You care about analyst coverage because customers care. Customers care because vendors can’t purchase it.

The only reason marketers care what some industry analysts have to say is because some customers respect their opinion. The moment customers suspect that this opinion can be bought, they would stop paying for their advice. These markets where an analyst opinion really matters are often those where the decision is made by a purchase team that doesn’t have the time/skill/money/risk tolerance to perform a complete evaluation of every vendor in the market. They trust analysts to educate/advise them enough to quickly get the vendor list down to a more manageable size. It varies by market/geography/company size of course but if you are selling to a Fortune 500 IT buyer in North America, you may not get on a short list if Gartner doesn’t cover you (if you are selling to consumers, you probably should stop reading this right now).

You can’t buy love. But you can purchase a date.

So the entire business model of an analyst firm depends on customers trusting that the analysts are not biased for or against certain vendors. Vendors cannot purchase coverage in a report, nor inclusion on a Quadrant or Wave. Analysts do cover companies that don’t pay for their services. So does paying an analyst firm increase your chances of getting favourable coverage in their research. Heck yes it does! But it doesn’t guarantee they will write nice things about you. Purchasing a contract gives you their attention. It gives you the ability to interact with them regularly (the biggest mistake you can make is pay for the contract and not establish regular meetings with the analysts, more on this later). This leads to several things:

• A better understanding of how the analyst firm views the market
• An opportunity to educate the analysts about the value of your offering and your point of view on the market
• The opportunity to influence their thinking about how the market is evolving
• Advanced warning about upcoming research and the ability to respond to questions and surveys before the research is published
• The opportunity to introduce them to your customers, further illustrating your offering’s value and increasing your chances of coverage.
• The ability to establish the credibility of your company and your depth of knowledge of the space, increasing the credibility of your offering in the eyes of the analysts.
• The ability to establish relationships with the analysts (hey, they are people too and it never hurts if you all know and like each other).

So buying the contract is a bit like buying your love interest dinner at Le Bernardin instead offering to split the bill at McDonald’s. It won’t guarantee that you’ll fall in love but it will increase the odds that they’ll show up so you can make your case.

The often-ignored but equally important reason you want to work with analysts – to learn from them

But here’s the thing. Coverage isn’t the only reason you want to work with an analyst firm. It may not even be the main reason you want to work with them. You want to work with them because you can learn from them. They spend all day thinking about the markets you are in. They spend a significant amount of time talking to customers. They know what your competitors are up to. Who else in your market can give you this kind of perspective? How valuable this perspective is to your company depends on a lot of things but here are some things I’ve used analysts for:

1. Feedback on messaging and positioning – they know the terms the rest of the market is using and they know how customers express themselves. That puts them in a unique position to give you feedback on how you are expressing your value proposition and your terminology. They also have a firm grasp of what your competitors have and can help you understand what really differentiates you.
2. Competitive insight – we are all under non-disclosure when we talk to analysts so they can’t tell you anything that isn’t already in the public domain (well technically anyway). but it isn’t always easy to keep up with what the competitors are doing especially if you are in a crowded market. Part of the analyst’s job is to stay on top of who’s doing what in a market.
3. Customer insight – Analysts do a lot of customer briefings. I find myself asking questions like “Have you ever seen a company with this problem?” or “We think that customers using competitor X’s product tend to look like ABC. Would you agree?” You should never trust any one person’s opinion as the final word on a market but the insight you get from an analyst can help you understand where to look next.

Now don’t get me wrong – I have worked with analysts that I though had a spotty level of knowledge of their market, had obvious biases toward certain vendors and seemed to be incapable of constructive feedback. Every profession has a few that maybe should be doing something else with their lives. Fortunately for me that has been the exception rather than the rule.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you will have a much deeper understanding of the particular slice of the market that you play in than any analyst you will meet. They on the other hand will probably understand the broader market better than you do. You need to keep this in mind when you are filtering their feedback.

Two big cautions for startups!

