Last week, we had Ronald J. Friedlander in our class of IETECHSTARTUP by Prof Enrique Dans at IE Business School. Ronald J. Friedlander is the founder and CEO of ReviewPRO. It is a startup dealing with social media monitoring and reputation management for hotels.
The main theme of this talk was about the the process of going commercial: how to acquire first customer, and build further on that. RJ believes that the first client is very important. To acquire the first customer, which was local hotel, he directly reached out to them by cold calling. RJ also talked the importance of offering large discounts to first customers. Giving discounts is anytime better than reducing prices, since it can decrease the perceived value of the product. For the first large customer, RJ reached out directly to the CEO of the large chain, and requested time to demo the product. He was able to impress the CEO in first 2 minutes. RJ is firm believer that the most important component is having a solid product to offer. In general, his strategy of ongoing customer acquisition is to use telemarketing for smaller customer accounts, and personal effort for large accounts.
These concepts learnt in the session are also applicable in the case of corporate entrepreneurship. The startups within another large enterprises also work pretty similar to a traditional independent startups. Going commercial is an important phase in the life of corporate startups as well. A corporate entrepreneur should also go extra mile to acquire first customer. By keeping the fixed list price of the product, even if huge discounts are given initially, can be a good idea as it retains the value of the product. The energy that is being put into the customer acquisition should also be commensurate with the size of potential customer client.
Implementing these concepts learnt from a startup in another startup withing larger enterprise can prove to be helpful.
startupinanenterprise 