Day 42 in MIT Sloan Fellows Class 2023, Entrepreneurial Sales and New Enterprise 1, How startups fail
Disciplined entrepreneurship
The professor of New Enterprises is Bill Aulet, one of the most famous professors in MIT Sloan school.
His book, "Disciplined entrepreneurship", articulated how we launch the business systematically and make the right decision based on data and logic. He broke down the foundation process into 24 steps and students will follow each step in whole the fall semester.
Entrepreneurial Sales
Entrepreneurial Sales is led by five non-academic practitioners. They are either founders or C-class of early startups. This lecture is the only course teaching "Sales" in MIT Sloan. It is not fixed curriculum, so sometimes faculty invites top salespeople or CEO into a lecture. Also, our assignments are not "practice" and it is proper fieldwork to dive into actual startups and investigate their and their competitors' Go To Market(GTM) strategy.
Commercialization Matters
Bill introduced impressive formula in startup world.
Innovation = Invention + Commercialization
And he said that majority of startups failed commercialization.
Of course, strong commercialization is realized by multiple factors.
Microsoft vs Slack under covid
Compared to Microsoft Teams, Slack is really beloved product.
However, under COVID, the growth of Slack was plateaued.
Contrastly, Microsoft invested sales force in Teams distribution and now it have more users than Slack.
Consequently, Salesforce acquired Slack.
Acquiring customers is more difficult now.
OK, so you got more competitors and there are several factors driving your acquisiton cost.
- Information explosion
- Diversified platforms and complex user journey
- Platformers' pricing power
Go to Market framework
There are 4 units in the course.
- GTM Motions
- Product Led Growth
- Channel Sales
- Inside Sales
- Field Sales
- GTM Stages
- Lead Gen
- Sales process
- Retain and Growth
- GTM Execution
- Experimenation
- Hiring
- Incentives
- Rev Ops
- Selling Skills
- Storytelling
- Sales Call
- Pitch contest
I can't wait to start this journey and I am really excited to jump into a completely different two fields, Sales and Startups, from my past career, data science.