1. All of the good stuff that you get from analysts only happens if you do the work. You have to establish a regular calendar of meetings with multiple analysts. You have to prepare for those meetings. You have to find customers that are willing to talk to them. You have to have interesting new news to talk about. You have to complain like heck if your analyst is a dud. If you simply sign the cheque and wait for the good stuff to come rolling in you are wasting your money. Without an analyst relations plan, it’s pointless.
2. Don’t forget your other marketing priorities. If you are a B2B startup working with analysts is going to be on a long list of things you have to do including lead generation, sales support, enabling your salesforce, building content for your site and campaigns, securing customer references, etc. etc. You have to weigh working with an analyst firm against the other things on your list and take your budget into account. If you only have $60K to spend on marketing, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone spend half of that on a Gartner contract. Even though I think analyst relations is very important for certain companies in certain markets, you need to be smart about it and make sure it makes sense for the value you will get.

Related posts:

1. Working with Analysts is a Pain (but you Should do it Anyway)
2. How to Build a More Targeted Startup Pitch
3. Your Company Can Ignore Social Media but You Can’t

Here’s my list of Do’s and Don’ts

Do This

1. Cultivate relationships before you need them – Did you ever have a friend that only called you when they wanted something? Don’t be that person. There’s generally a ton of runway pre-launch you can use to establish relationships with bloggers and journalists. Meeting face to face (at events, social gatherings, industry meetings, etc.) is always the best way but I’ve had good relationships that started out with me commenting a lot on their blogs, sharing their content, and linking to or blogging about their content on my company blogs. The goal is to get a better understanding of the person (what do they like/dislike, how can help them out, etc) at a stage when you aren’t asking for something.
2. Have something newsworthy to talk about – this isn’t just about having a great product, it’s about having a great story to tell that people will want to read about (and yes, great products make this easier). Why should people be excited about your news? How does it relate to other newsworthy things (market/buyer/cultural/economic trends for example) people are interested in? Most startups are great at tying their solutions to technology trends which works well for tech/startup publications. If you want more mainstream press your tie-in’s will need to be more mainstream. I talked to a startup recently that got good coverage tying their product news to the Occupy movement, and another that had a great story related to wedding planning that launched at the time of the royal wedding. You need to answer the question – why is your news interesting right now?
3. Pitch writers that are a good fit for your news – I’ve seen few examples where folks have been successful by blasting large lists with a generic pitch. Do your homework and understand what the writer covers, their likes and dislikes, whether or not they have written about other companies in similar markets and if so, what were the stories like. Build a personalized pitch that includes why you chose to pitch them specifically. If possible tailor your story angle for the publication or for them personally.
4. Make it as easy as possible – I like to have a media page that I can direct folks to where writers can get quick easy answers to basic questions (i.e. who/when/why was the company formed, who are the noteworthy employees/customers/partners/investors/advisors involved, what is the value the company delivers and to what markets) and get easy access to logos, screenshots, video, graphics etc. Write your press release so that it’s easy to copy sections from it to create a story (hard to believe but this happens more than you would think). Video and/or images (I seem to be the only person on the planet that’s sick of infographics) that compliment the story work well because they make it easy to create a visually interesting post.
5. Kiss butt (a little) – Just like regular folks, bloggers generally like working with people who are nice to them more than they like dealing with jackasses. In my opinion, putting a little sugar on it just helps move things along. Tell them you loved their most recent post, say thank-you when they cover you, send them a happy holidays note – this stuff seems simple but so few people do it that you will stand out when you do. Just be careful not to spread it on stalker-thick.

Try to Avoid This

1. Phoning people (or pestering them on social media) – What’s the definition of zero? The likelihood anyone will return your unsolicited phone call. I could have also said the probability that a blogger will pick up the phone when you cal,l but you get it. There’s a reason most folks don’t publish their phone numbers. Most publications have a preferred method of contact for pitches that they publish (usually a dedicated email address that is monitored) and going around it just annoys people. This goes for sending private messages to people over social media. Those channels are full of spam and using them when you don’t know the person makes you a spammer too.
2. Getting the names and/or genders wrong – My name isn’t Apple but I get a lot of email addressed to her. It’s hard to take people seriously after they have mistaken me for a fruit. Also confusing someone for a member of the opposite sex is just no way to start a relationship.

What am I missing?

Related posts:

1. Infographics: 5 Tips for Product Marketers
2. Politics in Startups vs. Big Companies
3. Startups: 10 Reasons Customers Won’t Switch to Your Product

I’ve been building a team where culture fit has been one of the biggest challenges. The folks I’m hiring not only need to deal with a TON of ambiguity (and a certain amount of chaos), they also have to be able to deal with a spectrum of language and culture issues in an environment where successful teamwork is critical to the job.

