SaaS Social Media and Updates

Customer Interviews Mirror First Sales Meetings

In this episode of #TheScienceOfScaling , I sat down with Mike Gamson #FoundingCRO at LinkedIn. We travel back to the early days when LinkedIn clearly had product-market-fit for its members, and Mike had the difficult challenge of devising the commercialization strategy. It's fun to reflect on how much he learned from Reid Hoffman and the rock-star early team at the company. Here are a few of my takeaways from the chat: (1) "Customer Interview Best Practices = First Sales Meeting Best Practices": Founders often fail to recognize the similarities between customer interview best practices during the MVP development stage and first sales meeting best practices during the scaling phase. These best practices are nearly identical (e.g., starting with open-ended questions, avoiding leading the witness, probing for pain points, quantifying implications, tailoring solution descriptions to buyer needs, etc.). When conducting your initial customer interviews, you are simultaneously crafting your first sales playbook. (2) "ICP for Your Current Phase is Not the TAM for Your Business Opportunity": Design for a massive market. However, don't attempt to "boil the ocean" (i.e., selling to everyone) right out of the gate. Focus your initial sales efforts on the market that will most predictably get you from $0 to $1M and then from $1M to $10M with a healthy customer and revenue base. These journeys take many years and, if executed well, will provide additional discretionary funding and resources to uncover additional growth opportunities to support the next phase of scale aspirations. (3) "Optimize Your Capitalization Strategy for Your Startup's Context, not Your Investor's Fund Size": For the last two decades, the U.S. startup ecosystem has over-indexed toward raising and burning large amounts of venture capital as the only path toward startup success. For some startup opportunities, that capitalization strategy is warranted. SpaceX is definitely an example. Many of today's foundational AI model businesses may be as well. However, that capitalization strategy is not optimal for all startup contexts. Founders are surprised to learn more wealth is generated in non-VC-backed versus VC-backed startups. Thoughtful alignment of capitalization strategy with startup context is crucial in the current macro context. We have never seen so much capital concentration in the top 20 firms, and we have never seen these firms attempt to deploy so much capital from one fund entity. Be very careful that your capitalization strategy is driven by your startup's context and not your investor's fund size. For more founder selling best practices, order “The Science of Scaling: Using Data to Decide When - And How Fast - To Scale Revenue”. 100% of the proceeds are donated to mental health. ---> https://lnkd.in/gH9jUy5b