New Business Ideation

Starting a business for the money is a pretty weak motive.

In all reality, if you're going to start a business, you want to start a business that solves problems you care about. You want to feel like you're saving the world in some way. You want to be driven by a fiery passion for solving a problem that you hate.

This method of business ideation seems to work pretty well. I've done it with myself and a couple friends now and so far I really like it. It's a sequenced list of questions that help find business ideas you're passionate about.

• What are you passionate about? (What do you think about / do in your free time?)
• Why are you passionate about it?
• Pick the 1-3 that you are most passionate about.
• What frustrations do you have with those things? (Start taking pictures or video of the problems you see.)
• What problems have you experienced or witnessed? (Experienced is better because you'll be more motivated to solve your own problems than someone else's.)
• Of those things, what is the problem you feel most passionate about solving? Why?
• Now, brainstorm solutions. (This may take a while.)
• Create a solution and sell it.

Mosiah 29:26

Do your business by the voice of the people.

Create an open-source design page for people to create our products for themselves - then we'll fill in the functionality.

(Use wire frames like Lucidcharts.)

Customer-Action-Based Sales Metrics

How to measure sales performance: by customer actions. In the end, what you want is for the customer to take an action (buy, sign up, create an account, etc.). In some sales processes, there are multiple steps that must be taken to get the customer from zero to buying, and the customer must take an action at each of those steps. Unless you have very lazy salespeople, it doesn't make sense to measure their actions, because they should always be doing what's necessary to move a client down the pipeline. (And even if they aren't, that will be shown by bad conversion rates in customer actions.)

An exception to this is the first contact, whether that's a cold call or some sort of referral contact. First contact attempts by the salespeople should be measured because , but beyond that customer action is what matters.

I worked at Qualtrics on the academic sales team for a while, where I made outbound cold calls to professors and attempted to set demos with them. The sales process looked like this:

1. Call
2. Set demo
3. Do demo with professor
4. Get professor to set up a demo with the decision-maker (usually the dean or dept chair)
5. Do demo with decision maker (and then other professors if dean wasn't convinced)
6. Close the deal

You can see that each milestone in the process (minus the first one) involved a customer action. First, a professor had to schedule a time for a demo. Then, he / she had to participate in a demo. Then, he /she had to give a recommendation to the decision maker. And on and on.

At the end of each step lies a customer action, and that's really what should be measured.

http://amacus.net/blog/2011/01/measure-your-sales-productivity-by-your-customers-actions/

Group Accountability Research

Articles / Blogs

• http://freelancefolder.com/5-reasons-every-freelancer-needs-an-accountability-group/
• http://www.aartipaarti.com/2010/09/01/the-accountability-group/
• http://www.clay-collins.com/blog/accountability-group-accountability-groups/
• http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1335457/starting_an_accountability_group_pg2.html?cat=51
• http://www.christianitytoday.com/workplace/articles/issue14-poweraccountability.html
• http://www.c12group.com/

Sales Process Variables

Direct Variables

• Quantity of activities (#)
• Conversion Rate (%)
• Sale Amount ($)

# x % = (deals won) x $ = revenue
OR
#%$ = revenue






Indirect Variables

• Sales Cycle
• Between steps and as a whole process. Shortening the sales cycle will likely produce higher conversion rates.
• Also, shortening the sales cycle will speed up closes only if the sales process is being started fresh.
• Activity Time
• How long it takes to complete an activity. This will affect how many activities you can complete in a given amount of time.
• Position of high / low conversion rates in the Sales Process
• Bad conversion rates should be moved toward the beginning of the process. This will free up time to complete more activities, as the salesperson is not wasting time pushing deals deep into the process which eventually are lost. Ideally, all lost deals are lost at the first step of the process.
• (Conversely, high conversion rates should be pushed to the end of the process.)
• Frequency
• It may be better to spread out certain activities, or to do them all at once, e.g. cold calls every day vs. only on Mondays and Tuesdays

Add: characteristics of a close

• (How client was first found)

• Number of contacts from open to close
• Sales cycle time (between steps and as a whole)
• Activity time

Startup Management

Business Model - My Version