I’ve hated enterprise sales since long before I started Puppet. I just didn’t know why.
All Things Sales! 16 Mini-Lessons for Startup Founders | Andreessen Horowitz
As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partner Peter Levine is constantly asked “Why sales?” by entrepreneurs and technical founders. He himself used to hold the “engineer-centric” view that if...
Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works) | Andreessen Horowitz
Amazon has a tendency to polarize people. On one hand, there is the ruthless, relentless, ferociously efficient company that’s building the Sears Roebuck of the 21st Century. But on the other, there is the fact that almost 20 years after it was launched, it has yet to report a meaningful profit. This chart captures the...
Autodesk CEO Carl Bass on investing in the future | TechCrunch
A year ago, the design-focused software firm Autodesk announced it would stop selling standalone perpetual licenses of its desktop software and instead
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done. Some jobs are little (pass the time); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for something else to solve the problem. Jobs are multifaceted. They’re never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics. Consider the experiences of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their homes. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives. Instead of adding more features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales took off. The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.
Machines of Buying and Selling Grace - Adam Behrens, New Generation
Why Marketing Flywheels Work - SparkToro
The first few years of my career were awful. Drowning in debt, losing nine out of ten pitches for new business, failing to earn clients. It felt like
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager | Andreessen Horowitz
Warning: This document was written 15 years ago and is probably not relevant for today’s product managers. I present it here merely as an example of a useful training document. Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and...
AI's Security Crisis: Why Your Assistant Might Betray You
Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure.
Why Questions Matter in Selling – A Synopsis of SPIN Selling by Richard Young - SalesPOP!
Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling is a game changing book. Here are his top sales techniques in a "cheatsheet" summary -- Get started immediately.
The Phases Product Teams Go Through, From Product/Market Fit to Hypergrowth
Former Credit Karma CPO Nikhyl Singhal shares the phases a product org goes through as a startup matures — and his tips for transitioning between them gracefully. From the mistakes that are too easy to make to what to look for when hiring, his playbook helps founders and product leaders build teams capable of finding product/market fit and handling hypergrowth.
You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is... | Hacker News
For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.
This $5 Billion Software Company Has No Sales Staff
Atlassian sold $320 million worth of business software last year without a single sales employee. Everyone else in the industry noticed.
