on desktop, Android, and iOS using team members’ accounts or dummy data. If you have links to product demos or marketing videos on YouTube, include those as well. Product screenshots In a nutshell, make it as easy as possible for press to share your story with their audiences. Giving them high-quality assets that they can include in their articles will make their stories and your product look better and more professional. Identify relevant journalists Build a virtual Rolodex of journalists who are already writing about your category or focus area. Go to and search for your company name, your competitors, and your industry. Open the relevant articles, then navigate to the journalists’ profiles to record their contact info. Google News Yes, this is a time-consuming and manual task, but finding the right, relevant journalists will increase the likelihood that the people you connect with will actually write about your team. Some journalists will list their email directly on their articles or on their publication’s profiles, like . Some will add their email to their Twitter bios, like . And some won’t include an email at all, but can still be reached via Twitter DMs or LinkedIn Messaging (but tread lightly). Luke Stangel Ron Miller Create a spreadsheet with names, contact info, and publications, and remember to include enthusiasts’ tech blogs, hyperlocal publications, and podcasts. Targeting smaller outlets is a good strategy if you’re just starting out, so cast a wide net. Pitch your story Finally, send lightly personalized emails to your list of journalists, and update your spreadsheet to keep track of who you’ve emailed and when you last contacted them. Start with a brief introduction to establish credibility, give your pitch, then make your request. Here’s a sample email that worked well for our team: Code review as a service with PullRequest Hi [NAME], I’m Lyal, Founder and CEO of PullRequest, and we’re building a platform for code review as a service that pairs best-in-class automation tools with a network of on-demand reviewers. I think your readers will really enjoy learning how we went from Y Combinator to funded by Google, and I’d love to send you our press kit and tell you more about what we’re working on. Thanks, Lyal AveryFounder & CEO, PullRequest[CONTACT INFO] Following these four steps should help you with your press outreach, as well as help you explain what you’re building in a way that resonates with more people. There isn’t one magic formula that will guarantee every journalist and blogger will cover your next product launch or funding announcement, but hopefully, this gives you a starting point that will help you design the right PR strategy for your team. Check out more: This post is part of a four-part series that includes , , and . Product Management for Engineers Marketing 101 for Engineers Sales 101 for Engineers Originally published at www.pullrequest.com on August 24, 2018. _A short guide to the press for non-marketers_hackernoon.com PR 101 for Engineers

The Public Relations (PR) Guide for Engineers

By David Frankel , Managing Partner In a world where IPOs are an unlikely outcome and traditional M&A exits are difficult to manufacture, there is a new alternative for liquidity starved founders and investors — The PE exit. It’s an invisible ecosystem to most, but when you see a headline about a PE firm making an “investment” in a mature SaaS startup, and there is no mention of valuation, or even what series it represents, you’re most likely witnessing an acquisition, of sorts. The original investors are bought out, the cap table is cleaned up, and the founders are provided some liquidity, usually around half their holdings. In the last eighteen months I’ve been involved with at least 10 startups that have sold, or seriously entertained, acquisition offers from PE firms. Acquisitions like these have primarily been B2B affairs, but earlier this month Hellman & Friedman , for a reported billion dollars so there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t expand to consumer startups as well. acquired a controlling interest in IoT home security startup SimpliSafe Much in the way First Round Capital and Y Combinator kicked off the founder-friendly micro-seed fund, the likes of Vista Equity Partners, and their peers have created a genuinely new category of capital. What follows is a quick guide for anyone who wants to understand this mysterious new exit opportunity. How the process works These firms focus on promising, but sub-optimized businesses in a specific vertical, usually SalesTech or MarTech. They look for teams with: Demonstrated product/market fit Established sales processes $20M+ of annual recurring revenue category with significant TAM Typically, a firm will buy these companies at >5X multiples, sometimes roll up multiple acquisitions, scale them up, and look to put them back on the market for a 2X gain in about three years time. It’s a surprisingly straightforward approach to tech investing. Growth via smart operations