Here are some things I am working into my interview technique to help me asses culture fit that I think would be useful for anyone hiring a marketer at a startup:

1. Process-related questions – in general I like process-related questions when interviewing marketing folks because anyone can say they did things like “developed and drove programs” but it’s hard to figure out what the person’s exact contribution to the effort was (especially when there was outside help involved). Asking things like “Walk me through the process you used to build that” or “Describe the steps you took to get that project done” are usually good ones to get into the details of someone’s role. They also let you see how a person sees themselves in the context of their own team. Are they working with other folks or just doling out tasks? How are they interacting with their management team? How are they making decisions and moving projects forward?
2. Have them describe their best and worst jobs – Yeah, it’s a bit of a cliche question but I still like it because of the number of times I get a totally surprising response. Again, pay attention to the people-related stuff. Did they clash with other people on their team? I’m totally sympathetic to folks who have left a job because they didn’t like their direct manager but a repeating pattern of lousy managers makes me worry that the employee is difficult. What were the aspects of the teams and culture at their other jobs that the candidate loved and hated?
3. Pay attention to the questions that folks ask – Personally I love it when candidates ask a lot of questions about the work and I worry when they ask a lot about the organization structure and/or compensation in early interviews. I find that star employees know that the job is the main thing and compensation and titles are something to sort out after you know the job is a great fit.
4. Have them talk to lots of people – I think startups are better at this than big companies but sometimes they forget to do it with marketing candidates. Your company culture is the people you work with. If everyone can’t feel good about each other at the end of an interview, they sure won’t at the end of a product launch.
5. Trust your gut – I have one critical position that’s been open for a while and I’ve interviewed so many candidates that I’m starting to let my guard down on this one. I have had a couple of mediocre candidates slip past the first interview stage because I’m starting to get desperate. The good news is that my team promptly shoots them down but I’ve still wasted everyone’s time with a round of interviews that never should have happened. Interviews are like first dates – everyone is on their best behaviour. If there’s something that rubs you the wrong way in the interview it is almost guaranteed to make you insane 2 months down the road. Always trust your gut if you feel like something doesn’t click.

As I was writing this I was thinking about how both sides (candidate and interviewer) have to be wary of the issue of fit and interestingly I think most of these questions work for both candidates and managers.

What do you think – do you have any interview tips to share?

Related posts:

1. Why Most Marketers Suck
2. Does Your Startup Need a Rockstar Marketer or a B Player?
3. Infographics: 5 Tips for Product Marketers

I don’t believe that demoing at an event like TechCrunch Disrupt is equivalent to a launch. Nor do I believe that a launch ends the moment your product/service is generally available to the public. I’ve done a bunch of launches (5 at startups and 2 new businesses inside a larger company) and I’ve seen a lot of things that worked and didn’t work. In my opinion a launch is a multi-phase event that has distinct phases and there are different things you do at each phase.

I was chatting with a startup founder about this last week and sketched this out. Here’s the picture I came up with:

Note that every stage is inclusive of the previous stage – you continue to do what you were doing pre-release, after you have released, you just add a set of new tactics. The same happens when you move from release to post-release.

Some notes on this:

The idea here was to capture the purely marketing tactics that are executed at different phases of a launch. That doesn’t mean that these are the only things marketing is working on. For example, I would expect marketing to be involved in product development and definition (particularly pre-launch), pricing, channel strategy, etc. That said, I’m sure I’m missing tons of thing that should be on this graphic so please add them in the comments.

I have some big catch-all categories in the graphic such as “outbound lead generation”, and “retention programs” that include multiple tactics (for Outbound that would be things like advertising and tele-prospecting, for retention programs that would include things like User events and rewards programs). Tactics in those categories vary so much from business to business that I thought it made sense to lump them in categories. That doesn’t mean those categories have the same weight as other individual tactics – often they require a huge effort.

There are a bunch of terms on here that might not make sense to people but rather than defining each of them I thought I would just wait and see which ones people don’t understand (sorry, I’m lazy like that). If it’s confusing, ask.

This was inspired in part by Eloqua’s excellent Content Grid which maps content types to a buyer progression. I thought to myself “Hey I should map that for launch marketing activities over the different stages of a launch and make it look way uglier!” and here we are.

