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href="https://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/">Startup Tools</a></li> <li class="page_item page-item-62"><a href="https://steveblank.com/secret-history/">Secret History</a></li> <li class="page_item page-item-68"><a href="https://steveblank.com/books-for-startups/">Books for Startups</a></li> <li class="page_item page-item-11025"><a href="https://steveblank.com/slides/">Slides/Videos</a></li> <li class="page_item page-item-25609"><a href="https://steveblank.com/raising-money/">Raising Money</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> </div>  <div class="narrowcolumnwrapper"><div class="narrowcolumn"> <div id="content" class="content"> <div class="post-30767 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-corporate-govt-innovation category-national-security category-secret-history-of-silicon-valley" id="post-30767"> <h2><a href="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/30/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-the-secret-life-of-polaroid-ceo-edwin-land-part-1/" rel="bookmark">The Secret History of Polaroid CEO Edwin Land</a></h2> <div class="postinfo"> Posted on <span class="postdate">April 30, 2024</span> by steve blank </div> <div class="entry"> <p style="font-weight: 400;">The connections between the world of national security and commercial companies still has surprises.</p> <hr /> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>December 1976 – Vandenberg Air Force Base, U.S. military space port</strong> <strong>on the coast of California</strong></p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">As a Titan IIID rocket blasted off, it carried a spacecraft on top that would change everything about how intelligence from space was gathered. Heading to space was the first <em>digital</em> photo reconnaissance satellite. A revolution in spying from space had just begun.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/KH-11-Launch.jpg?ssl=1"><img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="30771" data-permalink="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/30/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-the-secret-life-of-polaroid-ceo-edwin-land-part-1/kh-11-launch/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/KH-11-Launch.jpg?fit=122%2C158&ssl=1" data-orig-size="122,158" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="KH-11 Launch" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/KH-11-Launch.jpg?fit=122%2C158&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/KH-11-Launch.jpg?fit=122%2C158&ssl=1" class="alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-30771" src="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/KH-11-Launch.jpg?resize=116%2C150&ssl=1" alt="" width="116" height="150" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/KH-11-Launch.jpg?resize=116%2C150&ssl=1 116w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/KH-11-Launch.jpg?w=122&ssl=1 122w" sizes="(max-width: 116px) 100vw, 116px" /></a>For the previous 16 years three generations of U.S. photo reconnaissance satellites (257 in total) took pictures of the Soviet Union on <em>film,</em> then sent the film back to earth on reentry vehicles that were recovered in mid-air. After the film was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_processing">developed</a>, intelligence analysts examined it trying to find and understand the Soviet Union’s latest missiles, aircraft, and ships. By the mid-1970s these photo reconnaissance satellites could see objects as small as a few inches from space. By then, the latest U.S. <em>film</em>-based reconnaissance satellite – Hexagon – was the size of a school bus and had six of these reentry vehicles that could send its film back to earth. Though state of the art for its time, the setup had a drawback: Pictures they returned might be days, weeks or even months old. That meant in a crisis – e.g. the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or the Arab-Israeli war in 1973 – photo reconnaissance satellites could not provide timely warnings and indications, revealing what an adversary was up to right now. The holy grail for overhead imaging from space was to send the pictures to intelligence analysts on the ground in near real time.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">And now, finally after a decade of work by the CIA’s Science and Technology Division, the first digital photo reconnaissance satellite – the KH-11, code-named KENNEN – which could do all that, was heading to orbit. For the first time pictures from space were going to head back to the ground via bits, showing images in near real time.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">The KH-11/ KENNEN project was not a better version of existing film satellites, it was an example of disruptive innovation. Today, we take for granted that billions of cell phones have digital cameras, but in the 1970s getting a computer chip to “see” was science fiction. To do so required a series of technology innovations in digital imaging sensors, and the CIA funded years of sensor research at multiple research centers and companies. That allowed them to build the KH-11 sensor (first with a silicon diode array, and then the using first linear CCD arrays), which turned the images seen by the satellites’ powerful telescope into bits.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Getting those bits to the ground no longer required reentry vehicles carrying film, but it did require the launch of a network of relay satellites (code named <a href="https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3440/1">QUASAR (aka SDS, Satellite Data System</a>). While the KH-11 was taking pictures over the Soviet Union, the images were passed as bits from satellite to satellite at the speed of light, then downlinked to a ground station in the U.S. New ground stations were built to handle a large, fast stream of digital data. And the photo analysts required new equipment.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">More importantly, like most projects that disrupt the status quo, it required a technical visionary who understood how the pieces would create a radically new system, and a champion with immense credibility in imaging and national security who could save the project each time the incumbents tried to kill it — even convincing the President of the United States to reverse its cancelation.