Customer advocacy often starts in the most authentic of ways. A customer tweets something nice about us and we retweet it. It feels natural and in exchange for promoting us we promote them. Maybe another customer posts a link to a blog post on LinkedIn and we share that. We promote them and they promote us. There’s no quid pro quo. There’s no expectation. It’s just natural. Over time, we get busy. Especially in startups. Competing priorities pull us in different directions. We don’t open the social accounts during a mad dash to get a new feature out, get a round of investments, or close some sales. Our interactions go…

Political capital is often thought of as a currency of influence and trust that can be deployed or lost in order to achieve a given goal. We use political capital in various aspects of our lives. Let’s focus on how we accumulate and deploy political capital internally at a startup in this article. To read more about political capital, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/political-capital

For those in newer fields, the scale of growth in a given profession can feel like a revolution. We’ve gone from a world where organizations mostly get by without a discipline to that discipline driving us towards a better world. That world is increasingly about trying hard to listen and develop empathy for the people they serve. Still looking for productivity gains but also allowing for custom workflows.  To read more about evolving industries, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/sometimes-it-s-about-evolution-not-revolution

As our companies grow, we can’t do everything any more. As our needs become more complex, we end up with data sprawled across a lot of different places and a few steps early in the life of a company saves us a lot of time later down the road. This article looks at how vendors are brought on in large organizations. To see the checklist, check out: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/bringing-on-new-vendors

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…