Sean Murphy Scott Sambucci

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Murphy, Sambucci & Other Great Speakers

New Early-Bird Pricing Available Now

   A new block of early-bird tickets just went up on The Lean Startup Conference site. If you grab yours today, you save hundreds of dollars and assure your place in the room as great speakers share their stories--the hits, the collossal failures, and everything in between.   Sean Murphy and Scott Sambucci are two such speakers and their workshop, Engineering Your Sales Process is part of Day 2 of the conference--the workshop day. To participate in the hands-on workshops and startup site visits, what you want to buy is a Gold or Platinum Pass. Click here to register today while the early-bird prices are still viable.  Sean runs Bootstrappers Breakfast, and his company SKMurphy Inc. focuses on early customers and early revenue for software startups, helping engineers to understand business development. Scott is the chief sales geek at SalesQualia and the author of Startup Selling: How to Sell if You Really, Really Have to and Don’t Know How.  As Scott and Sean will tell you, for B2B companies, sales can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you’re usually in touch with your customers directly, and you can learn from them readily. On the other hand, it’s more often than not hard to close a deal. On December 4 at The Lean Startup Conference, their workshop will help you apply Lean Startup techniques to your sales process to extract sharper lessons and improve your conversion rate.  Our Q&A today is with Sean.  What aspect of lean startup methods most inspires you?  Lean Startup methods recognize that new markets in particular require a scientific approach of thoughtful experimentation and iteration—what we used to call "trial and error"—to determine what will work and what won't. It takes an engineering approach to defining the "known unknowns" about your customer, your product, and your business model but still respects the value of entrepreneurial vision and insight in crafting new hypotheses. It reminds every entrepreneur that they need to get out of their Bat Cave and go see the ground truth of their customers’ needs and market expectations.  What makes it hard for companies to implement this process?  It requires opinions that are held strongly enough to act on but lightly enough that you are willing to revise them in the face of new facts and new learning. This is a hard balance for individuals to manage, much less managers and executives who are expected to have the right answers. It can be very empowering for a manager or a leader to mark off the limits of what they know and ask the team for help in learning more. This behavior can violate expectations of employees, investors, and peers for the amount of self-confidence and passion that entrepreneurs and executives should exhibit.  What will people take away from your workshop?  The Engineering Your Sales Process workshop will address how to diagnose and handle common B2B sales problems. Attendees will leave with a scientific approach to understanding your customers' needs and their buying process so that you can scale your business with a repeatable sales process. Attendees will take part in written and interactive exercises that will complement the lecture portions of the workshop and allow them to focus on sales situations that they are facing in their own startups.    Here’s Sean in action, talking about “Technology Adoption.” And here’s Scott on “The Shifted Sales Environment.”  Register today for a Gold or Platinum Pass to attend the workshops.  

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