What sales and marketing software should I pick for my start-up?

I’ve been asked a few times recently for my opinion about CRMs (Customer Relationship Management systems: sales and marketing software) recently, so I thought I’d write down my thoughts.

Bottom line, what sales and marketing stack should I pick for my start-up? HubSpot.

I recently ran a selection at my current org (growth stage B2B start-up) with Insightly, Zoho, and HubSpot as the finalists. We ended up going with HubSpot because it integrated with other tools that the others did not, it has a sophistication in the Marketing + CRM + Support integration (a more fundamental sharing of information and database integration), and was more prepared for the scale we are aiming for in the next 24 months. Having marketing and support ticketing integrated with the CRM is really powerful, especially for a start-up.

All three are good, modern SaaS choices that should work to a high degree of scale. Success will mostly be determined by how you use and implement, rather than what tool you pick. That said, there is a reason why must start-ups pick HubSpot, it is kind of like picking QuickBooks for accounting, you are far more likely to find people who understand the tool and far more likely that your other (or future) tools integrate well with it.

Zoho or Insightly or some other system seems like it will be a lot cheaper, is the price difference worth it?

First, price differences are likely posturing. If you say want to go with HubSpot or Insightly you should share with your sales rep what annual number takes the cake; ask for a YC/start-up/end of year/etc. discount. The marginal cost to serve your org for any of these companies is near zero, they will negotiate on price—whatever they tell you. In fact they signal this by offering a free tier to get started that has most of the features–just not a few key ones to do material amounts of revenue. Finally, if well executed this is the software that your customer facing team will live in and it will be integrated with your product (e.g. help chat) it is worth it pay a few percent more to get the right thing to help your company grow.

We’re all hackers, we can hack together a Zapier thing or get Salesforce running, why not do one of those?

Many start-ups pick Salesforce, this is generally aping large companies in a bad way—unless you have the resources for customization, you’re buying enterprise grade that is unlikely to work ‘out of the box.’ I would also note that my current organization was switching from Salesforce + Pardot + spreadsheet ticketing which was a failed implementation for a variety of reasons but mostly related to common ones that cause Salesforce implementations to fail–it is too complicated and crufty for the sales team to manage without a bunch of support. And I cannot tell you how many failed start-up Salesforce CRM implementations I’ve seen. To be clarify, I haven’t personally seen a successful Salesforce implementation at a company with less than $100M ARR. I’ve heard about start-ups hiring a hot sales executive who really knows Salesforce inside and out starting on Salesforce–but to me at least someone who wants to start on Salesforce while you’re still implementing and small–to me it call into question whether that executive knows what they are getting into at a start-up more than it endorses Salesforce.

My current organization and past organizations I’ve been in are not fans of Zapier integrations as they are often too fragile to be maintained by business people, which is ultimately where integrations and data sharing between customer facing IT systems need to sit. Your sales team is not a bunch of hackers, they are bunch of social engineers. Don’t make them hack. Zapier is fine later if you discover some critical business process is downloading, re-formatting, and re-uploading data to some other system, but it isn’t a good design starting place.

Final Thoughts

The key to early stage sales is to discover a “growth motion” that works. That is a combination of marketing activities, sales process, and an offering to clients that works. The tricky thing is that this can change as you grow for example distribution can be catastrophically dangerous for deal number one, but distribution might be what makes a company. More mundanely, the degree of social proof required goes up as you march from visionary to mainstream buyers, but the availability of said proof does too–you need to understand what’s working, what’s not, where things are going off the rails, etc. CRMs are powerful tools, but like any tool, the wielder is more important than the tool. Go get yourself HubSpot and good luck growing your start-up!

Flag

Example Start-up Procedures Guide / Operating Handbook free to copy

My former start-up, TerrAvion, integrated many disciplines, not just of engineering, but of business and operations as well. We ran into a bunch of problems where software engineers, marketers, operators, technicians, pilots, salespeople, and finance professionals just didn’t have a shared set of expectations about vocabulary, reasonable processes, or what the other groups would do.

To overcome this friction, we wrote an operating handbook that I think is useful in two ways. Most obviously, employees can look and see how things are supposed to work; less obviously, the exercise of putting this together forces management to be on the same page have standardized vocabulary and goals.

I wouldn’t recommend anyone using TerrAvion’s handbook without thinking about whether decisions TerrAvion made are right for your start-up, but if you need an example inspiration, a thing to start from, or just something to copy to get going, enjoy!

