Tag: winning-pilots
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Project Charters For Cross-functional Alignment
Project charter docs drive early alignment with cross-functional teams on special projects, define goals and non-goals, specify RACI stakeholders, and outline high-level plans. Here is the Project Charter Template. The sections are: “At a glance” section must include the top things that the CEO must know: what, why, why now, and principles. Goals must be…
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The mindset to win in startups
Harvard Business School has a good working definition of entrepreneurship, even for those who haven’t started their own startups yet. It is – Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled. How can this be applied to winning as a startup employee? Just focus on the outcome This is the “pursuit” in the HBS definition. Focusing…
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10 learnings and the story of a pilot customer
In this post, I discuss an example of a pilot and the learnings. In honesty, the story below combines the stories of three pilots to illustrate the learnings. Learnings first – for the busy 🙂 No time to read everything. Learnings are summarized below: Now the full story for the more patient 🙂 The lessons…
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So, what’s the problem?
A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved. – Charles Kettering If you believe this, then it is better to initially use the time to define the problem than to work on the solution. Now this is counter-intuitive at startups because there is a bias towards actions and results. How can one get to a better description…
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The 30 Second Message
Elevator pitch – everyone’s heard of this. This is surely useful at startup pitches and career networking. This concept is also useful for communicating updates on pilots because it declutters the mind and focuses everyone’s attention on what really matters. As I reflect on situations when I had to craft the 30 second message, first I have had…
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Share early. Share often.
No news is good news – this adage doesn’t apply to pilots. When running a pilot, there is always news to share with the customer. The only questions are what’s relevant to share, when, by whom to whom, and in which forum. Here are some situations that can occur. A startup may be working late nights…
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A person is a person …
People make decisions on a pilot (here is the first post on winning pilots). Organizations don’t. Therefore, it is important to map out the people involved in the pilot directly or behind the scenes: For example, suppose a startup provides marketing automation SaaS to the Marketing division. In addition to this division, the customer’s Engineering division…
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Crossing the Chasm is evergreen
Crossing the chasm, an entrepreneurial marketing book by Geoffrey Moore, talks about the diffusion of high tech products. Written in the early 1990s, its observations still hold true. The book observed that there is a significant difference in expectations between the early adopters of a technology and the rest that follow the early adopters. In the early…
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Understand customer’s criteria for pilot success
Obvious, right? Nevertheless, let’s unpack it some more. First, a note about the customer. People make decisions; organizations don’t. So whether a pilot is successful ultimately depends on people’s perspective of success criteria. With that, let’s talk about success criteria. Here’s a framework for thinking about success criteria: Stated criteria for success Customers typically know why they got…
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5 Considerations That Help Win Pilots
Pilots are the life blood of new products and services for SaaS startups. Successful pilots will demonstrate value to the customer, convert them to long-term customers, justify higher prices, and help acquire new business through referrals. So what does it take to win pilots? Here are the considerations I have found to be useful in…
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