A Year in the Life of a Startup: A Marketer's Checklist

A Year in the
Life of a Startup:
A Marketer’s
Checklist
Ilya Mirman

Rev. 12-01-2011

Contents
Introduction........................................................................................................................ 3
Summary: Startup Marketer’s First-Year Checklist ............................................................ 4
Marketing ........................................................................................................................... 5
Refining the Web site ..................................................................................................... 5
Differentiated positioning .............................................................................................. 6
Content ........................................................................................................................... 7
SEO ................................................................................................................................. 8
Case studies and References .......................................................................................... 9
Events ............................................................................................................................. 9
Which social media sites matter .................................................................................. 10
©2011 by Ilya Mirman
Connection with bloggers............................................................................................. 10
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Lead generation............................................................................................................ 11
Marketing metrics ........................................................................................................ 12
NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Lead nurturing, lead intelligence .................................................................................. 14
Awards .......................................................................................................................... 16
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Sales.................................................................................................................................. 16
Mapping the Sales process ........................................................................................... 16
Prospecting tools and selection criteria ....................................................................... 17
Leveraging lead intelligence in Sales ............................................................................ 18
Sales rep onboarding .................................................................................................... 19
Sales metrics ................................................................................................................. 19
Cross-functional ............................................................................................................... 20
Set Goals ....................................................................................................................... 20
Iterating & refining ....................................................................................................... 20
Know where to step on gas .......................................................................................... 20
Infrastructure refinement and upgrades...................................................................... 20
About the Author ............................................................................................................. 21

A Year in the Life of a Startup: A Marketer’s Checklist www.IlyaMirman.com p. 2

Introduction
I recently passed the one year mark at my current startup. As I looked back at the things
we’ve been able to do over the past year, and compared and contrasted that with the
first year’s goals and efforts at my other two startups and those of my friends running
marketing elsewhere, it occurred to me that there’s a great deal of overlap (probably
because there’s a lot of commonality among our goals, efforts, and achievements).

So, I figured I’d make a checklist of sorts – the things one has hopefully accomplished by
the end of the startup’s first year in the marketplace. To some extent it’s a follow-up to
my earlier eBook, “Building the Marketing Plan: A Blueprint for Startups.” Though this
time around, it’s less about putting together a plan, and more about proposing a specific
criteria for evaluating progress during, and at the end of, the first year.

This is by no means a definitive guide or a comprehensive list, but rather a proposal for
what might be reasonable for a startup to accomplish, and questions you probably want
to answer, within the first year. (And of course, depending on your specific situation,
some of these may be much harder/easier, and more/less important than others.)


Summary: Startup Marketer’s First-Year Checklist


Marketing
Website Redesign Tips from HubSpot:
Refining the Web site
For more, check out this webinar on the science of website redesign I’ve found that the first year of a startup’s life provides a great and timely opportunity to
test, revise, upgrade the web site. After all, though your team probably has all sorts of
hypotheses about the right messaging, content, calls-to-action, you will learn a ton once
you’re live, in the marketplace. And chances are, there will be at least a few surprises.
So, some of the questions worth considering along the way are:

• Who are the primary roles (or “personas”) you’re targeting with content on the
site?
• What content do you have for these personas?
• Depending on their stage in the sales process (Information gathering?
Evaluating products? Understanding your key advantages?) – are you providing
this content, and is it easy to find?
• What are your calls-to-action? Do you want people to raise their hand for a
demo? Download a free trial?
• Which pages are popular - and what does that tell you about what visitors are
doing?
• Which important pages are NOT popular, and why? Content? Layout?
Navigation?
• And based on all this – are revising/updating/testing on a regular basis?

Use analytics (in this case, HubSpot) to gain insights into your web site’s assets:
the inbound links, which content is most popular, etc.


Differentiated positioning
Hopefully, by the end of the first year, you’ve had a chance to zero in on
messaging/positioning that works: it’s compelling to prospects, and is differentiated in
the market.