I also enjoyed Josh Duncan’s post – A Product Launch is like? that talks about different types of product launches and clearly illustrates the multi-phase nature of a launch.

Related posts:

1. Pre-Launch Marketing for Stealthy Startups
2. Startup Launch Lessons from Color
3. How to Build a Better Startup Pre-Launch Landing Page

Not so fast bub.

What happens next? You’ve targeted all of the friends you have. Who do you target next? You have no clue because you haven’t focused on a market segment, just a (somewhat) random group of people.

Traction Needs to be Traction in a Market

Not all traction is created equal. In fact, I would argue that you need to have traction in a market segment (or segments) in order for it to be meaningful. And by meaningful I mean the kind of traction that gives you an indication that you can scale and a path to doing that.

What is a Market Segment?

A market segment has 2 key attributes:

Identifiable – I can describe the segment in such a way that it can be specifically targeted. This can be demographics (new mothers under the age of 30 in New York) or role driven (IT managers working at companies with less than 500 employees) or company-oriented (Canadian retail banks with branch offices in different provinces) or even environment driven (companies with large Oracle data warehouses in North America). The more specific this is the easier it is to identify the folks and target them.

Common set of needs – This is the need or problem that your solution solves. Examples would be: a need to share photos with family members; a need to store large amounts of data for analysis as cheaply as possible without investing in training; a need to share data across branch office using the existing bank infrastructure; a need to provide better end user response times so that the sales force can close deals faster and reduce customer wait times. You get the idea.

Coming back to “Your Friends” as a potential segment. They meet the “identifiable” requirement – you know who your friends are. They may even fit into a demographic – 20-something, university educated social media users for example. If I just think about segmentation that way, they would certainly look like a segment.

But unfortunately they are not because of the second requirement. Do they have a common set of needs? You might argue that they do but you certainly won’t know it because you convinced them to sign up for your service. “Doing you a favor” might actually be the need you are meeting and unfortunately they are the only segment in the world with that need. Getting traction in solving the “Doing you a favor” problem does not scale. Once you have signed up as many of your friends as you can, you don’t have any indication of who to target next.

Wait, My Friends Do Have a Common Set of Needs! I’m Good, Right?

What if you could pick a sub-section of your friends that had a common set of needs? Would that be a segment? Now you’re getting warmer.

So you go back to your pals that signed up and asked them – “tell me the truth guys, why did you sign up?” Throw out the ones that said they did it because you asked them to. Then have a conversation with the rest about why they did. What are the patterns? Do those patterns start to look like a segment? For example – your friends with kids signed up because they wanted to do X or your gamer friends thought your product could help them do Y. Then of course you have to go target that segment and see if folks in it that aren’t your friends are willing to sign up too. If they do, chances are you have a market segment you can target. Now you know what to do next. You go out and target more folks in that segment. When you think you’ve tapped that segment out, you target an adjacent segment that is similar.

That’s sort of a B2C example but this applies to B2B in the same way. If you sell a service for IT managers and manage to sign up a couple of IT managers that happen to be your pals, that’s great. But sign up a few that aren’t your pals, and suddenly your business just got a whole lot more real.

The common thread here is that you don’t really know what you have until you move beyond your pals.

Growth moves through segments. You get traction in one segment and then you branch out to adjacent segments. If you don’t target a segment (or worse, decide your segment is “everyone”) you may get traction but you won’t necessarily understand why and you won’t know what to do next.

Related posts:

1. Should Your Horizonal Startup Focus on a Segment?
2. Product/Market fit and Market/Product fit
3. What’s Market Strategy and Why Should you Care?

Big companies have boring marketing because their budgets are too big to inspire them to be more creative.

More Isn’t Always More

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with having a big budget and you’d like yours right now thank you very much.  But my experience has been that I’ve done much, much better marketing with almost no budget than I have when I’ve had a massive budget.

Have you ever gotten a big bonus? You’ve seen this happen. For weeks you eat lunch at restaurants and get your coffee at Starbucks. You park in the expensive lot that’s close to work because it’s convenient and buy your friends beer on Friday night. And then slowly your bank balance dwindles down until you’re on your last 200 bucks and suddenly everything changes. You learn how to make a mean pasta salad! You convince your boss there should be free coffee in the office! You notice the two free parking spots on the side street you use for free if you show up at exactly 8:15AM! You discover the dive bar around the corner with the best happy hour in town! You’re getting creative and doing new things in a way your flush-with-cash-post-bonus self never dreamed of.

