Insight
Chang: Enterprise workgroups are better initial targets than SMBs
“A, you know, work group might be a better on-ramp than an SMB.”
Insight
Chang: Pitch B2B products slightly before they are finished
“You want to pitch your product or solution a little advance of it being ready to really understand early adopters and what they might be interested in and get their feedback.”
Insight
Sharon Chang: Giving away a full product for free before charging fails
“You don't want to give away your product, all of it for free, and we've heard this a lot. I'm going to give it away for free, get traction, and then charge, and that's just a bad idea because it's really hard to raise prices, and anything over free is, you kno…”
Insight
Sharon Chang: Publishing full pricing online handicaps B2B sales teams
“Don't publish all your pricing on the website, right? This does nothing but handicap your sales team and their ability to expand deal sizes by publishing all the pricing on the web.”
Insight
Chang: Sales teams should not create their own marketing materials
“Sales teams shouldn't create their own materials. I actually feel pretty strongly about this point. There's a school of thought that considers a sales creating their own materials, enabling the sales team, a standalone function within the sales team. Oftentime…”
Insight
Chang: A founder's story cannot scale as a startup grows
“This is a story that the founder has lived and breathed. They can tell it better than anybody else, but it's not going to scale as the company grows.”
Insight
Chang: Pricing strategy directly dictates startup valuation and is hard to change
“How do you even think about pricing your product? And really that is one of the single most important things that you could do and do right. No pressure. It's hard to raise prices and your company valuation will eventually be tied to this.”
Insight
Chang: A customer-facing deck is a startup's only asset pre-product
“The customer facing deck, and this is really what you have, the only thing you have before your product is actually ready.”
Insight
Sharon Chang: New products in new markets lack existing budget line items
“If you're in a new product, in a new market, there's no line item budget associated with what you're doing.”
Disclosure
Chang: a16z tells founders not to waste pitch time introducing themselves
“For our portfolio companies, when they're in our briefing center here, we guide them not to spend a ton of time here, because they already have the credibility and backing of meeting a potential new customer here in our offices, and, you know, just their name …”
Insight
Chang: Customers default to existing tools unless shown why they fail
“By default, people will want to try their current solutions. You've got to tell them why it doesn't work.”
Insight
Sharon Chang: Executive sales demos require high-level dashboards rather than granular user workflows
“The executive audience probably needs to see more of the dashboards or the reporting of all the user activity, and vice versa, if you're talking to user audience, show the most relevant use case for the audience that's in the room.”
Insight
Chang: Charge for workflow creation rather than execution frequency
“So probably charge for creation of new flows, but don't charge for the number of times that you run a new flow, right?”
Insight
Sharon Chang: Product positioning often differs from shipped features
“When you're launching a new product or a new dot release, you have to decide what you're selling and what it is, is often different than what is actually shipping.”
Insight
Chang: Selling to developers requires technical depth, not big marketing campaigns
“If you're selling to developers, they probably need access to code, to experts, to technical details, to online reviews and blogs that have written about it. So that's where you want to spend the effort. You probably, if you're talking to developers, you don't…”
Insight
Chang: Every team in a company should contribute to competitive analysis
“Everyone at a company is the source of competitive analysis. It isn't just the product marketing team who has to do all of this analysis, but they actually need to collect information that's coming from all of the different teams, rationalize the competitive i…”
Insight
Sharon Chang: Competitive materials and sales materials should be identical
“So really the competitive materials, the sales materials should be one in the same.”
Insight
Sharon Chang: Great products fail if customers do not know they need them
“You might have the greatest product on earth, but if your potential customers don't know they need it, they won't know they have to buy it, much less buy it from you.”
Insight
Sharon Chang: Frame customer problems using customer terminology, not internal metaphors
“Don't get hung up on how you want to articulate it. You know, don't fall in love with the language or the metaphors that you've figured out, but understand and articulate the problem in their terms first.”
Insight
Chang: Avoid generic pitch decks and tailor versions to specific audience personas
“You probably need more than one version, and really don't take the shortcut and make it generally applicable. What I mean is know who your audience is and sell directly to them. So if you're talking to a manager, use the language a manager uses, use examples t…”
Disclosure
Sharon Chang: Sales decks should never be presented without matching demo environments
“So we would never have a customer facing deck without a demo environment that was suited, that went with that deck.”
Insight
Chang: Proof-of-concept test plans should emphasize competitive advantages
“One of the things that you can do is actually write a test plan that can be given to potential prospects as they're looking at the products, and that would be helpful to have them see it and be able to have some ideas of how would you actually test that the pr…”