Moore’s Positioning Statement Template • User personas: who are the primary target users and decision makers, for whom
you’re crafting your product, your messaging, your content – the “archetypal
For (target customers) person whom you want your marketing to reach”? It’s almost never just one
Who (have the following problem) persona, nor can you realistically do a good job with more than three or four. If
Our product is a (describe the product or solution) you’re selling to businesses (B2B), it might be the end user (e.g., sysadmin,
That provides (cite the breakthrough capability) mechanical design engineer, accounting clerk) and the principal decision maker
Unlike (reference competition), (director of IT, engineering manager, CFO). If you’re selling to consumers (B2C),
Our product/solution (describe the key point of where the user and decision makers are one and the same, it’s still useful to identify
competitive differentiation) a couple of the key personas. For example, if you’ve built a photo sharing site,
different product features and marketing messages may appeal to Gen Xers , versus
recent retirees.
Example: Moore’s positioning for SGI (during SGI’s • Positioning statement: Geoffrey Moore’s seminal book Crossing the Chasm has
heyday) been a bible for countless startups. Moore’s template for a positioning statement
forces the startup to have laser focus around who your product is for, what
For movie producers and others problem it’s solving, what the breakthrough capability is, and what the leading
Who depend heavily on post-production special effects, competitive alternative is. Certainly your marketing will be broader – reaching
Silicon Graphics provides computer workstations multiple segments, promoting multiple benefits, and targeting more than one
That integrate digital fantasies with actual film footage. competitor. Forcing yourself to narrow the focus with the positioning statement
Unlike any other vendor of computer workstations, helps avoid wishy-washy schizophrenic marketing, where depending on where you
SGI has made a no-compromise commitment to meeting look, you can’t tell what the hell a product does, for whom, and why you should
film-makers' post-production needs. bother.
• Mission statement: While the positioning statement is immensely useful, it’s
primarily an internal document –a compass keeping you on track. On the other
hand, the mission statement is indeed for public consumption – a brief statement of
the essence of the company. Ideally, this will be closely connected to the elevator
pitch for the product.


Content
Some questions regarding the content of your site:

• Do you have a blog you regularly publish on? Are you using webinars? Videos?
• Is your content mostly about your products, or helpful/educational material
regarding your prospects’ problems? What’s popular on your site? What do your
competitors most successful content to attract inbound links, traffic, leads?
(Fortunately, there’s all sorts of tools to figure this out.)
• What’s popular? What’s not? Why? What are you doing about it?
• Do you have content for each stage of the sales process, from your customer’s
perspective? E.g., initial info gathering, key reasons to choose your product, ROI,
product evaluation, a pilot deployment, standardization, etc.

Content creation is a central element of a startup’s inbound marketing strategy, with
the ability to transform the entire customer acquisition model. Inbound marketing is a
way of getting found by prospects, with the following primary elements: creating
remarkable content, optimizing that content for search engines, and promoting this
content through social media. Unlike paid traffic – which disappears when you shut off
the spending, inbound marketing content is a gift that keeps on giving, building your
barrier to entry. There’s a ton of excellent resources on the topic online, so I’ll just add
Publish not only a blog, but every form of content that your a couple observations and suggestions:
target customer will enjoy. For example, the team at HubSpot
publish a blog, a podcast (www.HubSpot.tv), videos, photos, 1) It’s interesting that a ton of startups have at best a beautiful website, but little
presentations, and even a book. And this content – providing content that attracts traffic and links. In the first year of your startup, there’s ample
tips, best practices, industry information – is useful regardless of opportunity to start publishing content, experiment, see what sticks, rinse and
whether the reader is using HubSpot’s product. repeat.
2) One common question is, what is the right content to publish? One of the best
things I’ve heard on this is, “nobody cares about your products – people care about
their problems.” So look beyond brochures and white papers, and think about
creating content that’ll help your target customers solve their problems.
3) One cool thing about inbound marketing is that once you figure out what’s of
interest to folks, you can repurpose content in a variety of ways. For example, a
blog post can be leveraged in an e-Book, a short video, provide the basis for a
tutorial, etc.


SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key vehicle for your website being found online.
Answers to the following questions will help you craft an SEO strategy:

• Do you know what terms matter in your industry?
• What terms do your prospects search for?
• What search terms do your competitors target with pay-per-click (PPC) ads?
• What are the traffic volumes of these keywords?
• What is the difficulty in ranking organically for these?

These days, there’s a bunch of free (or nearly free) tools for figuring this out quickly
(e.g., KeywordSpy and SpyFu). The sooner you figure this out, the sooner you can start
building your SEO-based traffic magnet. Like so much about startup marketing, this is
an ongoing process. Over time, as you build up your SEO “mojo” (your authority
according to Google and the other search engines), you can start to reach higher, pick
more popular terms and develop content to rank for them.

Identify and refine
terms to target
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot software will
allow you to identify which organic search terms are already driving
traffic to your website. These keywords will provide a good baseline of Analyze results and Start building
core keywords and provide you with a list of keywords and SEO /PPC content for target
performance results that you can benchmark your future SEO efforts landscape terms
against.

Measure your
ranking for these
terms


Case studies and References
• How many case studies do you have?
• Do they:
o Cover the key markets you serve?
o Cover the key usage scenarios?
o Describe the key benefits in both qualitative and quantitative terms?
o Have return on investment (ROI) metrics?
o Drive much traffic to your site?
• How broadly do you use them?
o Press releases?
o On your web site, as both detailed case studies and quotes?
o Customer video testimonials?
o In webinars?
o Live presentations by your customers at industry events?
o To take the occasional call from a prospect considering your solution?
o Etc.

After all, one of the most powerful sales/marketing tools is customers helping spread
the word about the problems they solved, and the benefits they received, from your
product/service.

Events
Depending on your business, tradeshows and conferences may provide an opportunity
for generating leads, driving awareness, and helping establish your company as a
thought leader. These may include large conferences, tradeshows, or small user group
events. You may find it useful to compile a database and apply a consistent, rigorous
criteria to select which events might make sense to attend as an exhibitor, speaker, or
networker.

• Which events matter?
• What is the event attendance?
• Is there an opportunity to present at a session?
• Are your competitors there?
• What is the total cost to participate?
• What is the expected lead volume?


Which social media sites matter
• What are the important sites your prospects use to find and share information?
• Where are your competitors seeing traction?
• How widely used are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn in your segment?
• Which sites drive traffic? How does that convert to leads, customers?
• How important are content sites like SlideShare, YouTube

Connection with bloggers
• Do you know who are the influential bloggers in your space?
• Do you have a relationship with them?
• Do you read their blog posts?
• Do you comment on their blogs, participate in the online conversations?
• How frequently do you reach out? How often do you brief them?
Using tools like HubSpot and Salesforce.com, you can get end-to-end analytics • Do they write about you?
for each traffic source’s conversion rates (traffic  leads  customers)
As marketing strategist David Meerman Scott says, “Social media is a cocktail party”:
“Viewing the Web as a sprawling city with social media as a cocktail party helps to
make sense of the best ways for marketers to use the tools of social media. How do
you act in such a situation?
• Do you go into a large gathering filled with a few acquaintances and tons
of people you do not know and shout "BUY MY PRODUCT"?
• Do you go into a cocktail party and ask every single person you meet for a
business card before you agree to speak with them?
• Do you listen more than you speak?
• Are you helpful, providing valuable information to people with no
expectation of something tangible in return?
• Do you try to meet every single person or do you have a few great
conversations?
• Or do you avoid the social interaction of cocktail parties all together
because you are uncomfortable in such situations?
…So go ahead and join the party. But think of it as just that – a fun place where you
give more than you get. But what you get in return are lasting friendships, many
The social web is growing every day….where are YOUR prospects
which lead to business opportunities.”
and customers hanging out?
David Meerman Scott, 4/30/2009


Lead generation
Lead generation results vary widely, heavily driven by factors such as the quality of the
list, the offer, the creative, how frequently you’ve “hit” the list, etc. Hopefully, by the
end of your first year in the market, you’ve done enough pilots and experiments to have
answers to many of these questions:

• What is the cost-per-lead and cost-per-sale for each lead source?
• What is the conversion rate from lead to opportunity? To closed deal?
• Given the conversion rates, what lead flow rate (e.g., new leads/week) does your
sales team need?
• Do you have lead gen offers for each stage of the sales process, addressing the
prospect’s concerns, questions and motivations at that stage?
• Which of your lead gen programs would you repeat? Invest more in? Scrap?

