Comments on: SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards

By: steveblank

steveblank — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:40:35 +0000

Colin,
I’ve observed that when you’re a founding CEO delegating things you don’t understand is equivalent to taking the money you raised and going to Las Vegas.

Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing. But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. The goal is you to learn enough so you can’t be BS’d by a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and golf score. Or by a VP of Marketing who talks “branding”, SEO/SEM, PR agency, etc.

In the perfect world this happens when the founder(s) actually close the first few (3-3000 depending on market) paying customers themselves. After that you’ve become a battle-hardened realist. And when you do delegate responsibility I tend to favor the “Trust but Verify” model- telling new employees, “I’m going to be looking over your shoulder for the first 90 days. When you’ve proven you can do the job I’ll get out of hair. Until then it’s my company, my responsibility. You need to earn it.

Your mileage may vary, just my two cents.

steve

By: Colin Rae

Colin Rae — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:20:11 +0000

Steve, in many of your posts I’ve noticed you say certain things can not be delegated/outsourced (e.g demand creation strategy).
Interestingly, here you were ok to delegate packaging design after you had understood it.
I was wondering:
- what must not be delegated?
- what must be achieved before delegating something?
Maybe the core of what you talk about in getting companies to success lies in the answer to these 2 questions.
Oh, I absolutely love your “I was having coffee with person the other day” stories. Keep ‘em coming.
Many thanks, you’ve changed my startup a hundred times already.

By: Miguel Cavalcanti

Miguel Cavalcanti — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:12:30 +0000

Hello Steve, great pst, tks for sharing your knowledge.

I´m reading (and enjoying a lot) your book “the 4 steps…”.

Best, Miguel Cavalcanti, from Brazil

By: Niall Smart

Niall Smart — Sat, 02 May 2009 07:20:34 +0000

Great story – your point about snazzy design vs. actual impact is still relevant in the context of spending money on outsourced web graphic design. On the surface, it might seem difficult to quantify the value of good design – however, as per your article, I don’t see any reason why contracts with designers wouldn’t be structured in such a way that target conversion rates, bounce rates, and other metrics would drive the compensation level.

By: Bill Allred

Bill Allred — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:46:25 +0000

This is a really common pitfall. If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs :

http://www.schwans.com
http://www.ftd.com
http://www.proflowers.com

However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. That’s 10x what many websites convert. As your story demonstrates, this is easily testable, so no excuse for not improving purchase rate.

By: Dmitriy

Dmitriy — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:02:50 +0000

When I read your post I thought not about “websites” or “social media”, but “landing pages” as the most relevant online/DM comparable.

As a pay-per-click marketer, now I will look at retail packaging as a source of ideas on landing page design.

By: Nivi

Nivi — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:49:15 +0000

Reminds me of this post by Bill Flagg: “Direct marketers produce ugly, cheesy, long-winded stuff that CONVERT better.”

http://billflagg.blogspot.com/2009/04/better-converting-websites-marketing.html