Tag: business

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Start Selling Like Your Life Depends On It

Saturday, 6.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Their needs and wants impact every aspect of your business, from product development to content marketing to sales to customer service.

— John Rampton

I’ve got sales on my mind. I run a business – well, actually a couple of businesses now.

I dropped out of a PhD to join a startup twenty years ago as their first employee. Three of us in a small room. We grew to thirty and were acquired eight years later. I spent a decade in a corporate environment, and now am back to the startup routine, which is where I’m most comfortable.

That journey taught me a lot about building a business. In a startup you’re responsible for everything. Back then I was building computers and putting in wiring for servers. Now, you just start a Microsoft or Google workspace subscription and everything you need is up and running immediately. Infrastructure is not a problem.

Sales, on the other hand – there’s the real challenge. Sales isn’t magic – it’s a craft. One that you have to learn just like you learned everything else, with repetition and focus. So I’ve spent a little time today going back to basics. Reading the classics. And here’s what I’ve found.

You’re a founder. Get used to wearing that hat

First, we should start with Paul Graham’s famous essay on doing things that don’t scale. You have two jobs as a founder: recruit users and delight users.

Paul makes a distinction between founders and managers. Titles like CEO or COO mean nothing in a startup. You don’t have the ability to give your team instructions and then go golfing. You’re a part of the team – not apart from it.

You feel different when you introduce yourself as a founder, rather than a CXO or a sales person. It’s life or death for you. And you should approach it with that attitude. Seriously and with purpose. This matters. And if you really believe that, your prospects will see it too.

Commit, connect and collaborate

But what should you do – how do you spend your time? Three words: commit, connect and collaborate.

PA Consulting carried out research that found that professional services firm partners fall into one of five profiles. Only one of them is a rainmaker – that rare breed of person that brings in business to the firm. They called this profile the Activator.

An activator commits to building his or her network, connecting with people at different levels of an organisation. They know that a single contact is a single point of failure. As a result, they learn more about the company’s strategies, issues and needs.

Armed with this knowledge, they can collaborate with others to create products and services their clients truly need.

Engage on their time, not yours

B2B sales have changed since COVID. Everything starts with reaching out – but it’s not about cold calling or emails and relentless follow ups. I remember reading a line from a cold caller that said once a person was on their list, they stopped getting calls when they bought, or when they died. It’s a good thing that kind of thinking is dead.

Instead, you have to be where prospects are – which these days means platforms like LinkedIn for B2B consultancy firms like us. And events. And conferences. Places where people come together to learn from people.

The big difference is that the journey is now messy and multifaceted rather than linear and predictable. Lots of touchpoints rather than a funnel. Your content becomes the new cold call. Material that’s there for prospects when they are ready for it – case studies, opinions, videos – on their schedule.

Standardise marketing, not sales

Now this type of reality crashes headfirst into a common thought pattern. Many people believe that things that work have to be standardised, repeatable and teachable. In B2B, however, things are often complex, complicated and confused.

One of the best explanations of what needs to change here is the need to end the war between sales and marketing. The traditional view is that marketing is fuzzy and hard to measure. Sales is predictable and numbers driven.

In reality, we need to reverse this. Marketing is about numbers – put in the work, make connections, share content – and you’ll start conversations with the right people. Marketing opens the door. Sales then figures out what to do in the room – listening, understanding and co-creating the products and services that add value.

And closing the deal.

Learn to surface demand

Now you’re in front of a prospect. How do you talk to them and understand what they need?

Rob Snyder has an answer. His PULL framework gives you one way to structure a conversation.

Start by talking about a Project that they have to work on – one that’s Unavoidable and has to be done. That means it’s important. List the options that the prospect is going to consider. Do they all have severe Limitations? If so, you’ve got a demand signal – they need something. Now you can work out what that is and build it for them.

In other words, if you figure out what a prospect needs – demand – you can provide what they need – supply. It’s basic economics, just the other way around.

Putting it all together

In the end, sales is like everything else in a startup – you learn by doing. Get that right and you’ll end up with delighted customers, and a business that was worth building.

