Why do some startups win

Original author: Steve Blank
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I drank coffee with one of my former students, today the head of marketing at a fast-growing startup. His company has successfully gone all the way from consumer analysis to identifying user problems, then approving solutions, and finally to increasing sales and marketing. Everything seemed to be going well.

But he was worried: he noticed that as the number of employees increased, the productivity of the marketing department began to decline rapidly.

This did not surprise me. While the enterprise is still small (startups, small teams within companies and government agencies), the “pioneers” are united by a common mission - understanding why they come to work, what they need to do there and how to understand whether they have achieved a result. However, when the company begins to grow, what once was a common mission and goal is buried under the recruitment process and KPI.

I told him that a long time ago came to the following thought: to avoid this, it is necessary to give the team an idea of ​​the mission and goals.


Why are you here?


I got a job as vice president of marketing for a company that was just getting out of bankruptcy. We managed to ensure the flow of funds, but this was only a temporary solution.

In my first week at a new place, I asked the head of each of the departments what they were doing for marketing and for the company as a whole. When I asked the exhibition manager this question, she was very surprised: “Steve, don’t you know that my responsibility is to bring our stand to the exhibitions and set it up?” Other managers also gave answers in the spirit of logistics. The head of the product marketing department, for example, said that their job is to request specifications from the technical department and draw up documentation. I especially liked the answer of the PR employee. He said: "Our business is to compile information from the documentation in press releases and answer calls in case the press contacts us."

If such answers seem quite normal to you and you are involved in a startup, I advise you to refresh your resume.

Position is not work


When I began to ask employees why the marketing department participates in exhibitions, writes press releases or compiles documentation, I didn’t hear anything intelligible except “Well, this is our job”. They perceived their positions as a reference to the vacancies that comprise the personnel department in a company of 10 thousand people (job duties, necessary skills and requirements for a candidate, a place in the service hierarchy).

I realized that our department consists of people whose positions describe operations aimed at the process - despite the fact that we work in an area where constant flexibility and quick response are urgently needed.

Let the post - this is what is written on their business cards, but their work is not reduced to this. The obsession with the processes has led to the fact that employees behind the trees did not see the forest. In a company for which every day could be the last, you can imagine nothing worse.

For those who work in startups, a job is not the same as job duties. The whole point is this.

Department mission: what should I do today?


It's not that I got stupid workers. What I heard was the result of poor management.

No one brought these people up to date. No one explained how the work in a startup differs from work in a large company. All of them, it seemed to them, were doing what was required of them.

And most importantly: no one has assembled a marketing department and has not outlined the Mission (yes, with a capital letter) that it faces.

In most startups, a corporate mission is formulated because investors insist, or because the director remembered that there was something like that at the previous work. Most companies spend a lot of time polishing to perfection the wording of the corporate mission for outsiders, and then they don’t do anything inside the company to put it into practice. What I will describe now is fundamentally different from this approach.

Our marketing department was missing something that would guide employees daily, suggesting what they needed to do. When I expressed this thought to the director, his first reaction was: "That's why you are leading them." Indeed, we could build a hierarchy in which management would be carried out from top to bottom through orders and control. But I wanted to create a flexible team of marketing specialists, able to work autonomously, without daily directions.

We needed to formulate the Mission company, which would explain to everyone and everyone:

  • why did they come to work;
  • what they need to do;
  • how do they understand if they have achieved the desired result.

Also, it should feature two words that marketing lives and breathes: revenue and profit.

For several months we had a dialogue with users and the sales department, and as a result, we determined the Mission of the marketing department (and, accordingly, our responsibilities) as follows:

Help the sales team get 25 million with a gross margin of 45%. To do this, we will create demand on the user side and direct them to sales channels, convey to users and the sales department how our product wins against the background of analogues, and help the technical department better understand the needs and desires of the audience. To achieve this, we will conduct a number of events generating demand (advertising, PR, exhibitions, seminars, launching a website, etc.), we will analyze competitors, channels and materials for users (technical descriptions, documentation, product reviews), We will conduct surveys and study the audience.


This year, the marketing department must transfer to the sales department 40,000 active and verified leads, ensure brand recognition and product names of 65% in our target market, and five positive reviews every quarter. In the first year of sales, our market share should reach the mark of 35% with a resource of twenty employees in the staff and promotion costs of not more than 4 million dollars.

  • Create demand on the side of the user (in accordance with the planned revenue);
  • To direct this demand through sales channels;
  • Set the price of the goods, which would allow us to achieve the target figures of revenue and profit;
  • Provide information to the technical department;
  • Help the technical department better understand the needs and desires of users.