Though I’m a huge fan of inbound marketing, I’ve seen a lot of value in doing some
outbound marketing, at least early on. Inbound often takes months to generate results
– perhaps longer than you have to make your first sales, start figuring out and
Tip #1: Look at each program individually, for detailed insights; optimizing your sales process, and building the right tools and content. So outbound
Tip #2: But also, look at the overall categories, because you may see programs – e.g., direct mail and email, pay-per-click (PPC), newsletter sponsorship –
interesting macro trends (e.g., that PPC campaigns perform better than provide an opportunity to achieve a couple things:
tradeshows)
1) Allow you to pressure test list sources: Brainstorm a list of the possible list
Tip #3: Excel’s conditional formatting is a quick way to see the stack
rank – what did well, what didn’t. sources (e.g., trade publications, or consumer-focused vertical pubs) and job
titles or demographics to test.
2) Test several offers: Thinking about the steps of the sales process, you’ll
Lead Cost / Deal probably want to have offers that help prospects at each step – addressing the
particular questions and overcoming the hurdles. So early on, there might be a
$5,000
need for an information kit with valuable tips, or a brief demo that lets them
$4,000 dream; later on, once you’ve earned the right to ask for more time, you might
$3,000 offer an e-Book or white paper; and so on. You won’t know ahead of time
$2,000 what might really resonate, so experiment, and quickly.
$1,000 3) Don’t be the company that – 6 months after shipping product – just has a
white paper behind a lead form.
$-
PPC Direct Mail Tradeshow
Total $693 $1,676 $4,692


Marketing metrics
Without metrics, we are dead meat. The good news is that it’s increasingly easy to
measure nearly anything, much of it with free (or almost free) tools. Every business is
different, so while there’s no universally-applicable list of what to measure and with
what depth, there is a relatively short list of metrics that are actionable, and collectively
paint a reliable picture:

• Traffic – What is the volume, and growth rate? Where is it coming from? What
content is most popular?
• Leads – Which programs/sources/offers are driving leads?
• Conversions – What is your conversion rate of traffic to leads? Leads to
opportunities? Opportunities to sales? What is the cost of customer
acquisition (more on that one later). What are your best landing pages? How
do your landing pages’ conversion rates compare with best-in-class sites?
• Competitors – How do all the key players stack up in terms of traffic, reach,
inbound links, key words rankings?

And you might want to drill down, looking beyond the aggregate stats. For example, in
addition to looking at the big picture of monthly traffic/leads/opportunities pipeline,
what might be particularly actionable is figuring out which content drove interesting
volume of traffic and inbound links; or which community site drove visitors that
ultimately had higher conversion rates.

Some great tools are: Google Analytics; the integrated analytics in HubSpot; and
specialized tools such as ClickTale to really examine your visitors’ behavior, or Visible
Measures for web video metrics.

With analytics, you can get an end-to-end view of your business – see
what’s working, what’s not – data you can then act on.


Modern marketing analytics tools make it nearly effortless to not only see the big picture
(traffic volume, conversion rates, etc.) but also drill down as deep as needed – e.g., stats
for an individual inbound link, a specific call-to-action button, a specific email blast.


Lead nurturing, lead intelligence
• What are the steps your prospects go through in learning about, evaluating,
purchasing and deploying your product?
• What are the logical content, offers, calls-to-action you can offer along the
way?
• Are you using any automation and intelligence in automating some of the
interactions with the prospect?
• What are the click-through for your lead nurturing offers?
• Is there any evidence of lead nurturing positively impacting sales (e.g., close
rates, time-to-close?