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">More detail in a bit. But let’s fast forward, four months later, to a seemingly unrelated story…</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>April 1977 – Needham, MA, Polaroid Annual Meeting<br /> </strong>Edwin Land, the 67-year-old founder/CEO/chairman and director of research of <a href="https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/polaroid/timeline/">Polaroid</a>, the company that had been shipping instant cameras for 30 years, stood on stage and launched his own holy grail – and his last hurrah – an instant <em>film</em>-based home-movie camera called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDkBx4fvY4w">Polavision</a>. At the time, you sent your home movie film out to get developed and you’d be able to view it in days or a week. Land was demoing an instant movie. You filmed a movie and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpH8jIVgxwg">90 seconds later you could see it</a>. It was a technical tour de force – remember this was pre-digital, so the ability to instantly develop and show a movie seemed like magic. Much like the KH-11/KEENAN it also was a complete system – camera, instant film, and player. It truly was the pinnacle of analog engineering.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?ssl=1"><img data-recalc-dims="1" fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="30776" data-permalink="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/30/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-the-secret-life-of-polaroid-ceo-edwin-land-part-1/polavision-ad-2/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?fit=1810%2C1241&ssl=1" data-orig-size="1810,1241" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Polavision ad" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?fit=300%2C206&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?fit=468%2C321&ssl=1" class="aligncenter wp-image-30776" src="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?resize=468%2C321&ssl=1" alt="" width="468" height="321" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?w=1810&ssl=1 1810w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?resize=300%2C206&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?resize=1024%2C702&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?resize=150%2C103&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?resize=768%2C527&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?resize=1536%2C1053&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?w=936&ssl=1 936w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Polavision-ad.jpg?w=1404&ssl=1 1404w" sizes="(max-width: 468px) 100vw, 468px" /></a>But <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDkBx4fvY4w">Polavision</a> was a commercial disaster. Potential customers found it uncompelling and its $3,500 price (in today’s dollars) daunting. You could only record up to 2½ minutes of film. And believe it or not, with Polavision you couldn’t record sound with the movies. The 8mm film couldn’t be played back on existing 8mm projectors and could only be viewed on a special player with a 12” projection screen. There was no way to edit the film. It was a closed system. Worse, two years earlier Sony had introduced the first Betamax VCR and JVC had just introduced VHS recorders that could hold hours of video that could be edited. The video recorders looked like a better bet on the future. Polaroid discontinued Polavision two years later in 1979.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">For decades Land’s unerring instincts for instant products delighted customers. However, Polavision was the second misstep for Land. In 1972 at Land’s insistence, Polaroid had prematurely announced the SX-70 camera – another technical tour de force – before it could scale manufacturing. In 1975 the board helped Land “decide” to step down as president and chief operating officer to let other execs handle manufacturing and scale.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">But the biggest threat to Polaroid came in 1976, a year before the Polavision announcement, when Kodak entered Polaroid’s instant camera and film business with competitive products.<a href="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?ssl=1"><img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="30778" data-permalink="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/30/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-the-secret-life-of-polaroid-ceo-edwin-land-part-1/sx-70-ad-2/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?fit=927%2C1280&ssl=1" data-orig-size="927,1280" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1291306072","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="SX-70 ad" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?fit=217%2C300&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?fit=468%2C646&ssl=1" class="alignright wp-image-30778 size-medium" src="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?resize=217%2C300&ssl=1" alt="" width="217" height="300" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?resize=217%2C300&ssl=1 217w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?resize=742%2C1024&ssl=1 742w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?resize=109%2C150&ssl=1 109w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?resize=768%2C1060&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SX-70-ad.jpg?w=927&ssl=1 927w" sizes="(max-width: 217px) 100vw, 217px" /></a></p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">After the Polavision debacle, Land was sidelined by the board, which no longer had faith in his technical and market vision. Land gave up the title of chairman in 1980. He resigned his board seat in 1982, and in 1985, bitter he had been forced out of the company he founded, he sold all his remaining stock, cutting all ties with the company.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Steve Jobs considered Land one of his first heroes, calling him “a national treasure.” (Take a look at part of <a href="https://youtu.be/zbmq9R0dtVg?feature=shared&t=780">a 1970 talk by Land</a> eerily describing something that sounds like an iPhone.)</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Meanwhile, inside Polaroid Labs, work had begun on two new technologies Land had sponsored: inkjet printing and something called “filmless electronic photography.” Neither project got out the door because the new management was concerned about cannibalizing Polaroid’s film business. Instead they doubled down on selling and refining instant film. Polaroid’s first digital camera wouldn’t hit the market till 1996, by which time the battle had been lost.<strong> </strong></p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>What on earth do these two stories have to do with each other?<br /> </strong>It turns out that the person who had consulted on every one of the film-based photo reconnaissance satellites – Corona, Gambit, and Hexagon – was also the U.S. government’s most esteemed expert on imaging and spy satellites. He was the same person who championed replacing the film-based photo satellites with digital imaging. And was the visionary who pushed the CIA forward on KH-11/KEENAN. By 1977, this person knew more about the <em>application of</em> <em>digital</em> imaging then anyone on the planet.