Direct Green House Gas Emissions Accounting

I am trying to understand the state of green house gas accounting and understand what implementing the standards looks like. My first look was not promising. I’ll walk through some examples where it seems like the methodologies below don’t work.

I took a look at the SASB accounting standards for GHG and on first inspection they seem to be totally lacking in anything like a complete general ledger for carbon.  The document SASB references for how to do carbon accounting to standard is at the World Resource Institute’s Green House Gas Protcol which was co-developed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.  All the sustainability standards approach GHG as just a part of a disclosure/risk mitigation framework and are really financial reporting not, actual “direct” GHG accounting.

If these standards represent the state of the industry, they have very developed attribution / recognition protocols–perhaps too developed–but they haven’t figured out how to keep a general ledger.  I understand the difficulty, one side of the balance sheet is by a public commons, but I’m starting to ponder if there’s a way technology can help monitor that…
Maybe that’s my fundamental point here… carbon deserves its own “general ledger” and there are going to be problems–like the ones I’ve seen in agriculture–that won’t get solved until we have something like a general ledger and people know how to use it.

Drones Grow-Up

Our industry has been growing up!  We should be glad that the authorities are finally starting to prosecute people on the basis of illegal drone flights.  We have finally arrived.  Our industry is now important enough that the authorities are taking action to remove bad operators from our ranks.

There have been two recent high-profile prosecutions of small unmanned systems operators.  First, Raphael Pirker of Team Black Sheep got at $10,000 fine from the FAA that he is vigorously contesting.  You can see the video that got him in trouble below.

http://www.suasnews.com/2013/10/25619/the-1st-faa-prosecution-of-a-civilian-drone-uav-we-are-change/

Then, the NYPD charged the drone pilot in Manhattan who crashed his drone with reckless endangerment.  He also made a video of his face before the drone took off.

Drone Arrest

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=9292217

Both these incidents are are clearly inappropriate flights, well outside of FAA guidelines for hobbyists and rules for aircraft.  The authorities are doing their job in prosecuting and it is going to improve the industry.  We’ve had a “grey area” in aerial robotics for too long.  Yes, we need better rules and FAA rule making for UAS cannot come soon enough.  In the meantime though, our dislike of the current regulatory structure is not enough for us to substitute our judgement for the FAA’s.  In neither case, is the prosecution talking about destroying the life of the operator.  We are talking about fines and a misdemeanor charge.

These seem like appropriate punishments to remind everyone that there are rules about where we can fly and how.  Much, much more airspace will be open to robotic craft, eventually.  In the meantime, we as an industry have to address the concerns of the non-participating community.  They did not consent to have a quad-copter or any other aircraft falling on their heads.  The manned aviation community has built-up an elaborate system to persuaded the public that they can have some certainty of not killing people, particularly on the ground.

One of the points that is sometimes lost on the robotics community is how well our current regulatory structure actually works.  Most of the economic gains from aviation are being captured.  Commercial flights are cheap and safe–there have been two commercial fatalities in the last four years and it is cheaper in real terms than almost ever before.  All this success in commercial aviation has not precluded general aviation and RC hobbyists from pursing their interests.

We are certainly missing some gains from unmanned aircraft, but the largest applications for civilian use of drones remain undiscovered.  Technology spreads based on benefits, regaldless of the law.  If hobbyist style drones provided tangible benefits that had been discovered they would already be as widespread as, say, illegal file-sharing.  And on movie sets, quad-copters now common, but the movie helicopter shot market is not all that large at any price.  If this analysis is correct, since testing continues on drones of all classes, the FAA’s lethargic pace on the new rules has not had as much adverse impact as many in our industry like to imagine.

Given the only hypothetical benefit and the very real danger of unregulated drone flights it seems imprudent of authorities to let the industry go with no enforcement.  Non-enforcement discourages entry by law-abiding players and erodes the integrity of all firms involved in the industry.  If this is ever going to be more than a few guys out tinkering with electronic toys, the industry will have to show it is responsible enough to operate over people’s heads.  This is not going to happen if we resist and tolerate a disregard for regulation.  Many industries have used regulation to expand their reach, by necessity, the aerial robotic market will be one of them.

Pittsburgh Robotics: Who is missing?

Our AUVSI chapter finally has a mini-directory of the companies and institutions (both AUVSI members and not) who participate in the Pittsburgh robotics community.  Who is missing?  Any institutions left out?

http://www.auvsi.org/Pittsburgh/PittsburghRobotics/