Most entrepreneurs acknowledge the importance of customer validation. Few, however, are as curious or relentless in the pursuit of customer feedback as Whitney Casey. Following her Emmy-winning career as a talk show host and NYC anchor, Whitney created Finery.com, a startup in the Fashion/Technology space. Along with her best-friend and co-founder Brooklyn Decker, Whitney has assembled a stellar team of brainiacs, in NYC, who are revolutionizing the way you interact with your wardrobe. Whitney joins us this week to explore the value of customer feedback and the strategy every founder should model before attempting to scale. 

ON THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Finery - the first wardrobe operating system
• When to hire vs outsource developers
• A validation strategy every founder should adopt
• How to elicit the most authentic customer feedback
• The power of honest feedback from users, even if "your baby is ugly"
• Product Development discipline and the challenges of “feature creep”
• 6 revenue sources and the customers lifecycle.
• Choosing the right investors - “make sure you find smart money”

Justin Edwards is the VP of Sales Practice at Mercato partners. His focus is optimizing and accelerating sales performance within each of their portfolio companies. Leveraging his sales experience in startups and Fortune 100 organizations alike, Justin has demonstrated a unique ability to help founders identify sales inefficiencies and develop highly scalable sales teams and processes. 

ON THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Modeling high velocity sales growth 
• Looking at people as the underlying engine for sales acceleration
• Identifying the 5 traits of success in your sales environment, and building process and scale around those traits
• Why Hubspot requires new sales reps to experience the customer journey before selling
• Technology, money, and the dangers of a broken sales process
• Mapping sales process to identify bottlenecks and deceleration. 
• Identify the "anatomy of a perfect customer"
• Sales qualified leads and the ingredients of an efficient sales process
• The misleading indicators of sales performance
• Corporate strategy - Inside Sales vs. Enterprise Sales strategy.
• Why HR, Marketing, and Sales are the three most common area's of weakness in growth companies

Knowing why you win and lose deals might be the most valuable information your company can have. Unfortunately, 60% of sales professionals are wrong about why they win and lose deals. Not surprisingly, founders make critical errors when they use such assessments in strategic decisions. 

My guest this week is Clozd founder, Spencer Dent. Leveraging his experience at Bain, and Qualtrics, Spencer co-founded Clozd with the mission to help companies uncover the truth about why they win and lose. On this episode, Spencer shares some of the most common pitfalls, and why win-loss analysis should be an integral part of your growth strategy. 

ON THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Win-loss analysis and the founding story of Clozd
• 2 reasons companies should outsource win-loss analysis
• Why founders avoid win-loss analysis
• 60% of reps don't know why they win or lose deals
• How to categorize and prioritize the issues that affect win-loss
• Adapting your sales teams to position against the competition
• The 3 most common deal killers that every founder should be aware of 
• A closer took at Clozd business model