The Beauty of Constraints

What do we do when there are no constraints? The most easy, obvious, boring thing possible, that’s what. You do what everyone else does because it’s easy and you can afford it. This is a recipe for marketing failure.

I’ve had big marketing budgets and trust me, it’s really hard to motivate people to try new things and be really creative when there are tantalizingly easy options available to you like – hire an agency to do everything or do that thing our competitors are doing or just spend more on customer acquisition.

Taking the money away often takes away all of the really obvious options. And that’s exactly where the magic happens. So we can’t just spend more to acquire new customers. Now what? Well, we could figure out ways to engage them to send more business our way, we could figure out ways to sell more to the customers we have, we could figure out ways to improve our customer retention. There are always a thousand things you can do with a small budget.

Big budgets make us lazy. You’ll start hearing things like: But we have the budget to just keep doing ads, why should we mess with that? We don’t own customer retention. It’s too hard to get customers to refer us and we’ve never successfully done it before. Give a marketing group a budget that’s too big and you’ll here a chorus of lame excuses.

So here’s my advice. Embrace your puny marketing budget. Use it like a weapon against the bloated, ineffective, unremarkable marketing of your competitors. Trust me, they’ll never know what hit them.

Related posts:

1. A Zero Budget Customer Advisory Board
2. A New Marketing Framework
3. A Startup Marketing Framework (Version 2)

1. New employees that are still in the honeymoon phase of their job where everything looks like a rainbow-covered unicorn
2. Lying
3. The source of all politics at the company (sometimes known as “the founder”)

In my experience both environments have lots of corporate politics, but the 2 political landscapes look very different.

I define politics as activities that people engage in at work for their own personal gain rather than to achieve a specific business goal. This can range from telling your boss you like her horrible new shoes hoping she will give you a raise, to sabotaging a coworker with the hopes that he will get fired and you can be his replacement. Even flat organizations have folks with more power than others (meaning people who make decisions about hiring, firing and compensation) and both the powerful and non-powerful people will sometimes make decisions based on factors other than the good of the company. They are human beings after all.

Big Company Politics

At one large company I worked at, a very talented co-worker had her career as an executive derailed when she was passed over for a promotion (in that particular company, those passed over once were never promoted again). Her downfall was the result of a competition between two executives 3 levels above her. I learned that my success in part depended on my perceived alignment with people many levels above me and I needed to manage that perception to get promoted. In large companies, keeping track of who has power over what and whom consumes a good deal of employee energy. The term “matrixed organization” was invented to describe this.

Small Company Politics

Similarly at a startup I worked at I saw a talented, much loved co-worker get fired when the founder felt his authority was being challenged during a disagreement about the strategy. Everyone who worked there learned a lesson – don’t challenge the founder or you might get fired.

At small companies there are usually a handful of people who control/influence hiring, firing, promotions and compensation and they sometimes have weird and wonderful personal agendas or hot buttons. A mentor of mine who worked for a series of very successful yet volatile founders once described succeeding in a startup as “learning how to take a punch in the face.” I disagree with that as a general rule but that said, I’ve ducked a few punches.  And just because you’re the founder don’t think you get off easy. Outside investors are human too and I’ve seen founders pushed out for purely political reasons.

Big vs. Small: the Politics are Different (but Both can be Deadly)

At big companies the politics may seem more daunting because it’s harder to figure out who has power and what you might do to influence it. In startups it’s usually not too hard to figure out who the people are and what their hot buttons might be. Both require a certain amount of political savvy to be successful and in both environments you will at some point be required to do things that are not specifically for the good of the company but very much for the good of your career.

There are many good reasons to join a startup and an equal number of good reasons to join a large company. You might decide you’re better at one style of politics than you are at another. Just don’t tell me there are no politics at a startup. There are, and the outcomes can be just as deadly as they are in a big company.

Related posts:

1. Startups Vs. Big Companies – Mind the Gap
2. Startups: 10 Reasons Customers Won’t Switch to Your Product
3. 6 Secrets to Better Marketing Messages for Startups

He defines a “A” player this way:

…folks who can “write the book and not just read it.” These are an incredibly rare breed of people who not only have a clear idea how to competently accomplish their functional objectives, but actually lead the organization to innovate and be world class within their functional area.