Historically, private equity has been criticized as “cheap” and, for founders, a far less attractive outcome than a strategic acquisition. This belief might have been accurate in years past, but today, PE firms are some of the most forward-thinking investors in operation. These PE firms hire executives from the best run big companies (it’s common to see CXO and VP level talent from Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) and then parachute them into the recently acquired startups where they immediately disperse best practices from former employers. These executives are sharp, well-schooled, and have a level of operational experience that would be nearly impossible to recruit for at the comparatively early stage of these startups. It’s not unusual to see conversion rates rapidly improve by 20% or more and recruiting challenges that bedeviled the startups solved once the ex-Salesforce sales exec opens her Rolodex. Learn their tricks These PE funds don’t have access to any magical processes, but they do operate under a different set of assumptions and those lead to original thinking. Here are a few of the things I’ve seen PE-backed startups doing differently: In most of the SaaS world, free, but time-limited trials are standard. However, some of these PE-backed companies employ permanent trials instead. Rather than cut a user off after a month or a quarter, they let the customer keep using the product is some diminished capacity. This approach acts as a permanent call option on the potential customer while also acting as a pre-installed bulwark to rivals. This technique isn’t markedly different than the Freemium approach favored by consumer startups, but it is surprisingly effective when deployed in the B2B SaaS universe. Permanent Trial vs. Time-based Trial: Most VCs push their startups to extend contracts as long as practicable to help ensure retention. Some of the PE-backed startups I know are moving to quarterly contracts. It lowers the barriers to entry, and thus far the churn rates have not increased appreciably. Admittedly basic product has to be robust and mature to try this out. Again, this is basic stuff, but it’s illustrative of what can happen when approaching old problems with fresh eyes. Quarterly Contracts vs. Annual Contracts: Where a traditionally funded startup might raise equity to fund M&A activity or customer acquisition, these PE firms are savvier at using debt as a tool. This financial acumen helps limit dilution, but it can create a host of new challenges. Debt vs. Equity: Beware, old-fashioned financial engineering still exists There is still an element of style financial engineering at play in some of these transactions — it’s the price of easy liquidity. The classic PE horror story of loading up on debt and using that extreme pressure to wring profits from operational efficiencies still happens. Underperforming projects, along with their teams, are cut mercilessly. The C-suite stress level at these companies is often higher than those who raised money from traditional VCs given human resource cuts (though the latter sort of CEO may not have enjoyed a similar level of liquidity.) Barbarians at the Gate At Founder Collective we cherish the “weird and wonderful.” These PE firms generally like “stable and predictable.” An excellent product, a large market, and a team willing to level up with coaching from experts are expected. While initially patient, failure to deliver results a few months in is simply not tolerated. These deals also require founders to revest their remaining shares, with schedules stretching up to four years, which can add to agitation levels for entrepreneurs. I don’t mean to make these relationships sound predatory. On the contrary, I believe the expectations of these PE acquirers are in line with the metrics that would be expected by a traditional market-leading acquirer. Still, for entrepreneurs who have only known a world of “founder friendly” funding, the difference in attitude can be somewhat jarring. Who Benefits? Traditional venture firms win because they receive liquidity within their traditional time horizons. This new class of PE firms wins in that they’ve figured out a way to reasonably consistently double their money every three years or so (obviously as long as the current macro “music” doesn’t stop). Founders are winners in this arrangement as they receive substantial immediate liquidity — far beyond what even the most generous VCs would suggest in a late-stage financing. They also have the satisfaction of being able to continue growing their business without an acquirer impeding their progress, all while retaining the opportunity to make even more money alongside their new PE partner with a second sale. In short, If you’re a startup with a predictable, generally SaaS or SaaS-like revenue stream, stable management, and are attacking a large market, there’s never been a better time to be on the sell side. Keep your head down, grow your top line, and start talking with some of these new funds ASAP.