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What is the purpose of a startup?

Wednesday, 7.20pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole. — William S. Burroughs

A startup is like a tadpole. It’s a stage in the life cycle of an organisation. One approach is to see a startup as a period when an entrepreneur searches for a scalable business model. The dictionary definition is related to starting something up – from a small business to a drama group. Legally it might be a recently started company with little or no capital. Paul Graham of YCombinator fame defines it more narrowly – “A startup is a company designed to grow fast” – growth is what distinguishes a REAL startup, specifically its growth rate.

A popular tool for startup founders is the Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I first came across this concept in 2013 when I attended a Startup Weekend event. The Lean Startup built on Steve Blank’s Customer Development Process. It was an eye-opening idea, and the most valuable insight in there was “Get out of the building”. Go and talk to customers. It completely changed the way I looked at developing products and services for my customers. Rather than building something and presenting them with it I simply talked to them and started to build things that solved the problems they described.

That’s not all there is to the Lean Startup, however. Eric Ries suggested that what was needed was examining the components of a business plan and coming up with hypotheses about customer behaviour that could be carefully tested through experiments. It’s an approach that tries to be scientific. As a founder you come up with hypotheses. You design experiments to test your hypotheses. And if your hypotheses are valid, you go ahead and build your product.

I really liked the idea of the Lean Startup, but the principles didn’t really work that well for me. I created a number of business models, dutifully filled in the templates. But the hypothesis building just seemed like hard work. I don’t think I’d go as far as to say it doesn’t work, because the response would be that I just wasn’t applying it correctly. Instead, I put the theory on the back burner and moved onto other things, like Soft Systems Methodology.

For a long time, the only model I was aware of out there for a founder was that of the Lean Startup.

Until now…

Recently, I came across a special issue of the Journal of Management focused on the Lean Startup.

In their contextualising article, Zahra et al., (2024) introduce three alternative startup approaches : effectuation, creation theory and the theory-based view.

As described above, the Lean startup is about making a prediction and then testing if it’s right.

Effectuation is about: working with anyone willing to work with you; on what you can control; ensuring a low risk of loss; coping with surprises; and overcoming obstacles. These five principles were derived from conversations with 27 entrepreneurs and are described below:

  1. Bird-in-hand: Build immediately using resources you control. These include identify (who you are), knowledge (what you know), and network (who you know).
  2. Affordable loss: Invest very little and keep the downside risk low and affordable.
  3. Crazy quilt: Work with anyone willing to make real commitments, which means willing to pay or get involved and do the work.
  4. Lemonade: Turn failures into new opportunities.
  5. Pilot in the plane: Cocreate with partners who have made real commitments.

No 4 seems like an aspiration. The other four seem like very useful ideas.

Creation theory says that hypotheses are nonsense. We don’t know what’s going to work so we have “conversational experiments”. We talk to others about our ideas, most ideas die, some ideas survive and those are the ones where there is more certainty, eventually enough to build a business.

A theory-based view sounds similar to the lean startup, it starts with a theory of the business and is followed by using scientific methods in practice to collect and analyse data to validate the theory. But the creators argue it’s better.

Another idea that I hadn’t realised but which is obvious in retrospect is that startup theories mostly come from Western settings. Non-Western settings have fewer resources and more constraints. They may use strategies such as: seeing and copying what works; growing incrementally; leveraging family networks; having a number of options (bricolage); focus on making money with sales rather than gathering information; and changing what their families work on.

All the startup theories are predicated on the idea that business plans don’t work. Trying to predict and plan for the future is difficult. In practice, people shape and build their futures.

I think my approach in practice is a combination of effectuation and creation theory. I might dig into that more in future posts.

References

Zahra, S. A., Gruber, M., & Combs, J. G. (2024). Contextualizing Lean Startup and Alternative Approaches for New Venture Creation: Introducing the Special Issue. Journal of Management, 50(8), 2997-3007. https://doi-org.hull.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/01492063241264228