Eat What You Shoot

I have a proclivity for enjoying (and remembering) random business quotes.    I used to get a kick out of the quotes from Jim Barkdsale (former Netscape and AT&T CEO).  He had a great way of stating the obvious but somehow making it seem profound.  A great example,
    "Of course, nothing happens until somebody sells something." – Jim Barksdale

I am a firm believer that startups CEOs should do their own business development.  It is hard to enough running a startup.  You are constantly juggling between hiring, raising money, providing strategic direction, washing bottles, or whatever.  But, nothing gets a CEO focused on closing business and feeling the progression of your business as building your own sales pipeline.  The immediate feedback you get with a win or a loss is immeasurable.  I know too many CEOs that manage their startups from spreadsheets.  There is no better way to get feedback on your product by being in the front lines.

When you in the early stage of your startup, you don’t have the luxury of having a world-class product management team supporting you.  Being your own salesperson, allows you to think through the real challenges that your own salespeople may be having, too.  An additional benefit is that it makes you sharp.  It makes you smart as an operator and also as a strategic steward to your business.  It will expose things about what you are doing that you simply do not know or understand.  This is helpful for other areas of your operating repertoire like presenting to investors and your Board.  I ran across this great post from Josh Kopelman about how entrepreneurs have a hard time with admitting that they don’t know something.  It is also good practice to be in-front of a customer that simply is smarter than you.  Be willing to say, "I don’t know." 

I recently was in a sales situation with a large potential customer;  I was explaining how our contextual algorithm worked.  The SVP that I was talking to is a truly bright ad rock star and didn’t want my "Fisher Price" explanation, he wanted to know some specific information on how well our system would work thru their ad server against their own Fortune 50 clients.  I got our CTO on the phone and we got the questions answered but it was a stark reminder that I needed to bone up on some technical information.  In the process, I started to think thru how we could better work with exchanges and ad networks by pre-tuning our system to specific clients.  It got me thinking like a brand marketer not just like a performance marketer.