Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

An amazing article from Sherry Buffington came across my inbox (by way of Alltop through a Posterous subscription email) a few days ago, and I couldn’t get over how accurate she was with her 8 essential attributes of sales people.  I don’t imagine you’re familiar with her work, as its in the self help space, and she’s on rocking 30 followers on Twitter, but the article really stuck with me:

Its a bit cheesy, but after a little reflection, I had a lot of questions.  Do these attributes apply to early stage companies? Why do startups think sales is a four letter word?  Why isn’t revenue required to have a “company”?  Otherwise isn’t it just a hobby? Would startups even want to read this article because its copywrited 2006 (which is old new for them)?

To help bridge the gap, here’s an analysis of how each of the attributes from Sherry’s list maps out to the early stage startup world:

1)  Achievement Drive

This may mean something in big business talk, but to us this means EXECUTION OBSESSED.

Sales people are fast talking fast acting deal closing machines.  They’re going to be more aggressive than your average startup hire, and they’ll be just as goal focused as your google analytics addicted user conversion team.  Like everyone else in the startup space, don’t be afraid to let sales people learn on the job, because they should be more than comfortable jumping into a new industry head first!

You need to be careful not to hire the time share selling Gordon Gecko that would sell his own mother to protect your startup’s culture, but this extra “edge” is what you need to close big deals for big $.

2) Empathy

A big part of the web2.0 / social media trend is about making companies more personal.  Think Whole Foods having a facebook page.  Sales people working for a startup need to reflect that as well.

They need to know what problems their products solve, and how they can help their customers.  The cold hard sell does not work anymore because most people can sniff it out, and becaues they expect more from companies these days.

Empathize too much, and you won’t close the deal.  You’ll spend all your time worrying about the features that have yet to be built, and not enough time closing what you currently have.

3) Self Confidence

90% of all startups fail… so yes, sales people at startups have to be EVEN more comfortable with failure.  Their obsession with execution and strong belief or faith tha the startup is game changing (we’ll touch on faith in a future post) has to keep them going in the worst of times.

After 100 phone calls, 20 touches/contacts,  and 20 rejects, a good sales person will pick up the phone and close a deal on the 21 st call.  A great sales person will close a deal on the 21st call AND give you a full analysis based on what they learned during the 20 calls in which they made contact.

• 10 of the calls were to this profile of customer, and this type of customer won’t buy until they’ve reached X in revenue
• 5 of the calls were to the wrong person in the organization, and for 2 of them they told me the product manager was the decision maker
• 4 of the calls where to potential customers that were already using a competitors product, we need to follow up in 6 months once they’re feeling the pain again
• 1 call came from a legitimate objection, he was an educated customer, and wants a demo with a product team to go through the details

With so much to say on the subject, and so little time, I’m going to break this up into several posts…

First, lets start with the assumption that you use more than a couple of social web apps, and each time you sign up for a new social service you find yourself wishing that all your friends were already connected to you on this new account.  Enter the term “Social Graph”, and the dilemna of ownership and portability.  You can read in depth about it here and you can learn more about general social graph 1.0 problem here.

To solve the first Social Graph problem, solutions like Facebook connect popped up.  Many services let you log in via gmail or twitter to import your address books.  You could register for a new service, or just log in using facebook connect, and within a few minutes you could have a your whole social graph, or at least enough to get started, connected to you. Enter Social Graph Problem 2.0:

Not only do I want to take my social graph with me, but now I want to break it down and carry that meta data with me.

Facebook, in 2006, launched a “news feed” feature dumping all your friends actions into a long stream and immediately overwhelming users across the platform.  The natural reaction (besides futile protesting) was to group friends into little subgroups, to break the data down into more consumable chunks.  This way Facebook could serve as a feed reader from your friends from “college”, “work”, or even “highschool” through their “Friends Lists” feature.