That's all. Two paragraphs, five paragraphs. That was enough.

Creating a Mission Focused Team


The presence of the Mission meant that now it became clear to the team: it’s important not what is written on their business card, but whether the work they are doing is conducive to translating the goals of the Mission into reality. No more, no less.

It was not easy for everyone to switch to such a concept.

The head of marketing communications has transformed her department into a mission-oriented organization. The new exhibition manager quickly realized that his job was not to set up stands (we hired employees for this): exhibitions are our opportunity to popularize the product and collect leads. And the one who runs the exhibition department takes responsibility for both. The stand is the tenth matter. I don’t really care if we have a stand or not, if we can achieve the same result by jumping naked with a parachute into a tea cup.


The same story with the PR department. The new leader quickly learned that my secretary could also answer calls from journalists. The job of the PR man is not to send out press releases, and then sit back and wait, suddenly someone will call. What matters is not how much he does, but what results he brings. Moreover, the results were not measured in the usual quantities for public relations - how many press releases were sent, how much ink was spent. It is not interesting to me. I wanted the PR department to outline the stages of the sales process, determine the sites where you can disseminate information about our product and attract interest in it, establish contacts with the press, use them to increase demand and, finally, send it to sales channels. We constantly conducted internal and external audits, created metrics to track how different different messages are,

The same story is with the team that was involved in product marketing. As a manager, I took the person who managed the marketing department at the previous place of work, and then moved even closer to the center of events: he headed the sales department in the same company. We decided to hire him after my question: what proportion of the materials that were personally created by him, the team used in business? He replied: "Ten percent," and his face showed that he was embarrassed. Then I realized that we needed him. And our head of the technical marketing department was perfectly able to understand the needs of the user and state them to the technical department.

Mission Objectives: what really matters


Now that we have put together a powerful team, the next step was the realization that our Mission could change along the way. "Wait, we just got inspired by this whole idea, and now it turns out that it can take and change?" Maybe if we have to maneuver, if competitors release a new product, if we learn something new about the audience.

Therefore, we introduced the concept of “mission objectives”. To set goals, you need to answer the question: “Why is this Mission chosen, what does the company want to achieve?” In our case, the company's mission was to sell a $ 25 million product with a gross margin of 45%.

The point of devoting employees to the goal is that, understanding what our Mission is aimed at, they will be able to jointly help us achieve results.

We realized: it may happen that at some point the marketing department does not pull out or some external factors come into play, and the Mission will fail (for example, we will not collect 40,000 leads). Consider goals through the prism of the old adage: “When alligators have stuck around you, it’s not enough to clear the swamp”. For example, according to our Mission, these 40,000 leads and a 35% market share were needed so that the sales team could earn $ 25 million with a gross margin of 45%.

We tried to convey to the employees the following: the goal is more stable than the Mission. “Let's think. The company wants to earn $ 25 million with a gross margin of 45%. If marketing fails to provide 40,000 leads, what else can be done to ensure the same level of revenue and profits? ” A mission is what we strive for, but it can change according to circumstances. Goals, on the contrary, always remain unchanged.

When the usual startup problems with tight deadlines, a huge number of tasks, lack of time began, we began to train employees to work with an eye on the five theses that we put forward in the Mission, and a common goal. When they began to be overwhelmed with tasks, they learned to ask themselves: “Is this work necessary to achieve the goals? If so, which ones? If not, why am I doing this? ”

They began to realize that the goals behind the Mission were to maximize revenue and profit.

Why is it necessary


By the end of the first year, our team had finally worked together (over time, we introduced the “ No Excuses ” system to instill responsibility for employees). The department has become a group of people willingly showing initiative, reasonably building a workflow and ready to be responsible for the result.

I remember how at the end of a difficult week, the employees who usually reported to me came just to talk about the small victories we won over these days. And at some point, exchanging such stories, they suddenly realized that our company, which, it seemed, was just barely breathing, is now starting to overtake its competitors - large enterprises with better financing than ours. This was a moment of pure delight for us.

What have we learned:

  • Autonomous execution of tasks should begin at the lowest level;
  • Bring to everyone a common Mission: why they come to work, what they need to do and how to understand whether they have achieved the desired result.
  • Tell us about goals so that staff can view the Mission in their context;
  • Recruit a team, each of whose members agrees to independently work on the implementation of the Mission;
  • Introduce a system of "No excuses";
  • Agree on which core values ​​will define corporate culture.

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