Tag: marketing

Entrepreneurship

Branding first starts with your team External branding starts with developing a consistent, internal message first

Posted on by Ed Sim

External branding starts with developing a consistent, internal message first. When you think of branding and positioning, remember that your first line of offense and the most important representation of your company comes from your employees.  Make sure you have a succinct, crisp and clear 2-3 sentence pitch on what you do and that everyone from the CEO down to the engineer or QA can repeat the same mantra.  Whether your employees are doing sales pitch or at a conference or cocktail party, they should all be starting with the same message.  The more it is said the easier the message spreads. We live in a sound-byte generation with information overload so if you can cut through the clutter with a powerful and succinct message, you will not be forgotten.

It reminds me of the old kids game “telephone” where one player starts with a message and passes it down the line and in the end the last player repeats what they heard.  Many times the message is completely different from the initial version.  Obviously if you think of messaging in terms of the game “telephone” you will quickly recognize that the crisper and simpler it is, the harder it will be to get lost in translation.  You want the next degree of relationships to be able to explain just as easily as your employees – this is how great buzz builds.

At Cisco, it was “we network networks” or at Tableau Software which went public today “we help people see and understand data” Obviously what goes into sentence 2 can provide a little more detail on how or why you are special (see my blog post from 2007 on why vision statements matter and how to craft one.  In Tableau’s case, it is “we help anyone quickly analyze, visualize and share information.”  And sentence 3 is the build and ah-hah moment – “More than 10,000 organizations get rapid results with Tableau in the office and on-the-go.”  Yes, that is strong messaging to the outside world and in the written word but it can also be simplified for strong messaging from employees in the spoken word.

So remember when it comes to messaging and positioning, keep it simple, easily remembered and to the point. What is your message and does everyone on your team know it? When your startup is out in the market meeting with customers and VCs, will everyone you meet be able to say the same message – “yeah, i met this cool company today and they do “x”.  If so, you off to a great start!

Entrepreneurship

Cutco Knives and startups everyone in a startup needs to learn how to sell

Posted on by Ed Sim

When I worked for Cutco Knives one summer in college selling the world’s finest cutlery, my dream was to sell the Homemaker +8 at every meeting.  It was the Rolls Royce of knife sets and in every sales call I had, I always tried to flog the deluxe set.  Of course, more often than not, I left with selling a spatula spreader or much smaller set.  Many a memory was brought back yesterday as my wife and I went through a sales pitch for Cutco knives from an enterprising college student.  His pitch was great…and entertaining…and the same from 20+ years ago – cut the penny with the scissors, cut some rope, lay out the catalog, and even the close.  Would you like the Homemaker +8 or the Homemaker +4?

How about the Essentials +5 or the Essentials.  As I sat in on the sales call, what I remember most about selling knives was that it was a tough and lonely job and my friends teased me the whole summer about being little more than a “door-to-door” salesman flogging kitchen utensils.  Looking back on that experience, I recognize that I learned so many valuable skills about selling and more importantly about myself in terms of constantly being rejected but still having the optimism and fight to move on to the next opportunity.  I am sure by now you are thinking, what does selling knives have to do with startups?I strongly believe that every entrepreneur should take a sales job at one point in their life, even for a summer.  Whether you are a tech guy or product guy or executive, you have to remember that you are always selling – not just to the external world like customers and VCs and partners but also internally as well, drumming up support, getting the team to buy into your ideas, and much more.  I believe there is sometimes a stigma for being a sales person but in reality no business can ever succeed without someone selling your product or service.

Selling Cutco Knives was great because I went through sales training which at the time seemed incredibly cheesy, became enamored with trying to win salesperson of the week and month, and learned how to use referral based lead generation to create sales appointments.  I learned about creating a great script to use on the initial sales call (great understanding for understanding the life of an inside sales rep), how to use a presumptive close (can we meet this Wednesday at 3 or 5), how to properly make a sales call, how to read my potential customer, and ultimately how to manage my own personal sales pipeline and funnel.  From that experience I went on to start my own window washing business and develop a deep appreciation for sales reps and how hard their job really is.  And I find myself selling every single day in my life as a venture capitalist – selling to potential investors, selling my value add to startups, selling to portfolio company CEOs on why they might try another way to accomplish a certain goal, and selling my own partner on why we should or shouldn’t do a certain deal.  If you are wondering what happened at the end of our sales call, my wife and I ended up buying the lovely Homemaker +8 and gave our rep a boatload of referrals.