Recently on VentureBeat, author Jacob Brody reported on an entrepreneur’s Meetup in NYC where the founders of several successful startups discussed a common sales problem for small businesses: how to get larger, established organizations to take you seriously enough to be able to close a deal. It’s not surprising that this was such a hot [ Read More ]
Many people don’t think about it specifically, but know it intuitively: if you want good customer service, skip the big guys and go to a small company. In Small Business’ Competitive Advantage, I discuss that Customer Service is the magical pixie dust for small business. Think about your normal daily experience: if you need to [ Read More ]
There is nothing harder for a non-salesperson than building a sales pipeline. In Bagging the Elephant I highlight a post about a recent event in NYC, in which entrepreneurs discussed how to build strong enough relationships with larger businesses in order to be taken seriously enough to close deals with them. This is part of [ Read More ]
In Deck the Halls with Pink Slips I discuss the November round of layoffs at several big companies. Of course, part of what brought these to my attention is that a dear friend of mine got caught in the pre-holidays cut-backs at Adobe. Even worse, however, was the fact that my friend loved working at [ Read More ]
My first blog post as part of the Entrepreneur Evangelist series on WorkingPoint was called, Being a chocolate and peanut butter entrepreneur. One of the things I like most about being an entrepreneur is the dicing and slicing of seemingly unrelated ideas and piecing them together in new ways. This article was specifically about identifying [ Read More ]
As the old joke says, “There are two kinds of people in the world…” In my corner of the universe, there are those who love working in/with startups and those who don’t. Those to love it never question why someone else likes it. Those who have either never done it or who have low tolerance [ Read More ]
The former CMO of Jive Software, Sam Lawrence, spoke to a crowded room at Interactive Austin this morning. His message was on the lessons needed to specifically apply in order to make social media work in your business. How We Say What We Say One of the challenges social media evangelists face is based on [ Read More ]
This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [ Read More ]
People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [ Read More ]
I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [ Read More ]