When I ran Marketing at SolidWorks, I had the fortune to work with David Skok (Matrix
Venture Partners), who was on our board. Before becoming a venture capitalist, David
was a serial entrepreneur – so between his own experiences and that of his portfolio
companies, he saw first-hand many best (and worst) practices. Out of this experience,
he drummed into us some excellent strategies and tactics around building a sales and
marketing machine.
With HubSpot’s lead nurturing, you can easily create, test, and launch
campaigns; and move leads from one campaign to another. At JBoss, David and the team mapped out their sales process - and by looking at it from
the point of view of the customer, they could identify the CONCERNS and
MOTIVATIONS at each step (see figures on next page). Once this process is understood,
you are in a position to design the marketing and sales tools, techniques, and a lead
From “Lessons from Leaders: How JBoss did it” by David Skok nurturing program to address your prospects’ concerns and motivations at each step.
(And check out other articles on his blog, www.forentrepreneurs.com)
The JBoss team treated it as an engineering system – one that can be designed, analyzed
and optimized.


“Using the methodology, we worked to
understand the customers’ mindset
and motivations at these key steps in
the sales cycle, and looked at the tools
available to motivate them to do what
we wanted.”

(From “Lessons from Leaders: How
JBoss did it” by David Skok)

Tools to move customers
through specific stages

(From “Lessons from Leaders:
How JBoss did it”)

Automated lead nurturing can
streamline delivery of many of
these tools and content.


Awards
Winning awards might give you some degree of bragging rights and help raise
awareness about your company and solution. Sometimes it gives you a leg up; other
times, it just puts you at parity. Either way, awards are something often worth pursuing
for a startup. With that in mind:

• What are the awards that might matter? What are your competitors bragging
about?
• What are the possible categories and types of awards to go after? (There’s
awards for individuals, for companies, for products, for campaigns, etc.)
• What are the awards the most successful companies in your field are going
after?
• Knowing you won’t win many of them, are you going broad enough?
• What are you doing to win the relevant ones?
o Do you have good award write-ups? Have you refined the applications
based on which ones win vs. lose?
o Who is on the decision panel?
o Have you briefed them along the way?

Sales

Mapping the Sales process
Very early on, it’s critical to figure out what the sales process looks like – after all, you
will likely need to eliminate major hurdles and bottlenecks in order to scale your
business from the first 10 sales, to the next 100 and beyond. So on an ongoing basis,
you must engineer your marketing and sales process with as much rigor as you engineer
Identifying the sales process and filling in the gaps: your product. Having answers to these key questions helps:
1. Map out the sales steps;
2. Identify the bottlenecks, hurdles, and key questions; • What are the steps the prospect goes through?
3. Develop sales tools and processes to address bottlenecks. • What are the corresponding concerns and motivations at each step?
• what are you providing to address these at each step?
(And of course, as the product matures and the market evolves, • How long is each step? What is the gap between these steps?
there’s a corresponding evolution of the sales/marketing steps, tools • What can be done to reduce the calendar time and effort? E.g., sales tools,
and metrics.) marketing materials, marketing programs, sales workflow?


Prospecting tools and selection criteria
Sales teams live and die by the quality of the leads they call on. Though you hopefully
you have an ever-growing amount of marketing-generated leads, chances are that if
you’re in a growing business, it’ll feel like a never-ending treadmill, and you’ll be adding
inside sales professionals at a faster rate than marketing can generate leads. (Yes, there
are the rare and notable exceptions – companies that have insane inbound lead
volumes, or companies totally committed to the “freemium” model where inside sales
reps focus 100% on upgrading downloaders of their free products.)

In particular, the economics of “high velocity” (a.k.a. “low friction”) sales models are
extremely sensitive to the quality of cold-call lists, for the following reasons:

1) The average sales deal is relatively small
2) Sales expense makes up the majority of the cost of customer acquisition (CoCA)
3) With cold-calling – even targeted cold-calling – you’re typically looking for a needle
in a haystack, with somewhere over 99% of the calls not contributing to a sale.