The IPO Alternative No One is Talking About

Harvey Mackay, creator of the Mackay 66 Customer Profile Get ready to build business relationships and network faster, better and stronger than ever before. The process I’m about to give you is one of the best hacks to build your network, even if you’re an introvert. The primary intention of the Mackay 66 Customer Profile is to help sales professionals build more effective, long-term relationships with customers. who built $100 million company, wrote seven, New York Times best selling books that have been translated into 46 languages, sold in 80 countries, with more than 10 million copies sold to-date. Harvey is a nationally syndicated columnist for United Feature Syndicate, whose weekly articles appear in nearly 100 newspapers across the country. Harvey is a legendary speaker, and my business partner in charge of his , soon to become Harvey Mackay Academy. Harvey Mackay is a legendary business leader online university Here’s why this approach to building your network is helpful for introverts … The key to this process for building your network is using social media because introverts lose energy being around people. I know because I’m an introvert, and my network is growing larger than it would be otherwise because I love and use social media. You see, introverts can use social networks to build huge influence based on new relationships. We then get to meet these people in the real world when we come out of our introverted shells. The Mackay 66 Customer Profile only works when you work the follow up process. What follows is a modern-day hack of one of the most powerful networking and relationship-building tools ever invented. (This is striving for relevance.) But you must care a lot, and do the work. Wimp Warning: Rolodex “The 66" is viewed by millions of business leaders to be more important than the invention of the Rolodex because the typical Rolodex contains little, if any, useful information people collect or use to build their network faster, better, and stronger for life. Plus, these days, our Smartphone is the Rolodex, and how many times have you dropped it in the toilet and kicked yourself for not having a solid backup? Exactly. Why is building relationships important? Because your network is everything when you think about it. Your network of people reflects not only who you are, but also the people with whom you have established and maintained a relationship with because it’s important to your business and your life. We know most about others when they meet a need in our business or life. Otherwise we move on. Meet Harvey Mackay Harvey Mackay is the man who wrote the original book on dealing with Sharks. If you haven’t read , maybe today is the day. Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive Many of you reading this article may not know Harvey. If not, and learn more about a man I consider to be one of the most legendary business leaders, once again, in the world’s history. (Harvey’s last name is pronounced with a “ay,” not an “ee,” because you often ask me.) click here If you want to know if this process actually works, here’s proof: Harvey Mackay bought MackayMitchell Envelope Company when he was only 26. He transformed this company into a $100 million company. This is remarkable considering the envelope manufacturing business used to have approximately 200 companies worldwide. Today the number is closer to fewer than half. And MackayMitchell people use the Mackay 66 every day. This level of commitment to building and managing relationships, an intense “customer first” focus, is the key driver for Harvey Mackay and the company’s success over many decades in a declining industry. The Original “Mackay 66” Warning: Don’t use this for hiring people unless you like lawsuits. You’ll notice a lot of this profile researches personal interests that can become very personal and intimate. Naturally, the more you know someone, the personal you can be with your relationship in appropriate ways. The original Mackay 66 profile is a profile containing 66 things you research and record about people in your network. The key to this process is caring. You have to care about people to do the Mackay 66. This may explain why so few people actually practice this even if they learn it. The Mackay 66 is one of the most powerful relationship building tools in the world if you use it. The Mackay 66 existed far before social selling became a buzzword, and we had tools like LinkedIn. When you think about the time, energy and commitment it requires to research and learn Harvey’s “66” things about people important to your business and life, the internet is a life saver if you use it. (See a pattern calling for action?) Remember, your favorite subject to think, talk, speak and write about is you. This is true