- Don’t keep your ideas so well guarded. Share them with friends and serendipity may just help you out
- Be willing to take a risk - no hedging
- Always go after the Goliath or market leader. If there is none, go after the status quo
- Whether you use a PR firm or not, make sure you know what your message is
- Companies must embrace marketing from the beginning of their lives in order to break through the noise
- Brand (essentially keeping promises you make to employees and customers) is your more most important asset. Make sure everybody in the company is on the same page as to what the company does. Make everyone part of the marketing team and make the message concise and consistent. It must capture why you exist
- Build a trusting relationships with influential journalists. Meet with them often and give them direct contact to you.
- Unbiased advice from experts is the most powerful form of marketing. Word-of-mouth and references are so powerful
- Create your own analogies and metaphors upfront and test them out. This take some work but it’s so worth it as it helps people understand clearly, quickly, and concisely what you’re all about
- The event is your message. Make sure that the venue and everything else aligns with who you are - if you’re a sustainable company, have fair trade coffee, etc.
- Turn adoption into addiction through fast feedback loops. Keep in constant touch with your customers, track their requests, ask them what you could do better, act on it quickly, ask them how they are using your product. Rinse and repeat
- Make your website your best salesman by keeping it fresh and up-to-date. It is more effective than any direct marketing campaign
- Don’t undervalue your product at the beginning and don’t give discounts. Keep it simple with one price or a low number of prices across the board. This incentivizes the sales team to close deals immediately rather than waiting until end of quarter and offering customers discounts
- You can’t win an entire company at once. Start in a division, prove your value, and grow from there
- V2MOM - Benioff's playbook for making decisions and tracking progress
- Vision
- Values
- Methods
- Obstacles
- Measures
- Hiring is one of the most important things you can do. Create a recruiting machine and always be on the lookout for top talent. Have people visit the new employee, make sure they have lunch plans, give them a crash course on product and culture
- Set aggressive but attainable goals. If it’s too hard and only 10% make it, their morale is sky high but everyone else’s is low. This also helps with camaraderie and consistent morale
- Hire A players, demote B players, fire C players. Hire slow and fire fast
- Solicit and act upon customer feedback.
- Strive for this checklist to be checked off for employees:
- I am doing the best work of my professional career
- I have the opportunity every day to do what I do best at work
- In the past six months I have talked to someone about my progress
- There is someone who cares about my development
- I have opportunities to learn and grow at work
- My opinions are sought after and acted upon
- My supervisor or someone cares about me as a person
- I have a support network at work
- My colleagues care about and do quality work
- I am recognized and rewarded for my contributions
- Eskimo proverb: "The time to fish is during the storm." The time for real progress and differentiation is when others are retreating, not when everything is perfect.
What I got out of it
- Some great advice for anyone starting or leading a company. A playbook for various stages and common issues that everyone would face in this type of pursuit