Now, I’ve got 600 + friends, its going to be a huge pain to do this manually.  And worse, what if I want my friends categorized like this on other services? Is facebook going to let me take these lists (categories, subgroups, etc) to another service?  Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and most recently Twitter have all added the ability to create lists, while services such 37 Signal’s Highrise CRM sofware have powerful tagging features to categorize your contacts.  Things get even more confusing when you bring in new services like, Friendfeed, Threadsy and Gist, where you can group your friends and they communications across all your services (twitter, facebook, etc)

In summary, we’re pushing the envelope of data portability, and I think its exposing a bigger problem.  These are my friends.  These are my contacts in life, and to stay in touch with them I need a better way to organize them.  These categories and lists are rapidly going to become important across all the services you use, and right now they’re stuck in one place.

To some up this year’s TC50 experience I wanted to write about the most exciting company there, AnyClip (full disclosure, Nate and I are good friends).

1) The product looks damn good

First and foremost, the product looked damn good for only four months of work.  Within a few seconds of looking at it, even from the back of the room, you could tell what it did.  Compare that to all the “realtime web” applications that just had long cluttered pages of “lifestreaming” data, this one really stands out.

2) The pitch was smooth, slow, and confident

Aaron’s spoke about his company and the space they’re in with AUTHORITY.  Not something you see from the first timers.  He spoke slowly, and described the product in simple terms everyone could understand, while keeping them entertained with an exciting demo (and some crass jokes).

More importantly he didn’t cram in 2000 details about the features, and he got straight to the important issues that the judges wanted to discuss

3) They’re taking a huge risk, and thats what startups are about

There was no sneaking around the licensing issue.  Its the 1000lb gorilla in the room.  Everyone knows it, and everyone wants to see them suceed.

4) Like I just said, EVERYONE wants this to happen

Who hasn’t said to themselves “oh shit, what movie was that,” in a conversation with their friends.  Its something that everyone from my grandma to girlfriend or sister (people that don’t fall into the uber nerd category) can understand.

After 2 days at TC50 running through the DemoPit gauntlet, I was surprised by how many people have a hard time communicating their business idea.  To make the most of a PR opportunity like TC50 your Sales team, community, and product all need to be in lock step with a great message.

Here are a few steps to help out:

1) Keep it short

The startup world is booming and with so many companies out there its really hard to get anyones attention.  Investors, possible partners, and acquirers are looking at new ideas all day long, so they need to know what you do in 30 seconds or less. 

Angelsoft has this nailed down with their “one line pitch”.  Lead with a very short, comprehensive explanation of what your company does and why its different.

2) Make it visible

Once you have this perfect one line pitch, put it out there so everyone can see it.  On your website, make it stand out.  Get marketing, sales, and product all using the same vocabulary, so you’re customers see one consistent message. 

At your booth in the DemoPit make it visible so someone can see what you do before coming in for a more detailed discussion. Investors and other interested parties don’t want to waste their time or yours, so help them find you.  This last part is KEY!  A half dozen investors mentioned how difficult it was to approach companies without knowing what they did.  Make it easy for them to find you, and you’ll have a lot more highly relevant conversations.

3) Keep it simple

Use words that your customers, or your mom can understand.  Here’s a great example from Get Satisfaction, a community based customer support site, where they ask their customers how they would describe the service to their mom.

Leave out the buzz words and stick to common sense descriptions that a wide audience can understand

4) Know what your cutomers are hearing, not just what you’re saying

This is the all so important feedback loop.  Even once you get your message nailed down, you may not be spreading the right message.  Theres a big difference between what you think you’re saying, and what the customers are hearing.

The example by Get Satisfaction above is one way to get feedback on how your customers see your product.  My buddy Dan Martell , suggested that investors just ask their users what 3 words come to mind when they think of XXX company.

You need to be describing your company using the same words that they would use, and you know you have a problem if they describe something completely different than what you built.

Time is flat on the web today!  If the blog post/web page you’re currently reading doesn’t have a date, you’re stuck using design cues in the hopes of carbon dating what era it came from (flashing text, and animated jpgs?)

