How Do You Set Up Operations In The US And Why? Interview With Microtask CEO
Microtask has been putting in a lot of effort in the recent year or so to expand their operations beyond the Finnish borders. They've been restructuring their business this fall by moving all Finnish operations to Tampere and focusing on setting up their US business on the other side of the Atlantic. We thought it might be a good time to talk to the CEO, Ville "Wili" Miettinen, about why they decided to move overseas and how it has gone for them so far.
Experiences And Learnings In Selling New Innovations To Companies
Editor's note: This post is a guest post by Ykä Marjanen, sharing his thoughts as an entrepreneur in selling new and innovative products early on in the startup life cycle. If you'd like to get your thoughts and experiences out to our community, contact us at editor@arcticstartup.com.
After 10 years of so called professional life I‘m ready to make honest analyses of my experiences in business, especially in the startup world. I’ve been working around innovative products and services my whole career, first as a researcher and the last five years in two startups as a co-founder, owner, manager, programmer and a salesman. I’m an engineer and not so fond of selling. But, when selling new innovations, I believe that the most convincing salesmen are the engineers. We just need to better understand the buyers and their reasons to buy, and also motivate ourselves to go out to meet them.
Kiosked Is Your Instant Point Of Purchase, Anywhere
Anything you see can be yours, that’s what Kiosked believes in. The startup revolves around the concept of Web Wide Shop and has developed a secure sales and marketing platform, transforming all content online into a marketplace.
Valkee Sold 5000 Devices By January 2011
Bob Helsinki, a Helsinki based advertising agency, has disclosed some interesting figures regarding Valkee in their application to Grand One, a Helsinki based annual gala for ad agencies. In the application, the agency states, that Valkee sold 691 devices during the two month campaign period from October 11th to December 12th last year. 691 devices at 185€ a piece yields a nice 127 835 euros. However, the agency later discloses that they sold a lot more by early January.
Angry Birds Extending Sales Over Merchandise
Angry Birds is making a ton of money off its mobile games. However, a natural extension to sales at this level is to license the characters and other material for merchandising. This is tricky as there are surely companies out there to try and leverage the products without proper licenses. However, one could argue this spreads the knowledge and brand further even though it doesn't bring a dime to Rovio's pocket. Below are a few interesting products and creations inspired by Rovio's Angry Birds, collected by Toxel. Some may be licensed, but others may not - whichever the case, these surely bring a smile to your face.
Signom's Go-To-Market
Last November we had guest post from the CEO Signom, Ossi Marko, based on their lessons learned in pricing. I like the product a lot and what it's accomplishing so I thought it would make sense to get back in touch with them about their progress and how their go-to-market is working out. Despite being a simple service, a digital method for signing your documents, there are many industries and companies who could take advantage of the service on an enterprise level.
Pimp Your Sales: Pipedrive vs. Deal Machine
Initiating and closing sales is a tedious process, often made even worse by complicated software that makes you fill out endless forms before you even start the work. Seems like people in the Northern Europe are particularly frustrated with existing CRM solutions and are busy building their own tools. Cases in point are a new start-up from Estonia - Pipedrive and an early-stage start-up from Finland - Deal Machine. Both companies offer sales management software but from different perspectives. Pipedrive from the point of view of experienced sales managers, Deal Machine from a young generation of innovators. What is the difference between the two and why would you choose either one of them?
Trials HD By RedLynx Reaches 500 000 Unit Sales Mark
The Finnish multi platform game developer RedLynx has announced that it has sold over half a million copies of its popular Trials HD game on the XBOX360 (via Kauppalehti). The game is worth about 1200 Microsoft points which accounts to about 15 USD totalling in 7,5 million USD in sales.
The company itself is also in very good shape financially. RedLynx is already showing some of the success in its finances as 2009 revenues are in the range of three million with a million in profit. Last time RedLynx was profitable was in 2004 with a 356 thousand euro profit. High fluctuations are natural in the gaming business as it takes a long time to build a game and very few are capable of pumping out new games on continuous basis to keep the company constantly profitable.
Sales Guy vs. Web Dude
I know this is old and most of you have probably seen it, but I just had to share this with you. I tumbled into the video again and could not stop watching. If you're having a heavy and hectic day, take a few minutes to watch this. Its worth it and best of all, its true. A Classic!
Building And Managing A Successful Sales Team In The U.S. Market, Part II
Last week we covered some basics in getting into the U.S. B2B software market. This article further elaborates the tips from the presentation by Pirjo Tuomi, who has quite a many years of sales experience in the U.S. market. The focus is on building and managing a local sales team for the B2B market.
Building And Managing A Successful Sales Team In The U.S. Market, Part I
Pirjo Tuomi, an experienced Finnish saleswoman who has worked in the U.S. for the past 16 years, presented her experiences and tips for Building and Managing a Successful Sales Team in the U.S. Market at Verso Software Sales Camp last week (see our previous post from the event). Pirjo has long experience from the U.S. B2B sales, positions from Sales Rep to SVP Worldwide Sales, going through 5 M&A's and 1 IPO, growing a firm from zero to $250M in revenues and up to 120 team size, among other things. In the following, I will also reflect points from Jussi Harvela's presentation also covered in the previous post.
Kicking Off B2B Software Sales - Lessons From The Field
I attended Software Sales Camp seminar organized by Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology) earlier this week. The event was a two-day "bootcamp" aimed for improving Finnish software firms' business-to-business sales and marketing skills. Going forward, I will summarize a few interesting tips and experiences shared by the seasoned speakers at the event. One main theme throughout the event was also the U.S. market entry and issues related - I will get back to that later.
Using A Sales Process for Venture Capital
Daniel Blomquist from Creandum venture capital firm wrote lately how entrepreneurs should focus more on which VC to approach than how to approach. He argues that you can make more out of your time if you try to find out and select the most prominent VCs for your firm beforehand. As Ville Vesterinen and Daniel mention in successive post's comments, it is a sales job. But a bit of clarifying could be used to point out the similarities and try enlighten the whole process further. The fund raising process seems to be somewhat comparable to business-to-business selling process.