for everyone on the planet. Remembering this is one of the most powerful relationship building tools in the world. Dale Carnegie taught us this is his book, . How to Win Friends and Influence People Harvey Mackay lives the 66. He’s taught the Mackay 66 to millions of people. You can search for it online, download the pdf, scrape the profile questions and do your own hack. Or you can continue reading here. The MACKAY 66 — A Five-Step, Modern-Day Hack Very few people today will take the time to research all 66 profile questions. This is a hack I created to shorten the process of building relationships and expanding your network using social media. We are starved for time and attention these days, but social media and technology can make researching and maintaining relationships much easier than it used to be when we only used paper. Social media is also a huge breakthrough for introverts who seek to build our network because we can connect with people and not be physically around people, which is a key for introverts. We lose energy when hanging around too many people. For more information, read the book, Quiet-The Power of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking. The entire purpose of this hack is to help you build better relationships with people by researching, collecting, managing, and CREATIVELY following up with people in your network based on what you know is most important to others. Your creative follow up on what you know about others is what makes the biggest difference. If you’re a wimp, and you’re simply going to “try” to do this for people you care about, stop here. None of The Mackay 66 will work unless you commit to using a process, a system, and following up as long as you’re alive. I watch Harvey Mackay in action almost every day, and I’m telling you that Harvey lives this stuff like nobody else. This makes sense considering he invented “The 66.” Okay, let’s rock on by following the steps in this game-changing hack … Make sure this system is backed up. Heck, this system manages and contains all the people who count the most in your business and life. Treat your network as your most important asset “because your network is everything” as we say at our academy. Organize all your contacts in one system. You can dive deeper if you want, but you’ll want to keep this list tight enough to have custom fields in your contact management or CRM system. Using spreadsheets can also help organize your list of contacts for ease in importing and exporting it. But remember, it’s a static document, and likely not backed up. Choose the top ten to twenty of the 66 items on the list. Regardless of the system you use, you’re about to research and collect the key information you need about every person you in your network you care about. Add the custom fields or space to place and save this information. This is potentially huge for automating follow up on key dates such as birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Add custom fields to your contact manager or CRM. LinkedIn is my suggested social network for this step. Use what is easiest for you. Start researching and collecting (curating) the information you need to add to your contact management system. Normally, you’ll already have basic contact information and awareness of their where they work, where they went to school, what clubs they belong to, and more. You can confirm this information and add anything that’s missing. Research. Take action! For example, a phone call on a birthday, or a personal note can be powerful ways to build and maintain relationships. If you don’t do the follow up, and use a system that automates this, you might as well be happy right where you are with what you do and what you’ve got. Building and maintaining important relationships requires your commitment to follow up. Follow up. Mackay 66 Customer Profile (Official Name) This is the complete profile, but not in the original format. This is why you will see more than 66 items. You can use any of the items on my list to focus on IF you choose not to use the entire 66. Only the most dedicated relationship builders will use the entire 66 and follow up with any regularity. If you could choose just one thing to do, it might be sending a birthday card you hand write and sign, or a call, or a meal or visit together. This hack is all about building better relationships to expand your network of people who you care about, and who care about you. Most of us use social media and contact management or customer relationship management software. Examples of this range from your phone to Apple Address Book, Google Contacts, etc. Start here, then go wider to research and add people you want to add to your network. Each “field” you will want in your contact management or CRM system. For example, the field for