Are you creating or stealing customers?
(Editor’s note: Michael Greenberg is COO of Loyalty Lab. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
It’s easy to think that your start-up is centered in a green field or blue ocean, but typically, that’s not the case. Only the lucky few are truly creating new customers out of thin air. Most have to steal them from someone else.
This is a fact that few entrepreneurs want to hear. But smart start-up owners know when to face… Continue Reading
Your customers are not who you think
The most important early customers for your startup usually turn out to be quite different from who you think they’re going to be.
When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “Serial Communications Controller” (SCC). As the (very junior) product marketing manager, I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember… Continue Reading
Cinching sales with sports scores
When I was a young marketer I learned how to listen to customers by making a fool of myself.
Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers.
Convergent’s business was selling desktop computers (with our own operating system and office applications) to other computer manufacturers – most of them long gone: Burroughs,… Continue Reading