Comments on: The Phantom Sales Forecast – Failing at Customer Validation

By: Entrepreneurship blogs agree: Fail fast! | InnovationManagement

Entrepreneurship blogs agree: Fail fast! | InnovationManagement — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:04:07 +0000

[...] development, most everyone lacks the corresponding systematic process for customer discovery and validation. So all entrepreneurs should check out his blog – here – and read at least chapter 3: Customer [...]

By: illona cardona

illona cardona — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:51:11 +0000

great post and a great lesson for all! i’d love to hear the postscript too as to what happened 6 months later. no matter how good you think your vp is, the ceo must have a hand on the pulse especially in strategic accounts. i think you always have to be part of the cycle, especially the beginning and end AND be able to connect with the customer. as in football, sometimes you have to drop back and punt!

By: Matt Cobb

Matt Cobb — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:57:41 +0000

I’d love to hear the postscript… what happened 6 months later?

By: dave broadwin

dave broadwin — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:22:45 +0000

Excellent post and a great reminder that our perceptions (especially when not paying close attention) are not necessarity consistent with the real world.

By: aw

aw — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:24:36 +0000

Love the insight – thanks.

By: Joe A.

Joe A. — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:25:46 +0000

Excellent article… I hope I won’t make the same type of mistake one day.

By: Scott Miller

Scott Miller — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:49:26 +0000

Great post – read about this in your book this morning! Funny timing

By: dmlandry

dmlandry — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:46:13 +0000

There may be a second, hidden lesson in here, too.

If, as CEO, your assumptions and hypotheses are confirmed through initial customer discovery research, don’t fall into a _confirmation bias_ trap. Keep the feedback loop closed even as your march through customer validation and into the execution phase. And, as you point out, you don’t truly have a closed loop if you aren’t participating …

As an excited, focused, optimistic startup CEO talking to potential customers, it’s natural to be convinced that ideas are on target and thus the righteousness of the cause confirmed.

In your experience, how common is this occurrence? Is this a critical failure point for startups to watch out for?

By: JohnBasilGeorges

JohnBasilGeorges — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:34:38 +0000

Now this is worth reading. I couldn’t agree more with this article. I would go further in that great CEOs also need to be actually CLOSING themselves (at least large contracts), not just be involved with sales. How else will they really understand their biz better. As a CEO of two successful startups myself, the sales closing process also taught me how to run the company better operationally.

By: 25 Tech Companies You Want To Work For | Streamlined Life

25 Tech Companies You Want To Work For | Streamlined Life — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:27:21 +0000

[...] lose your job. That’s the advice for start-up CEOs from Steve Blank, as he relays a must-read cautionary tale of a chief executive who entrusted too much faith in his VP of Sales and almost lost his job [...]

By: Chris Joyce

Chris Joyce — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Article is 100% dead on

By: Joanne Lang

Joanne Lang — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:02:08 +0000

Steve a good reminder article!
At AboutOne we have a person assigned to customer feedback and validation full time – but this is a good reminder to revisit some of our earlier customers, I love the reply from Andrew Holt with the question ideas too. We did this with our market validation and alpha release, but we really should re-do it with the current beta. Thank you Andrew for your reply!

By: Andrew Holt

Andrew Holt — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:41:41 +0000

The ‘what if we offered this for free’ question is a great metric, and I’ve used it a bunch of times to gauge customer interest. I think that, and the ‘would you buy this if we charged $1mm for it’ (response: ‘no, but I’d pay $10k/mo’) question are two of the most useful ways to figure out how much value your current offering has, and what needs to happen to make it worth paying for. I certainly wish we had asked the first question before we ever started development of our product – it would have saved us a lot of iterations.

By: Michalis P.

Michalis P. — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:22:28 +0000

Excellent article, once again.
Thanks,
Michalis

By: Alex Murphy

Alex Murphy — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:18:38 +0000

One more lesson learned.

Pivot Discovery:

If the answer to “what if it were free?” is crickets, you have found your moment to Pivot.

Great article.