Success typically rests on that razor-thin difference in quality: a list that’s “99% bad”
might drive profitable sales, whereas “99.9% bad” might be a giant waste of time,
because the former has 1% quality leads, whereas the latter has 0.1%.

Whether you’re using list brokers, online sources like Hoovers or iSell, or online
directories such as Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, and LinkedIn, there’s many sources for finding
prospects to call on. They all have pros and cons, but regardless of the source,
everything starts from the list criteria you use. So – how do you zero in on the right
criteria? One technique for systematically zeroing in on an improved selection criteria is
Results from a typical cold-call list experiment as follows:
For a technique for systematically zeroing in on the correct 1. Establish the selection criteria
selection criteria, check out: 2. Identify variables to measure (e.g., conversion rates, deal close rates, ASP)
3. Establish a baseline
“Refining Cold-Call Lists for High Velocity Sales Operations”
4. Design your experiment
5. Execute the experiment
6. Analyze the data

And like so many other things, this is a never-ending process – there’s always more
variables to test, hypotheses to explore.


Leveraging lead intelligence in Sales
• Why do prospects come to your site? What do they do upon returning visits?
• What demographic info can you add to the record to make your marketing efforts
more relevant, and sales efforts more effective?
• Are you progressively adding automation to leverage this?

The more you know about prospects, the more you can tailor their experience
throughout the buying process. There are several sources of data worth collecting (and
there’s a variety of tools that help you do this – HubSpot, LinkedIn, Hoovers, iSell,
Google Analytics, LeadLander, etc.):

1. The content that originally brought your prospect to your site;
2. Behavior on your site (frequency and timing of, and content viewed during,
returning visits);
3. Demographic data that can be appended to the lead record (e.g., title and
contact info, company demographic data, etc.);
4. Response to lead nurturing campaigns.

It might seem like a tall hill to climb, but I’ve found there’s a reasonable progression
from a coarse and manual process, to a more automated, fine-tuned process:

1. Manual: The quickest win is simply putting the lead intelligence into the hands of
Sales. There’s a variety of CRM plug-ins that make this possible – for example, the
LinkedIn and HubSpot plug-ins for Salesforce.com. Right from the lead or contact record
inside your CRM tool, your Sales team gets a much richer view of the prospect.

2. Lead grading: Over time, you can see which factors – both behavioral and
demographic – correlate with sales success, and build a Lead Grade that’s relevant for
your business (Salesforce.com and other CRM/SFA tools allow this fairly easily). And
based on the lead grade, you can prioritize and steer sales follow-up.

3. Automated lead nurturing: The customization and automation
doesn’t stop in the Sales department! Marketing can do all sorts of
cool things with increasingly sophisticated automation. Automated
nurturing programs can be driven by all sorts of factors reflecting the
prospect’s behavior and demographics.


Sales rep onboarding
• Do you have a training curriculum to bring new sales reps up to speed? Covering
your industry; your prospects’ key issues and challenges, your solution, your sales
process?
• Is there certification for the different levels? (E.g., for demand generation teams,
versus account reps that present to customers) Are there periodic refreshers,
and/or an ongoing program of education?

It goes without saying that the sooner a new Sales team member understands your
space and solution, the sooner they can become productive. (And, I’ve found this
particularly important for the “high velocity,” low-touch sales model – where the new
team members might have little experience selling a product like yours, or even selling,
period.)

Sales metrics
Among the many metrics worth measuring for a sales operation, here’s a few that
marketers should have an increasingly accurate sense of:

• Sales cycle (stages, effort and calendar time); Conversion rates from stage to
stage
• Lead-to-opportunity conversion rates; and deal close rates, by lead source
• Average sales price (ASP)
• Metrics per rep: dials, opportunities, deals closed, avg quota attainment,
revenue per rep, avg. lifetime value of customers closed by the rep
• A key metric that for start-ups turns out to be one the biggest drivers of success
or failure is the cost of customer acquisition. The sooner you can build at least
a rough model of this, the sooner you can make adjustments in your business –
for example, figuring out the minimum deal size that results in a profitable
customer.

