Successful customers often lead to much larger footprints (or deal sizes) in year two of the life a customer. One of the best ways to grow an account is to grow our footprint within organizations we’ve already closed deals with. This might mean something as simple as a freemium customer we’d like to nurture into a paying customer. Or it might mean a small customer who we think could grow into a really large customer. To read more, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/teaching-customers-to-promote-us-in-their-organizations

A press release is a document that informs the press about an event. A software company might put out a press release that we’ve got a cool new feature. This is usually done in hope that a media outlet will pick it up and run with it. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of press releases for features or version numbers, but do like doing them to announce an investment, adding a prominent board member, or adding additional rounds of funding. And specifically a new round of investments is a great time to make sure local media outlets receive those. Software updates are rarely worth a press release,…

Before sellers can work on leads, they need a framework to work on sales. There are a number of frameworks used for these, but none should be universally applied. Instead, to meet the needs of most startups, let’s break things down into a few basic points: Mechanics: Managing the sales using the existing technology. A how-to guide could be a simple Confluence page. This helps us all get aligned and be on the same page. That guide should be simple but go through what to put into each field. That should be guarded, so weekly go through the leads a seller is working, check the data integrity, and then review…

The customer journey is the general process followed by a person when becoming a customer. Here we’ll group customers into four primary stages and then dig deeper into managing customers in HubSpot using lead scoring. In the beginning, the lead score and staging will be used to help focus on the leads that are the furthest along. As teams grow, those help define who’s working on a lead, where leads are getting stuck (so we can develop ways to get them unstuck), and ways to automate communicating with leads so sellers can swap out those manual tasks with tasks that require a human. The general stages of a customer journey…

Product management is the function in an organization that plans, organizes, and manages the products the organization makes at each stage of the product lifecycle. In an organization of one, it’s pretty clear who does that job, as it is with every single other job. But as we round the corner to our third or fourth hire, our advisors often start talking about being more deliberate about the product lifecycle and roadmaps. To read more, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/product-management-in-startups