Go To Market Consulting

Bill Joos
Go To Market Consulting

+1 650 799-5980
Bill@GoToMarketConsulting.com

I love entrepreneurs and high tech startups!  Whether I am on a consulting assignment working with a company founder in Palo Alto or conducting a workshop for a room full of entrepreneurs in Moscow (on November 7-8), there’s almost nothing that I would rather be doing than helping them accelerate their success.

I spent over seven years as the VP of Entrepreneur Development at Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that I helped co-found with startup guru/author Guy Kawasaki and others.

At Garage, and in the years since, I honed my expertise in providing my clients with effective, hands-on, action-oriented strategic and tactical mentoring and coaching.

I’ve also held sales and marketing positions with a variety of leading tech companies including IBM and served as VP of US Sales at the software division of Apple.

My combined experience has given me exposure to a broad array of technologies and tech companies from startups to mature industry powerhouses.

In 2004, I decided to start my own company, Go To Market Consulting, and extend my services to global clients.

Client Consulting

I have worked with literally hundreds of startups around the world and helped them clarify and polish their marketing messages as well as refine their fund-raising and customer presentations.

Beyond being a leading “pitch doctor,” I also help clients with their business and revenue models, strategic alliances, business development, sales, marketing and funding strategies.

Featured Speaker and Workshop Leader

Over 20,000 entrepreneurs worldwide have attended conferences where I’ve been a featured keynote speaker or workshop leader.

Here's some of the most popular sessions:

    - Perfecting Your Positioning
                                                 - Short-Building Elevator Pitching
                                                 - Perfecting Your Investor and Customer
                                                    Presentations 
                                                 - Creating Powerful Executive Summaries
                                                 - Top Ten Mistakes Made in Business Plans
                                                 - The Amazing Power of an Advisory Board
                                                 - How to Hold More Effective Investor Meetings

Often several of my sessions are combined into highly interactive one- or two-day workshops for high tech startups.

Where have I conducted seminars or workshops?  Here's a partial list:

Aarhus, Anaheim, Athens, Austin, Berkeley, Boise, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, 
Copenhagen, Dallas, Davis, Denver, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Haifa, Helsinki,
Indianapolis, London, Los Angeles, Madison, Minneapolis, Moscow, New York, 
Orlando, Oslo, Palo Alto, Phoenix, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego,
San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Seattle, Singapore and Tel Aviv.

Tips from the Trenches

All of my seminars and workshops are filled with real-world anecdotes and examples spotlighting lessons learned -- from outstanding sucesses to painful mistakes -- as well as insights gained from working with countless entrepreneurs over the years. Periodically I'll post some of my favorites to this site; enjoy!

Hiring Computer Engineers? You'll Love This Idea! :-)

Click on the image to enlarge it and see the challenge. 

Any engineers who can can figure out the real phone number are certainly interview candidates!

Would someone please email me the solution? :-)

The Elephant and the Invisible Man; "So What?"

A friend’s daughter is attending the University of San Diego. As a part time job, Karen got an interesting position at the world famous San Diego Zoo where she was helping with the elephants, a great job for a biology major.

You could fill the Grand Canyon with what I don’t know about pachyderms, so when I was invited down to get a private, after hours tour to meet the elephants up close and personal, I knew I just had to go. 

As it happened, one of my San Diego clients needed me at their office for a prep and polish session for an upcoming VC meeting -- a typical consulting assignment for me -- so the timing was set.

At this point you might well ask what elephants -- or an invisible man for that matter -- have to do with marketing, sales and fundraising. Read on . . .

After my arrival at the zoo, before we went out to the elephant pens, we were having a cup of coffee while Karen and a fellow employee were giving me the run-down on this unusual job. It was an entry level job involving -- among other things -- gloves, shovels, pitchforks, buckets and wheelbarrows, but interesting nevertheless.

You could tell that Karen had fallen in love with the job and with Molly, “her” elephant. With every sentence her excitement grew. She talked about how Molly weighed about 200 pounds and stood over 2 feet tall at birth and then loudly exclaimed, “Molly is now three years old and weighs 3,000 pounds!”

She and her colleague almost high-fived each other with this statement. It obviously meant something important to both of them, but to me it didn’t mean a darn thing.

As I hadn't actually met Molly yet, I didn’t know if she was anorexic and as thin-as-a-rail as elephants ever get. Or was this toddler a giant in the making?

For a three-year-old did she only weigh 3,000 pounds, or did she already weigh 3,000 pounds? For lack of a few extra words I was left to draw my own conclusions, and they were 180 degrees out of phase. Svelte Molly, or corpulent Molly?

This parable’s punch line is that in every VC fund raising presentation I have sat through -- and I have sat through many hundreds -- there are usually more than just a few “Molly statements” made . . . statements meaningful to the presenter but not necessarily to the audience.

    “Our RAID disk drives have a 5 millisecond seek time.”

    “We are using Java.”

    “We are Wi-Fi and WiMAX agnostic.”

