Rapid Innovation Group blog

Thoughts on the Lean Startup Cult: 'Not Just Two Guys in a Garage'

Jessica Tayenjam — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:37:33 +0000

I’ll be honest: I haven’t read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Guilty, I know. I could make excuses – I’m new to the tech scene, I don’t have the time, whatever – but they probably aren’t valid. Nonetheless, I don’t live in a cave, so I am of course...

The Personal Brand Wheel

Aralby — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:23:03 +0000

As we were discussing current renovations to our company website, our director began talking about ways to define each person’s individual expertise and area of focus. What’s your brand? Answering the question directly poses significant challenges. It’s a bit like being asked, “What’s your culture?” There’s no simple answer to...

Why I started Rapid Innovation Group

Jessica Tayenjam — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:49:53 +0000

We recently sat down with Shields Russell, Principal and Founder of RIG, to talk about the company’s beginnings and his evolving thoughts on working with entrepreneurs. Why did you start RIG? "There are essentially three capabilities involved in starting a high growth technology company: solving a real problem for a...

Information is Free, Knowledge is Expensive, Wisdom is Priceless

Aralby — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:36:16 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to hear some of the speakers from the event “Silicon Valley Comes to the UK” in Cambridge. Several of the speakers talked of the amazing possibilities opening up with the availability of large data sets that effectively index information, language, and...

"Kodak failed because they weren't able to innovate"

Jessica Tayenjam — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:51:16 +0000

Dr. Markus Perkmann is a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College Business School where he leads the Business Model Innovation theme. Having worked earlier in his career as Head of Innovation and Strategy at a software start up, we talked to him about his experience of working in a growth...

Becoming (in)credible

Jessica Tayenjam — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:32:36 +0000

As a recent graduate working with start ups (not infrequently run by people who would themselves be considered ‘young’ in the corporate world), I think credibility is one of the biggest issues a young professional comes up against. The trouble with credibility, and this is by no means a new...

The Transferability of Skill

Aralby — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:27:46 +0000

This is my first week at the Rapid Innovation Group and I come to the company from an unlikely background. Having studied English, literature, languages, and medieval studies from undergrad through a PhD, I have often been asked in sneering tones, “What are you going to do with that?” Along...

"Get Thee Down to a Hackathon, Young Man"

Simon Jackson — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:06:58 +0000

Hackathons are generally seen as being the preserve of enthusiastic developers. It’s all about the code, surely..?? I recently had the good fortune to be accepted for the Seedcamp Seedhack event – there were going to be 120 attendees, with a mix between coders and ‘business types’. My personal aim...

"I had a major decision to make: shut down or change"

Jessica Tayenjam — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:51:14 +0000

StarBase, founded in 1992, is a London-based performance testing software consultancy with established testing expertise in a wide range of industries. We spoke to Stephen Davis, StarBase founder and MD, about his experience in starting his own company. Why did you start StarBase? "The reason I started StarBase was basically...

How to approach an initial sales meeting

Robin Trickett — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:58:33 +0100

How to approach an initial sales meeting

I wanted to write this post to follow up a previous one which covered the importance of having an effective sales process. The post began with a comment that entrepreneurs have a fantastic passion for their products and are able to convey this deep enthusiasm in sales pitches.

The risk is that this can lead to relying upon a solution-centric approach which takes no heed of the prospect’s challenges. Founding CEOs frequently turn up at a sales meeting and wax lyrical about the features, capabilities and benefits of their solution. But how can you presume the solution will solve the prospect’s problem, without understanding what that problem is in detail? Getting this right is especially important at the early stages of your company’s life, as feedback from these early sales meetings can be vital to helping you refine product / market fit in the wider sense.

A meeting (or meeting preparation) should always begin with a focus on identifying the prospect’s key challenges. In addition to taking this approach for our clients, we also use it with our own prospects. I thought I would lay out the high-level methodology I employ when meeting potential future clients, because although we are selling services, the same approach should be used as part of a consultative sales process for an enterprise technology solution.

1. Set a clear objective
a. E.g. ‘To understand the {prospect’s} key growth objectives, strategies and the accompanying challenges. From this, to determine whether our capabilities and experience could be utilised to help address these challenges and as such accelerate the growth of the business’

2. Understand their challenges (to determine whether they can be addressed by your competencies / capabilities)
a. Elucidate these through a series of insightful questions. This serves a number of purposes beyond identifying their challenges:
1. By asking the right questions, you demonstrate your expertise
2. Gives a chance for you to highlight issues / opportunities which the prospect may not have been aware of
3. Shows you have done your homework on their company, demonstrating that winning their business is of value to you
b. For example, I often try to drill down to the crux of a prospect’s challenges by structuring questions under the following headings:
1. Market and competitive landscape
2. Growth objectives / window of opportunity
3. Market focus and rationale
4. Market strategy and proposition
5. Demand generation activities
6. Sales and sales management processes
7. Partnering capabilities

3. Explore potential synergies / areas of collaboration
a. Give a relevant (according to the answers to the questions) background to your company / solution
b. Discuss how a relevant selection of your competencies / capabilities could be used to address their most strategic challenges (elucidated earlier on)
c. Add credence to the discussion by referring to appropriate case studies

4. Next steps (if appropriate)
a. Agree to structure the discussions into an objective driven programme of work
1. If well put together, this document will in itself give you significant credibility, as well as laying out the value the prospect will gain from the collaboration
2. Suggesting to put together this programme of work should be compelling for the prospect – they should get value from it even if they end up not choosing you to execute upon it

If you are thoughtful, effective and easy to work with during the sales process, you give direct assurance to the prospect that this will be the case after the sale. As well as using what you learn to tailor the relevance of your offering to the company in question, it also helps you develop your overall proposition and further refine your product / market fit.