Common startup mistakes..

I’ve seen quite a few startups make these same mistakes time after time:

1. Mistake: “Ramp up the sales before you have a product/service”
It’s going to take a sales team 2 - 3 months to understand the customer, the selling process and how to replicate that. Adding more people to the sales team is not going to speed up this process. Once you have sales metrics and a growing pipeline, then you’re ready to add to the sales team.

2. Mistake: “Marketing leads don’t get follow up”
Where are all the marketing leads going? Fact is that 75%+ of marketing leads often are not followed up on. These are online leads, search leads, event leads, sales team leads, etc. Make sure you have a solid lead model and a CRM system to funnel all the leads through the different stages and make sure they are automatically assigned to individual sales team members.

3. Mistake: “Failure to communicate company goals”
Everyone in the company is part of sales. They need to have the company vision and mission memorized. Performance against key dev ship goals, sales goals and financial status should be publicly posted and measured against.

4. Mistake: “Under paying for talent”
Good talent is never cheap. Sure it’s fine to pay 10 - 15% lower than industry salary, but that better be made up elsewhere in stock options, bonus or backpay agreement. Smart people know what they are worth and they are going to want to know the funding status, possibility of future rounds, cap table, # of shares outstanding, sales pipeline, play with the product/service hands on and talk to your customers.

5. Mistake: “Not supporting your employees”
People work for different reasons, but they usually lie between working for money and working because they love what they are doing. People want career growth and a sense of ownership. A manager should directly ask their employees what they want to do and what they like working on and help them evolve their own role–this is a startup after all.

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