As part of this effort, it is particularly useful to establish, early on, which metrics
correlate with sales. Identifying leading indicators in the sales cycle that have a
predictable rate of converting to sales is invaluable for planning and driving the
business. For example, if on average, one out of 4 demos typically convert to a sale 3
months later, this gives us not only a great visibility for forecasting, but also a great
metric to drive through sales and marketing activities.


Cross-functional
The three critical phases of a startup:
Set Goals
1. Finding product/market fit
Sounds obvious, but some marketers forget to connect marketing activities with some
2. Finding a scalable and repeatable sales model
agreed-upon, shared business goals. Without at least some connection to the goal (e.g.,
3. Scaling the business
“drive more leads,” “prospect self-education” or “”) discussions can easily devolve into
(From “Setting the Startup Accelerator Pedal” by David Skok)
vague and subjective debates (“the web site is ugly” or “tradeshow A is better than B”).

Iterating & refining
One theme common to many of the points above is about the importance of
experimenting, changing, upgrading, refining on an ongoing basis. Particularly in the
first year of a start-up, you’re in a race to figure out how to improve key metrics like
lead volume, deal close rates, deal size, lifetime value of a customer, and many others.
Every part of the sales and marketing operation lends itself to this: web site content;
calls to action; lead gen programs; sales scripts; and infrastructure.

Know where to step on gas
And finally: Part of our job as marketers is to identify the programs and investments
that have a positive return, to be ready when the business allows it. So within a short
number of months, we should be able to answer the following questions:

• Which lead generation programs would you repeat? What is the best cold-call
list selection criteria?
• What roles would you hire, what part of the organization would you expand?

Infrastructure refinement and upgrades
Are you increasingly leveraging technology to run and analyze your business? Are you
These days, you can rapidly
progressively automating more of your sales, marketing, and support functions?
build an increasingly
sophisticated infrastructure Early in the start-up’s life, you need to choose marketing and sales platforms. There are
to support marketing, sales a variety of good tools and technologies out there, though I’m quite partial to a set-up
and support. that integrates Salesforce.com and HubSpot. Between these two products, you can
quickly and easily build the infrastructure that’ll enable you to have a web presence, get
found online, convert visitors into leads, nurture leads, and manage the sales process
from start to finish. And depending on what’s relevant for your business, there’s a lot of
useful supporting tools, technologies and plug-ins available.


About the Author
Ilya Mirman has spent the past decade building, marketing, and supporting enterprise
software products.

Most recently, Ilya was VP of Marketing at VMTurbo, a venture-backed cloud startup.
Previously, as VP of Marketing at Cilk Arts (a venture-backed MIT spin-off acquired by
Intel), Ilya wore multiple hats (marketing, sales, support) and led all marketing efforts
for the company from 8 months before product launch through company acquisition.

As VP of Marketing at Interactive Supercomputing (a venture-backed MIT spin-off
acquired by Microsoft) he built and ran the marketing, customer support, and
application engineering organizations.

As VP of Marketing at SolidWorks (the world's leading vendor of mechanical design
software) Ilya helped establish SolidWorks as the standard in 3D mechanical design
software, used by millions of engineers worldwide.

Ilya holds a BSME from the University of Massachusetts, an MSME from Stanford
University, and an MBA from MIT's Sloan School. Earlier in his career Ilya designed
Performing with Guns N’ Roses tribute band Mr. Brownstone lasers for high-speed fiber optic communication systems, worked on NASA's Mars
at Eugene Mirman’s book release party. Mission, and washed dishes at Souper Salad. He enjoys jamming with friends, concert
photography, and San Pellegrino mineral water.

To connect with Ilya:

Blog: www.IlyaMirman.com

Mirman Photography: photos.ilyamirman.com

Twitter: @IlyaMirman


A Year in the Life of a Startup: A Marketer's Checklist

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