company name in the original Mackay 66 also contains the address. Naturally, this is data you need for a different field in your contact management or CRM system. Every line item below comes from the original 66, but can be a field you choose to use for your list of key contacts in your network. I did preserve the categories, just for integrity purposes because I have so much reverence for “The 66.” Also, the original “categories” such as Customer, Education, Family, are represented on this numbered list, but may not be fields you want to use in your contact management system or CRM. They are highlighted in bold to make this more clear. CUSTOMER INFORMATION NAME (NICKNAME) COMPANY NAME (ADDRESS) HOME ADDRESS BUSINESS PHONE HOME PHONE BIRTH DATE PLACE HOMETOWN HEIGHT WEIGHT EDUCATION INFORMATION HIGH SCHOOL YEAR GRADUATED COLLEGE YEAR GRADUATED COLLEGE HONORS DEGREES COLLEGE FRATERNITY/SORORITY SPORTS COLLEGE EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES IF CUSTOMER DIDN’T ATTEND COLLEGE, IS HE/SHE SENSITIVE ABOUT IT? MILITARY SERVICE DISCHARGE RANK ATTITUDE TOWARD BEING IN THE SERVICE FAMILY INFORMATION SPOUSE’S NAME OCCUPATION SPOUSE’S EDUCATION SPOUSE’S INTERESTS ANNIVERSARY CHILDREN, IF ANY, NAMES/AGES CHILDREN’S EDUCATION CHILDREN’S INTERESTS (HOBBIES, PROBLEMS, ETC.) BUSINESS BACKGROUND PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT (Most recent first) COMPANY LOCATION TITLE DATES COMPANY LOCATION TITLE DATES PREVIOUS POSITIONS AT PRESENT COMPANY: TITLE DATES TITLE DATES “STATUS” SYMBOLS IN OFFICE PROFESSIONAL OR TRADE ASSOCIATIONS OFFICES HELD OR HONORS WHAT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP DOES HE/SHE HAVE WITH OTHERS IN OUR COMPANY? WHO ARE THEY? IS IT A GOOD RELATIONSHIP? WHY? WHAT OTHER PEOPLE IN OUR COMPANY KNOW THE CUSTOMER? TYPE OF CONNECTION NATURE OF RELATIONSHIP WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS HIS/HER LONG RANGE BUSINESS OBJECTIVE WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS HIS/HER IMMEDIATE BUSINESS OBJECTIVE WHAT DO YOU THINK IS OF GREATEST CONCERN TO THE CUSTOMER AT THIS TIME-THE WELFARE OF THE COMPANY OR HIS/HER OWN PERSONAL WELFARE? DOES THE CUSTOMER THINK OF THE PRESENT OR THE FUTURE? SPECIAL INTERESTS CLUB, PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OR SERVICE CLUBS (Masons, Kiwanis, etc.) POLITICALLY ACTIVE? PARTY IMPORTANT TO CUSTOMER ACTIVE IN COMMUNITY? HOW RELIGION ACTIVE HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE ITEMS NOT TO BE DISCUSSED WITH CUSTOMER (i.e.: Divorce, AA Member, etc.) ON WHAT SUBJECTS (OUTSIDE OF BUSINESS) DOES THE CUSTOMER HAVE STRONG FEELINGS? LIFESTYLE MEDICAL HISTORY (Current Condition of Health) DOES CUSTOMER DRINK? IF YES, WHAT AND HOW MUCH? IF NO, IS CUSTOMER OFFENDED BY OTHERS DRINKING? DOES CUSTOMER SMOKE? IF NO, OBJECT TO OTHERS? FAVORITE PLACES FOR LUNCH DINNER FAVORITE ITEMS ON MENU DOES CUSTOMER OBJECT TO HAVING ANYONE BUY HIS/HER MEAL? HOBBIES AND RECREATIONAL INTERESTS VACATION HABITS\ SPECTATOR SPORTS INTEREST: SPORTS AND TEAMS WHAT KIND OF CAR(S) CONVERSATIONAL INTERESTS WHOM DOES THE CUSTOMER SEEM ANXIOUS TO IMPRESS?HOW DOES HE/SHE WANT TO BE SEEN BY THOSE PEOPLE? WHAT ADJECTIVES WOULD YOU USE TO DESCRIBE THE CUSTOMER WHAT IS HE/SHE MOST PROUD OF HAVING ACHIEVED? WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS CUSTOMER’S LONG RANGE PERSONAL OBJECTIVE? WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS THE CUSTOMER’S IMMEDIATE PERSONAL GOAL? THE CUSTOMER AND YOU WHAT MORAL OR ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS ARE INVOLVED WHEN YOU WORK WITH THIS CUSTOMER? DOES CUSTOMER FEEL ANY OBLIGATION TO YOU, YOUR COMPANY OR YOUR COMPETITION? IF SO, WHAT? DOES THE PROPOSAL YOU PLAN TO MAKE TO HIM/HER REQUIRE THE CUSTOMER TO CHANGE A HABIT OR TAKE AN ACTION THAT IS CONTRARY TO CUSTOM? IS HE/SHE PRIMARILY CONCERNED ABOUT THE OPINION OF OTHERS? IS HE/SHE VERY SELF-CENTERED? HIGHLY ETHICAL? WHAT ARE THE KEY PROBLEMS AS THE CUSTOMER SEES THEM? WHAT ARE THE PRIORITIES OF THE CUSTOMER’S MANAGEMENT? CAN YOU HELP WITH THESE PROBLEMS? DOES YOUR COMPETITOR HAVE BETTER ANSWERS TO THE ABOVE QUESTIONS THAN YOU HAVE? Build The Network Of Your Life Now you have The Mackay 66 Customer Profile hacked into five steps and 100+ data points, or fields, you’re already on your way to building the network of your life. It’s up to you to do the work! It’s up to you to research, collect and gather as much information and insight as is useful for building relationships with prospects and customers, or anyone who’s important to your business and life. It’s up to you to follow up. Remember, the Mackay 66 Customer Profile hack is important because “your network is everything.” Mackay Envelope Corporation Minneapolis, Minnesota Copyright, 1983

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