Business Development for High-Tech Startups

We help high-tech startups find their first customers.

Technology sales is hard. Finding the first customers for a new product is harder. If you are experiencing any of these challenges, you’ve come to the right place:

You need to engage with early customers to validate your product-market fit
You have a great product but don’t know how to find the right person to sell to
You’ve started product evaluations that never seem to end

Sales is about getting face-to-face with customers in pain.

BizDev.Global is a team of experienced technology sales pros. We know how to research markets, talk to technical managers and introduce you to companies in your target market. We use proprietary technology for identifying and tracking sales prospects, but at the end of the day we all know that sales start when you sit face-to-face with real, live customers. Check out the services and case studies below, then contact us to talk about finding customers fast.

BizDev.Global Services

The BizDev Workshop

Does your team spend enough time with customers? When was the last time a customer critiqued your product and value proposition?

The BizDev Workshop puts prospects from your target market in front of your team, so we can analyze their needs and formulate a strategy to get you to revenue fast.

Interim BizDev for High-Tech Startups

Start-ups want to start selling as soon as possible, but don’t want to staff biz dev too soon. Interim BizDev enables you to start working with customers earlier and ramp sales as your product matures.

So the real question becomes, “How many customers do you need to engage with now?”

Success Stories & Sales Accelerators

Featured

Watch How Emotions Drive Sales (video case study)

Why will customers buy your product? That’s a Hot Button. What drives Hot Buttons? Emotions. Listen to customers talk about their hot buttons, in their own voices.

When the CEO Reads Your Email 120 Times

Recently we sent out the first of a series of informative emails on behalf of a client. Our campaigns are fully instrumented so we know exactly when people open emails and what they click. We watched on the campaign dashboard as prospects read the email, often opening it more than once to study the information and follow the links.

It’s Not My Problem! (video case study)

Recently we talked to mobile app developers about keeping financial and personal data secure. The good news is, they understood the problem and recognized that users of their apps were at risk. The bad news is that they won't do anything about it.

Hot Buttons in the Fortune 500

Eight days after the CEO meeting, BigCo’s lead engineer got a call from an MBA intern working for the CFO. This is what the she asked, verbatim:

“On slide 121, you state that the new dispenser eliminates downward drift in the syrup/water mix, resulting in 0.6% percent greater syrup usage per year after year one. Is that correct?”

How To Avoid First-Timer Manufacturing Mistakes

Hardware is hard, and the hardest product to get right is your first one. Follow two hardware startups and learn the mistakes that cost them time, money or both. Avoid making the same mistakes!

Surviving a Six Year Sales Cycle

Month 4: We identified the reason for Qualcomm’s loss of interest: the incumbent competitor had offered an alternative, less powerful solution for free to prevent Acme from establishing a foothold. This was not a fight they could win, so Acme decided to stop wasting time on this “perfect” prospect.

Big Data, Big Backup Problem

For 1% of the cost of hardware backup, the new product would deliver 10x the performance of competitive software backup solutions, at performance approaching that of hardware backup. Before starting development, BMC asked BizDev.Global to validate this value proposition with customers.

Help: Too Many Opportunities!

Blaze’s technology allowed them to build either faster transceivers for a given length of cable, or transceivers that would drive a given bandwidth across a longer cable. So the key to the puzzle was the existing fiber optical cable installed base.

Launching on Kickstarter: Lessons Learned

When the client first approached us, six months before the product was ready for Kickstarter, we tested the concept with 30 streaming TV users. Here’s what we learned:

Avoiding Startup Heartbreak

Since we started offering business development services in 1991, we’ve worked with a lot of new products, new companies and new markets. Here’s a summary of the 200+ startup products we’ve worked on.

37% of the products we validated with customers were either fundamentally flawed or completely off base. As often as not, this was not a surprise to our client; sometimes they had retained us just to confirm their suspicions.

What if We Choose the Wrong Strategic Partner?

Buildsoft was the leading supplier of back office software to homebuilders. Thousands of small and mid-sized homebuilders used Buildsoft to handle orders, payables, receivables and other tasks.

Together with Lowe’s Home Improvement, Buildsoft was preparing to launch BuildNet, an online purchasing network. BuildNet would allow builders to place orders online, receive volume discounts and schedule deliveries all from within the Buildsoft environment they were already using.

CRM For Startups in Under Five Minutes

One of the first questions we hear from startups is, “What CRM should we use?” Nobody wants to start selling without having a system in place to track, cultivate and communicate with customers.

If you are starting from scratch, you are probably considering SalesForce or one of a host of other SaaS products that promise to revolutionize your sales process. But there’s another way to approach the problem.