Twitter is coming to address some component of this issue, but they still face the same problem as google, delicious, etc.  How to represent time in your search results.

Here’s how I see the issue of “time relevancy”:

For example in the “Google Web” category, if I’m looking for advice on how to choose a DSLR Camera (the bigger format digital cameras with swapable lenses) google brings back articles from 2002 and 2003 which no longer applies to todays cameras.  I could go to twitter, but I don’t necessarily need advice on the camera that came out today, those are too expensive!

How do we solved this for everything in between the Way Back Machine and the Real time web?  Do they all need timelines?  Ones that look better than mine….

Just noticed facebook added a feature to allow you to pull other services in (a la Friendfeed).  Check out the screenshot below:

Go to your profile, and click the “Settings” button on your wall

I’ve been managing Kiva’s social media initiatives as part of the community outreach team since Feb, and one of my biggest problems has been tracking metrics.  Sure, “real time” web tools are all the rage, but none of them seem to suit my needs ( I want distributed Google Analytics for social media), so I’ve gone low tech; URL shorteners.

Bit.ly to the rescue!  I didn’t quite understand this before, but a URL shortener like Bit.ly that provides metrics can serve as a decentralized stats tracking tool.  Unlike something like Google Analytics where you have to have access to the site where you are tracking stats, with bit.ly you can release your unique shortened URL and you can track the stats wherever it goes!

I discovered the idea by accident, and posted a quick version of the test earlier, but for this post I wanted something a little more robust.

Starting Point:

Kiva Twitter Accnt (on 6/12/2009) :  5,758 followers

Kiva Facebook Accnt (on 6/12/2009) : 44,039 fans

The Setup:

I was posting a link to the newly released Kiva App Directory and I wanted to track the clicks this link would get on Facebook vs. Twitter to get an idea of how engaging either service is.  To do this I needed to create two different short URLs on services that provide real time link tracking.

I chose bit.ly to generate the link that I would post to Twitter (bit.ly/PdKQ5) and the SnipURL to generate the one I’d post to Facebook (http://sn.im/jzph9).

Results:

Raw Data:

Chart 1:  Day 1 10am – 4:46pm

Continue Reading →

Just posted a link that I shortend with two seperate shortening services to Kiva’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.   Found some interesting stats, and wanted to post them quickly before going back and writing a full post.

Here are the stats after two days:

Bit.ly (posted on Twitter)

SnipURL (Posted on Facebook)

Given that our Twitter account has around 5k followers and our Facebook account has 42k fans, I was surprised how many clicks that I got from Twitter.  I’ve already run more “serious” tests and I’ll post the results.

You probably heard about it through facebook or twitter, but last weekend I participate in the first Kiva Developer Garage.   The idea was to promote the launch of their new API, and get a bunch of new projects kick started.  Though Im not a developer, I attended to motivate, inspire, and provide some ideas on which direction the apps could take.

In short we had 25+ coders show up and we proposed a handful of general projects:

1) Javascript Loan browser – to make the browsing experience sexier

2) iphone App

3) better Facebook app

4) wordpress plugin

5) google friend connect

My main interests where around the Facebook application and the WordPress Widget.  If we can get to the point that every someone Facebook account makes a loan or gets repaid, they post it back to their news feed, we’d be set.  People would learn about the lending and loaning experience through their friends, and would be more comfortable checking out Kiva.org for the first time.

On the wordpress widget, the idea is that many bloggers are out there lending to Kiva and they want to show their kiva street cred.  We want to display our portfolios and our stats to the world in the hopes of challenging more people to get involved.

Both of these projects got off to a good start, and once I track the links, I’ll post them.  In the meantime, here’s the video:

My friend Rachel is traveling the world doing all kinds of crazy things, and you can see her wordpres travel blog here.  The problem is, she’s got no pics in her posts!

So she needed to know how to post pictures from her flickr.com account into her blog posts on wordpress.com

Here goes:

Adding a Flickr Photo to a Post on WordPress.com