David Cummings on Startups

Blog

  • EO Accelerator Sales Day

    Today we had our quarterly EO Accelerator education event on sales and marketing. It was an all-day session from 7:30am – 4:30pm held at my office in Buckhead. Our expert instructor was Jim Ryerson of salesOctane, and he did a fantastic job.

    One part of the class was about persuasion and communication techniques to aid in the selling process. Here are a few takeaways:

    • Don’t talk — spend more time listening
    • Use short questions
    • Start questions with who, what, why, where, when, and how
    • Don’t ask yes/no questions
    • Offer alternate choices (e.g. do you want to start sooner or later?)
    • Always set an agenda for the next meeting at the end of a call, make sure both sides have homework, and promptly follow-up with an email reiterating everything

    In my experience, sales is the number one area entrepreneurs fail to do as well as things that come more naturally like product development and team building. I highly recommend making sales a top priority for entrepreneurs and really understanding how to create a repeatable process.

  • Venture Atlanta 2009 Wrap Up

    The Venture Atlanta 2009 conference wrapped up today with two great keynote speakers and 22 companies presenting their six minute investor pitch. As conferences go, the event was extremely well done and the venue worked out great. Here are a few quick thoughts from the event:

    • The companies were mostly early stage with revenues under a million for this calendar year, and naturally, huge growth projections
    • Most companies were looking to raise an average of $2M – $3M in a Series A or Series B round
    • The tabletop area for presenting companies to talk to investors was separated from the main area and didn’t get as much traffic as you would expect
    • The event had a heavy number of service providers, all of whom were very nice

    TAG, Atlanta CEO Council, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce did a great job putting on the event.

  • Venture Atlanta 2009

    One of the things I love about the Atlanta technology community is that there are large events, almost quarterly, that bring entrepreneurs, technologists, and executives from around the region. We have events like Startup Riot, TAG’s Georgia Technology Summit, and Venture Atlanta. Today and tomorrow are Venture Atlanta 2009.

    From the Venture Atlanta website:

    Event Highlights:
    – Venture Atlanta Showcase with 24 companies to open this year’s event
    – 22 Presenters to give their pitches on stage on October 14th
    – Two dynamic speakers: Pete Kight of Fiserv and Jeff Sprecher of IntercontinentalExchange (ICE)
    – Networking with the entire Atlanta technology community
    – Meet Venture Capitalists from Silicon Valley, Boston, Washington D.C, North Carolina, Texas, Florida and more

    I recommend that you get involved with your technology community if you haven’t done so already.

  • New Employee Lunches

    One of the most important things the entrepreneur of a startup company does is set the tone for the company’s corporate culture. Corporate culture truly is a competitive advantage when done well. The best time to set the tone for new employees, after the actual interview process, is their first day at the office.

    I like to take new hires out to lunch on their first day as the CEO of the company. Corporate culture starts at the top. Of course, this isn’t always feasible as the company gets larger, but for companies under 100 people, it should be doable.

    I recommend startup CEOs and co-founders take new employees out to lunch on their first day.

  • Feedback-Driven Businesses

    One of the biggest strengths of startups, and a major reason why they can compete with much larger companies, is the ability to innovate faster. It’s truly a competitive advantage to be closer to the customer and iterate quickly. Much has already been said about customer driven development related to talking to your prospects or customers throughout the product development lifecycle, but I don’t think enough has been said about using the same tenants of soliciting feedback to drive all aspects of the business.

    Here are some common examples:

    • Listening to employees to improve corporate culture
    • Asking the right questions with potential employees to effectively recruit
    • Interacting with suppliers to find how to work better together

    Obviously, this is a broad topic but I encourage you to work to build a feedback-driven business.

  • Shotput Ventures 60 Days After Demo Day

    So we’re exactly two months after our first Atlanta Shotput Ventures Demo Day. Let’s take a quick look at how things have played out so far:

    • Three of the eight companies have stayed in Atlanta and five have moved out (almost all that left returned to where they came from)
    • Two have raised a professional angel round or are about to close the round
    • Two have raised money from friends and family
    • One is trying to raise a Series A
    • One has pseudo shutdown while evaluating next steps
    • Two companies were put in part-time mode while the co-founders took consulting jobs unrelated to their startup
    • Two are generating revenue

    That’s all I have right now. Stay tuned for more updates in the future.

  • Atlanta Startup Advantages: Service Providers

    As you might imagine in a city with a regional population of five million plus, Atlanta has a strong base of top-notch service providers. Yes, most will not defer fees until funding, like many do in Silicon Valley, but there are a handful that will (here’s one). Of course, the fees in Atlanta are also much lower than in other major cities, and that’s inline with our cost of living advantage.

    Here are some of the major service providers for technology companies in Atlanta:

    Legal

    Accounting

    Human Resources

    Service providers are an advantage for Atlanta startup companies.

    Note: Please let me know of other services, legal, accounting, or otherwise that you recommend.

  • Quarterly Celebration Picnic

    Last Friday we tried something new for our quarterly celebration — a picnic. The idea came from one of our team members who had done a picnic at her previous company in Silicon Valley. As a company, we took the afternoon off and had a nice, low-key time at Piedmont Park.

    I believe it is important to celebrate as an organization and recognize the hard work everyone does. A picnic is a simple, trivial event, but represents a good way for everyone to relax and get out of the standard daily grind in a different environment with friends.

    I recommend having a quarterly celebration for all companies.

  • Tradeshow Wrap Up

    We just finished up the second of our two MarketingSherpa.com B2B Marketing Summit conferences yesterday in Boston. These shows are small and highly specialized with just under 200 attendees. Next month we’ll do a show with 13,000 attendees in San Francisco and another one with 30,000 attendees in Denver.

    Here are the tradeshow wrap up steps for us:

    • Create a campaign, including costs, in our marketing automation system and import the new leads as a CSV file
    • Do a quick meeting and talk about what went well and what we can do better next time
    • Ensure that any outstanding commitments for prospects, partners, and analysts are followed through on
    • Share any competitive or industry intelligence learned with the rest of the team

    Tradeshows, while expensive, still play an important role in B2B technology companies and I recommend evaluating them.

  • Atlanta Startup Advantages: Technology Community

    The Atlanta startup community has really come into its own in the past three years. When I moved my company to Atlanta in the summer of 2002, I must admit that I was disappointed in the lack of activity in the metro area. There were a handful of events but it didn’t feel like a community. The advent of social media and passionate technology entrepreneurs really helped coalesce the community and make it a vibrant place.

    We have so many events and organizations I’m bound to forget a few (please add them in the comments!), but here goes with a starting point:

    • ATDC
    • Shotput Ventures
    • Technology Executive Roundtable
    • Technology Association of Georgia
    • CEO Council
    • Atlanta Technology Angels
    • Young Entrepreneurs Society
    • StartupChicks
    • Startup Riot
    • Startup Drinks
    • Open Coffee

    For links to these and more organizations, please visit the ATLSE.com organizations page.

    The technology community is an advantage for Atlanta startups.