When Do You Hire a Real Head of Sales? A fellow entrepreneur I’m friendly with who’s got a really early stage company asked me the other day when he should hire his first head of sales. I think the answer completely depends on what kind of business you’re in and how dependent it is on external relationship building, and also what kind of entrepreneur you are. But I tried to distill my answer down to three things for him to think about: If your company requires a meaningful amount of customer participation before your initial product is launched, you need to invest in sales months ahead of anticipated revenue. This was the case for us at Return Path. We hired…
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Leadership
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes The press conference this past spring where President Bush embarrassingly refused to admit that he had ever made any big mistakes, other than to reiterate his gaffe at trading Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers, brings up another issue in this series: is it good for leaders, both political and corporate, to admit mistakes? On the corporate side, I think the ability to admit a mistake is a must. Again, I’ll refer back to Jim Collins’ books Good to Great and Built to Last, both of which talk about humility and the ability to admit mistakes as a critical component of emotional intelligence, the cornerstone of solid leadership. And in…
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Continued
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Continued My colleague Ed Taussig had a great comment on this posting that I thought I’d share since no one ever reads comments on blogs. Firing someone should always be considered an opportunity for “Lessons Learned” – i.e. was there anything that as a manager I could have done differently to avoid getting to the point of having to fire someone in the first place? Was it a failure to interview/hire properly in the first place? Was there a failure to mentor them or to give them constructive feedback before the problem became irreparable? Did I make an effort to find out what might be affecting their performance? There will be times when the…
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Continued
One of my first postings was about how challenging it can be to fire people. This is a topic that can probably consume volumes, but Jerry Colonna has just written a great piece about it for his column in Inc. that’s definitely worth a read.
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part I: Realist or Idealist?
It’s election season, the GOP convention is literally in my backyard, and while this is not a political blog, I can’t help myself. As we as Americans grapple with the question of who we want to be our next leader (or at least those people who live in the 11 annointed swing states do), I have had a lot of thoughts lately about the question of what makes a good leader, and what the differences are between successful leadership in politics and successful leadership in business. James O’Toole’s article on President Bush on page 31 of the September issue of Fast Company (no link available yet) brings up a really interesting point in comparing Bush to former president Ronald Reagan….
Why French Fries are Like Marketing
My friend Seth has a theory about life called the French Fry Theory. The theory is simple — “you always have room for one more fry.” It’s pretty spot-on, if you think about it. Fries are so tasty, and so relatively small (most of the time), that it’s easy to just keep eating, and eating, and eating them. I’ve always thought that the French Fry Theory can be applied to many things, usually other food items. However, I came up with a new application today: Marketing. So why are French Fries like Marketing? You can always do one more thing. One more press release. One more piece of collateral. One more page on the corporate web site. One more newsletter….
Whatever Happened to "The Customer is King"?
B2B published a synopsis of an unbelievably pathetic study last week, which I’ll excerpt here in case that flaky-looking link doesn’t work: More than 50% of global brands fail to answer e-mails, study finds…Fewer than half of the top global brands bother to answer e-mail correspondence sent to their Web sites, according to a study by Common Sense Advisory, a research company…”Our research showed that responding to prospects and customers appears to be a problem for most companies,” said Donald A. DePalma, the lead analyst for the report. Sixteen percent of those surveyed don’t offer e-mail or Web communication with current and prospective customers, the study found. Ok, the last paragraph is a little sad, since email and the web…
The Land Without Blogs (Can You Imagine?)
We just spent three days whitewater rafting in Glacier National Park, Montana. It was great fun for many reasons, but one thing that really struck me is how rare it is to completely unplug these days. No cell phone, no email, no TiVo, no electricity. Not even an iPod. Just a raft, a tent, and an open fire for cooking. And I’d venture to guess that of the 15 other people on our trip besides the two of us, not a single one even knows what a blog is, let alone writes one. In many ways, those three days of being unplugged were as refreshing as two weeks on many other vacations.
The Good, The Board, and The Ugly
Fred, Brad, and Jerry have done a bunch of postings recently, and threaten to do more, sharing the VC perspective on many aspects of startups and entrepreneurship. I thought it might be interesting to share the entrepreneur’s perspective on the same subjects. I’ll try to cross-post and keep pace, but I’m already a couple behind, and I can’t crank out postings as fast as these guys can! (For reference, Fred and Brad are on my board, and Jerry as Fred’s partner is an advisor to my company, Return Path.) Topic 1: Boards of Directors. All three have many good points. Brad says that boards come in three flavors (working, reporting, and lame duck), and that small companies need working boards…
Present AND Accounted For
There was a great essay in the New York Times yesterday about multitasking. The gist of the article is that multitasking, when taken to an extreme, is unproductive at best and in the case of driving, quite dangerous. I’ve long believed that in business, as in any activity relying in part on interpersonal relationships, it’s important to be fully present when talking to other people. This is especially true in one-on-one conversations, but true even in larger meetings. The article talks about the clicking you hear when you’re talking to someone on the phone and he or she is typing in the background. And we’ve all been in meetings where someone picks up a Blackberry to reply to a presumably…
Turning Lemons into Lemonade
I’ve always thought that the ability to stare down adversity in business — or turning lemons into lemonade, as a former boss of mine used to say — is a critical part of being a mature professional. We had a prime example of this a couple weeks ago at Return Path. We had scheduled a webinar on email deliverability, a critical topic for our market, and the moment of the webinar had come, with over 100 clients and prospects on the line for the audio and web conference. There was a major technical glitch with our provider, Webex (no link for you, Webex), and after 5 or 10 minutes, we had to cancel the webinar — telling all 100 members…