When I hear “Molly statements” like these I am left with several options. I can smile and nod knowingly, hoping that later statements will clarify any confusion. I can ask a question, perhaps showing my ignorance of the topic. Or, I can draw my own conclusions; and in Molly's case it probably would have been a 50/50 coin flip . . . svelte or corpulent?

Flash back several decades. When I was working for IBM as a sales rep I attended an intensive six week advanced sales training course. 

There, I was given a special gift by a seasoned sales professional whose name I have long forgotten: a 2” high invisible man (see photo).

He lives to this day unobtrusively sitting on my right shoulder. Naturally if I talked directly to him, well . . . you can imagine the consequences; I would be carted away.

But there he sits, listening to everything I say. If he ever hears me say “Molly is now three years old and weighs 3,000 pounds!” he leans over, tugs on my earlobe to get my attention, and whispers in my ear two magical words: “so what?”

The answer to “so what?” almost always points directly to benefits, clarifiers or differentiators which help the listener draw the right conclusions and in the best possible light.

So, through the magic of cloning and the internet, I'm now giving you your own invisible man. Listen to him when he says "so what?"

    “Our RAID disk drives have a 5 millisecond seek time (so what?)
        . . . so they’ll outperform all competitive solutions by at least 40%.”

    “We are using Java (so what?)
        . . . which allows for rapid development and device independence.”

    “We are Wi-Fi and WiMAX agnostic (so what?)
        . . . so our service will work both now and in the future as new standards emerge."

“So what?” is a powerful mindset -- an attitude really -- that should be part of your mental toolkit anytime you are trying to communicate who you are or what you, your product or company does.

    P.S.  Take a close look at Molly’s small ears. That, I learned, is a dead giveaway that she is an Asian elephant. Her larger African counterparts have huge floppy ears that help lower their body temperature by 10 degrees, since the blood circulating in their ears acts exactly like a car’s radiator.  Molly is, in fact, three years old and weighs 3,000 pounds. So what? She is on the right growth path and probably will measure about 9 feet at the shoulder and weigh about 8,500 pounds when fully grown. This was the unspoken third possibility, not svelte or corpulent, but normal and fit!

Avoiding the Great PowerPoint Slide Hunt

This PowerPoint tip takes just 120 seconds to learn and can make you look like a real pro.

This may seem like "PowerPoint 101," but fewer than 10% of the CEO presenters I have coached knew this trick before I shared it with them. 

Try it; it's very cool!

One of the things that drives me crazy when I am an attendee at a presentation is when someone in the audience asks a question and the presenter says, "I have a slide here somewhere that addresses that," and then proceeds to flip forward and backward through the slides, flashing them all on the screen and looking like a rank amateur while appearing flustered on the Great PowerPoint Slide Hunt.

When they finally do find the elusive slide, they talk to it, and then they have to click madly back to where they were, flashing on screen all intermediate slides as they go. Any pretext of "presenter cool" has just vanished, usually taking some -- or all -- of the presenter's self-confidence with it.

Never let that happen to you, or at least not while I am in the audience!

Before your presentation, make a simple, small discreet list maybe on a 3 X 5 card, of all of your slide titles with their respective slide numbers; like this example:

    1-   Welcome
    2-   Company overview
    3-   Players, problem & pain
    4-   Pain killer
    5-   Our magic technologies
    6-   Competition
    7-   Business model
    8-   Go to market plans
    9-   Revenue summary
    10- Team
    11- Timeline & status   
    12- Why Us Summary

  Backups (to be used only as needed*)
    13- Expanded market data
    14- Technical details, expanded view
    15- Financial details
    16- Revenue details
    17- Etc.
    18- Etc.

Now you are all set to look like a professional, perhaps even a genius with ESP.

Example 1: You are just finishing talking about slide 9 (revenue summary) and someone asks for more revenue details. Without missing a beat you glance at your list, and press 16 and Enter - - you are instantly seeing that slide (revenue details). When you're done, you simply do a 10 and Enter and you're back to your original flow. 

To the audience it looked like the revenue details slide was always immediately after the revenue summary.  Only you know that this is what really happened: . . . 7, 8, 9, 16, 10, 11, etc.

Example 2: You are on the summary slide 12 and a question comes up about your patent-pending technologies. With a simple 5 and Enter you can return to the slide where that was discussed, or jump ahead to a more detailed explaination with a 14 and Enter. After that discussion, a 12 and Enter will return you directly to the summary slide.

You can totally avoid the Great PowerPoint Slide Hunt and jump to any slide at any time, if you just know what slide number you want. Referring to your discreet slide list, simply press the desired slide number and Enter. You can hop-scotch all around your presentation at will.

   * CAUTION: backup slides seem to have a magical, hyponotic power over the presenter, as though part of the presenter's brain says "I went to all the work to make these, so darn it, I am going to show them whether they are needed or not!" Only use the backup slides if they are really needed. Now you know how to make them appear seamlessly in the right place at the right time.