B players by contrast are the folks that can “execute well on what they are asked to do.” C players look at a lot like B’s but need coaching to get really get the job done well. The majority of folks are C’s. B’s are rare and A’s are super-rare. Given that, startups trying to hire only A players are probably kidding themselves. He says:

Those who suggest that startups should only hire A players are grade inflators.  They’re calling B players A players.  The actual A players are too rare for this to be a practical hiring plan.

I will go a step further and say that there is a time and place for an A player in a certain role but sometimes what you really want is a B.  Most startups like to think they always need rockstars (I translate this to A). If I had a dollar for every email I get from folks looking for a “rockstar head of marketing” for their startup, I could buy you all lunch. But sometimes I look at the makeup of the team and the stage of the company and I wonder if a rockstar is really what they need.

Here are two different scenarios:

Scenario 1:

An early-stage company that I am an advisory for has just raised a seed round of over a million dollars. They have a very solid product, a great understanding of the value of that product and a fairly good understanding of their initial target markets. They have been in market for a few months and although they got decent buzz when the product was first released, user growth has been slower than predicted. It’s not entirely clear to me whether or not they have achieved a great fit between their product and their market yet. They are currently not spending much on customer acquisition and are unsure if they should invest more. The short-term goal is to get to profitability as quickly as possible with a small team so they expand into new markets without additional outside investment.

Scenario 2:

This company is small but they’ve been around for a few years, choosing to grow organically without outside investment. Their product has been through several new releases and is stable. They have a good understanding of the market they are addressing, the types of users that are a good fit for their product and who their competitors are. Their growth was flat through the economic crisis of the past couple of years but they are back to double digit growth. Their short-term goal is to continue that growth and position the company for an exit in the next couple of years.

Do both of these companies need a rockstar head of marketing? I don’t think so.

Scenario 1 requires a marketer who can think strategically about the potential markets the company should pursue, can work with customers to assess product/market fit and the potential need to shift the company positioning or product direction. This person needs to solve problems creatively and can work as a key member of the executive team to shape the business.

In Scenario 2, the marketer might not even be a member of the core executive team. Their job is to execute on a defined strategy in a defined market and hit defined goals. They will need to figure out the tactics they will use to do that and their tactical experience in executing programs will determine how successful they will be in their job.

Scenario 1 in my opinion needs a rockstar A player that can think creatively and strategically, execute, learn, and adjust. This is a big deal job at a critical stage of the company.

In Scenario 2 on the other hand the big decisions have been made, and the strategy and direction are set.  In my opinion Scenario 2 needs a solid B player that executes like a maniac without a ton of supervision (and don’t kid yourself, these folks are hard to find too).

The risks are different for both of these hires as well. In scenario 2, a poor hire at worst fails to grow the business as fast it could otherwise and is quickly replaced because their lack of execution will be obvious. In scenario 1, a poor hire can sink the company before anyone even realized what the heck happened.

What do you think? Are your teams full of A players? How’s that working?

Related posts:

1. Why Your Startup Shouldn’t Hire a Marketer from Microsoft
2. Should Your Startup Take on the Big Guns?
3. Startup Marketing Vs. Art

Last week I had the chance to chat with Andy Lippman, Nicholas Negroponte and others at the MIT Media Lab and they and constantly repeating ”What if you could do this?” or “What would happen if we had that?” Their projects aren’t constrained by the practical market realities that bind most startup folks.

Given that, you wouldn’t imagine these folks could teach a startup anything about selling. You would be dead wrong. These folks pitch sponsors constantly and they are good at it. In fact, I saw more great pitches in an afternoon than I’ve had startup folks give me in the past 6 months. Here’s what made them great:

1. Your pitch should start with the vision – Startups often skip talking about the vision and rush to pitch you the thing you can buy right now. But vision is important for setting the frame of reference for what you are trying to accomplish. Before Rick Borovoy showed us his Junkyard Jumbotron and Electric Price Tags projects he explained that he was exploring how we could make interacting with our mobile devices more social in the real world, something we immediately saw the value of. John Moore’s explanation of his vision for more patient-directed healthcare helped us understand the importance of his I’m Listening project.  Starting with the big idea not only sets a frame of reference for an audience that may know little about the space you’re working in but also helps underline the importance of what you have created.
2. It isn’t real until you can show me something – Not once on this tour (or any of my previous tours) did someone try to talk to me conceptually about a project without showing me something. That’s more than I can say of about half of the startups I’ve chatted with in the past 6 months (and I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well). Talking about it just isn’t the same as showing it.
3. Every employee should be able to do the pitch – When we got to the Responsive Environments group, we were early and the person we were supposed to meet with was in another meeting. A grad student in the area immediately offered to show us a demo and it was great. Can everyone in your company demo your product to a potential investor?
4. You should be ready to pitch at the drop of a hat in as little as 10 minutes – Running late, we had 10 minutes for someone to show us what the folks in the Affective Computing group have been working on. “That’s not a lot of time.” the grad student remarked before diving into his pitch which included a demo where we took part. Not a lot of time but more than enough for someone who’s prepared.
5. Practical examples make your pitch better – The Responsive Environments folks have the Media lab building wired with sensors and can show you where the heating system is failing. The Affective Computing folks can show you where the happiest parts of the campus are. Practical examples of where your products are being used are powerful, even if it’s just showing how you use it in your own company.
6. Pitching a lot makes you good at it – Throughout the whole day I didn’t see anyone who looked nervous when they pitched us. Sometimes the demos didn’t go exactly as planned and it didn’t bother them too much. They continued on like folks that had done these pitches a thousand times.  Practice will improve your pitch a lot.

If a group of research folks can do great pitches, there’s definitely hope for the rest of us.

Bonus Pitching Link – I loved this post by the founder of Swayable called What I Learned by Pitching 300+ Times in 4 Days where she relates what she learned about pitching from doing a ton of them at SXSW.

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1/ Tell a story or folks will make one up for you – Most of the coverage around Color’s launch focused on the large amount of money they raised. That’s a story angle the company and the VC’s should have anticipated. But as far as I can tell, the company did not have a clear story to deliver around why they raised or were worth that much money or what they planned to do with the capital. Bloggers and journalists quickly filled this information vacuum with guesses ranging from the plausible to the utterly ridiculous (they’re building a location-based ad platform, the team is amazing, the VC’s are nuts, VC’s piled on out of fear of being “left out” and a bunch of other stuff). I believe that the coverage would have been different if they had announced the funding with a clearly articulated story around it and then participated in the dialog that followed in a straightforward manner.  Yes, us tech folk are a gossipy bunch but we are a million times worse when something appears to be a mystery or a secret.

2/ Use cases are important, even for early adopters – Occasionally companies launch without a clear idea of how their product will be used and once users figure out some killer use cases, adoption skyrockets (Twitter). For the rest of us it usually goes more like this – folks download the app, fire it up, scratch their heads for 30 seconds and then delete it.  Sometimes they write reviews to express their disappointment and frustration. Color launched with a single-page site and a paragraph of text. I went looking for a demo or an FAQ – nothing.  A few screen shots or hints about how your product could be used will help your early adopters stick around or at least be less cranky if they decide it isn’t for them. The crazy thing is that within a week they had a demo and an FAQ posted (which are both simple and great). If it were me, I would have delayed the launch for a week to get those items posted to make sure I didn’t frustrate my crucial first wave of users. If I weren’t writing this post, I’m not sure I would have thought to go back looking for those a week later.

3/ Beta? What Beta? – Interestingly, the fact that Color launched as a beta was barely mentioned in the press coverage. All of the coverage I read mentioned simply that they had “launched.” Startups have been using the ol’ “it’s beta therefore we don’t have to have it all figured out yet” trick for products that are clearly beyond beta for so long that the word is meaningless. Like it or not – real beta’s are closed and open beta’s are “launches” that come with non-beta customer expectations.

4/ You can’t launch quietly if you’ve raised $41 million – yeah, OK, you and I will likely never need this advice but if there was ever a doubt in anyone’s mind about that, there isn’t now. With the big money, comes big expectations.

The good news is that not much of this will likely be particularly damaging for Color in the long term (and hey, with $41 million in the bank, long can be LONG) and the team is doing what they need to to recover.  However their experience should still serve as a cautionary tale for startups that won’t necessarily find their market and their investors so patient and/or forgiving.

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