What Are Core Skills For Customer Development?
Core skills for customer development: triage, lead generation, complex negotiation that builds a business relationship, and project management.
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Ten Tips For New Product Demos
Here are ten tips for managing new product demos to prospects. While it’s always a good idea to preview inside the team and perhaps call in some favors for “friendly fire” review, at some point you have to bite the bullet and start giving new product demos to prospects. Here are my top ten tips (or
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Counting Your Blessings
The next few weeks and perhaps the next few years are going to be awful. Keep counting your blessings anyway, remain kind, and continue to make a difference. Peggy Noonan wrote My Brothers and Sisters on March 8, 2002 in the Wall Street Journal. She subtitled it “A report from New York, six months on”
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Second Sight: A Meditation on Silicon Valley and 9-11
Michael S. Malone wrote “Second Sight” for the Dec-3-2001 issue of Forbes ASAP (a great quarterly magazine put out by Forbes and edited by Malone that no longer seems to be available on-line). It’s also collected in his book “The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook 1963-2001” as Chapter 3. It’s a meditation
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User Experience Research vs. Customer Discovery
We Help You With Customer Discovery Q: Why don’t you ever blog about User Experience Research (UX)? The short answer is that we do customer discovery not user experience research. Our Clients Want Leads and Deals My clients come to me for help generating leads and closing deals, so that narrows my focus. We don’t
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Founders Want Leads and Deals
Q: I have looked at your website and based on some of your blog posts you seem to provide a full range of tactical services–content, outbound messaging, SEO, videos, newsletters, demos, etc.. Why do you talk about “leads and deals” instead of focusing on the full range of services that you offer? Founders Want Leads
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Nine Tips For Expert Public Speaking
Conor Neill has a great post up today on “a 9 Step Cheatsheet for Becoming a Public Speaking Expert” courtesy of the London Speakers Bureau. I am not usually a fan of infographics but this is is exceptionally well done. Expert public speaking requires deliberate practice the same as any other skill. Here are some
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A Great Demo Is A Conversation Driven By Mutual Curiosity
The best demo–a Great Demo!–is a conversations driven by mutual curiosity. Your goal is to learn more about a prospect’s current situation and needs while they want to learn more about your product and services and how you can help them. Mutual Demos “Before I demo to you, why don’t you demo to me what
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Labor Day 2014: Knowledge Work Productivity
I have not yet internalized the lessons from Daniel Cook‘s “Laws of Productivity: 8 Productivity Experiments You Don’t Need to Repeat” [PDF] so I find myself work–and now blogging–on a holiday. Here are my key take-aways from Cook’s roundup on knowledge work productivity and some additional thoughts on why they are so hard to put
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–August 2014
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like have new blog posts sent to you.
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Five Mistakes To Avoid In a Nurturing E-Mail
I signed up for a free trial of a lean project management tool (I have changed the name of the tool to <LeanTool>). A few days later I got the following nurturing E-Mail. Subject: Are you afraid to manage your project in a lean way? We’ve noticed that you haven’t been signing into <LeanTool> for a
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Map Customer Buying Process Before Sending a Proposal
Map the customer buying process, needs, and situation before you invest time sending a detailed proposal. A quick request can mean you are column fodder. Q: We are still trying to close our first paying customer. We have a website up and have talked to a number of people. More or less out of the blue
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Busyness Won’t Build Your Business
Busyness won’t build your business, it closes off your creativity and your luck. Anticipate, or at least acknowledge, missed deadlines and commitments: triage or re-negotiate. Busyness I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something
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Nadia James’ Daily Checklist for Aligning Efforts With Goals
Nadia James recently posted a thoughtful article on “Why Entrepreneurs Must Stretch to Reach Their Visions of Success” that included the following daily checklist for aligning efforts with goals for your business. What vision did I have for my personal and work life when I decided to launch a business? (Think of this vision for yourself as your
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Entrepreneurs Blend Passion and Prudent Risk Taking
Successful entrepreneurs are fueled by a passion to change the world tempered by prudent risk taking. Many risks have to be managed on an ongoing basis.
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Customer Interviews: Spend an Hour to Save a Minute
For customer interviews we have a rule of thumb that if an hour or research saves a minute early in the conversation it’s a good investment. When you look at the list of questions you have prepared to learn about the prospect’s business and their needs, it’s easy to say to yourself, “I am really
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By Sunday Night Your Chips Are Down For The Week
By Sunday night the week is over and all of your chips are down. The bets you have been able to place will have to bear fruit, or not. “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late” Bob Dylan “All along the watchtower“
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Minimum Viable Product: Enthusiastically Proceed Skeptically
In a candid discussion about the challenges of managing your own expectations for a minimum viable product (MVP), Tristan Kromer observed, “It’s psychologically hard to enthusiastically proceed with skepticism.” And that is the challenge, we have to be enthusiastic about our product ideas to persevere to complete them and tell others about them, but we have to
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Chris Yonge on 3D Printing: Past, Present, Future
The following is a guest post by Max Murphy, a mechanical engineering student who is interested in the implications of 3D printing or positive manufacturing for mechanical design, its synergies with animation, and potential for fostering new opportunities for entrepreneurs. Max is an intern at DreamWorks and returns to his sophomore year in college this fall.
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Q: How Do I Calculate Business Model Parameters For A Novel Product?
While truly new markets have no history, their business model parameters can be estimated by what they replace or substitute for.
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