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Who was that?</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><em>It was Edwin Land, the Founder/Chairman of Polaroid – </em>the same guy that introduced the film-based Polavision.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">More in the next installment <a href="https://steveblank.com/2024/05/16/secret-history-when-kodak-went-to-war-with-polaroid/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>.</p> <p><strong>Read all the Secret History posts <a href="https://steveblank.com/secret-history/#Secret%20History%20Backstory" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a></strong></p> <hr /> <p><strong>Read all the Secret History posts <a href="https://steveblank.com/secret-history/#Secret%20History%20Backstory" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a></strong></p> <iframe loading="lazy" width="100%" height="91" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1825193580&width=false&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=false&show_comments=false&color=false&show_user=false&show_reposts=false"></iframe> <div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled"><div class="robots-nocontent sd-block sd-social sd-social-official sd-sharing"><h3 class="sd-title">Share this:</h3><div class="sd-content"><ul><li class="share-print"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="" class="share-print sd-button" href="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/30/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-the-secret-life-of-polaroid-ceo-edwin-land-part-1/" target="_blank" title="Click to print" ><span>Print</span></a></li><li class="share-email"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="" class="share-email sd-button" href="mailto:?subject=%5BShared%20Post%5D%20The%20Secret%20History%20of%20Polaroid%20CEO%20Edwin%20Land&body=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2F2024%2F04%2F30%2Fthe-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-the-secret-life-of-polaroid-ceo-edwin-land-part-1%2F&share=email" target="_blank" title="Click to email a link to a friend" data-email-share-error-title="Do you have email set up?" data-email-share-error-text="If you're having problems sharing via email, you might not have email set up for your browser. 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Reblog'><h3 class="sd-title">Like this:</h3><div class='likes-widget-placeholder post-likes-widget-placeholder' style='height: 55px;'><span class='button'><span>Like</span></span> <span class="loading">Loading...</span></div><span class='sd-text-color'></span><a class='sd-link-color'></a></div> <p class="postinfo"> Filed under: <a href="https://steveblank.com/category/corporate-govt-innovation/" rel="category tag">Corporate/Gov't Innovation</a>, <a href="https://steveblank.com/category/national-security/" rel="category tag">National Security</a>, <a href="https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-valley/" rel="category tag">Secret History of Silicon Valley</a> | <a href="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/30/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-the-secret-life-of-polaroid-ceo-edwin-land-part-1/#comments">6 Comments »</a> </p> </div> </div> <div class="post-30742 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-customer-development category-epiphany" id="post-30742"> <h2><a href="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/16/founders-need-to-be-ruthless-when-chasing-deals/" rel="bookmark">Founders Need to Be Ruthless When Chasing Deals</a></h2> <div class="postinfo"> Posted on <span class="postdate">April 16, 2024</span> by steve blank </div> <div class="entry"> <p style="font-weight: 400;">One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?”<a href="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?ssl=1"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="30745" data-permalink="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/16/founders-need-to-be-ruthless-when-chasing-deals/purchase-order/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?fit=1024%2C1024&ssl=1" data-orig-size="1024,1024" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="purchase order" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?fit=300%2C300&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?fit=468%2C468&ssl=1" class="alignright wp-image-30745" src="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?resize=112%2C112&ssl=1" alt="" width="112" height="112" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?resize=300%2C300&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?resize=768%2C768&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/purchase-order.jpg?w=936&ssl=1 936w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 112px) 100vw, 112px" /></a></p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering team.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">It all depends on one question every startup CEO needs to ask.</p> <hr /> <p style="font-weight: 400;">I was having coffee and pastries with Justin, an ex-student, listening to him to complain over the time he wasted with a potential customer. He was building a complex robotic system for factories. “We spent weeks integrating the sample data they gave us to build a functional prototype, and then after our demo they just ghosted us. I still don’t know what happened!”</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">After listening to how he got into that predicament, I realized it sounded exactly like the mistake I had made selling enterprise software.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Enthusiasm Versus Validation<br /> </strong>Finding product/market fit is the holy grail for startups. For me, it was a real rush when potential users in a large company loved our slideware and our minimum viable product (MVP). They were ecstatic about the time the product could save them and started pulling others into our demos. A few critical internal recommenders and technical evaluators gave our concept the thumbs up. Now we were in discussions with the potential buyers who had the corporate checkbook, and they were ready to have a “next step” conversation.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">This buyer wanted us to transform our slideware and MVP into a demonstration of utility with their actual data. This was going to require our small, overcommitted engineering team to turn the MVP into a serviceable prototype.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">When I heard a potential customer offer us their own internal customer data I was already imagining popping Champagne corks once we showed them our prototype. (For context, our products sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and lifetime value to each customer was potentially measured in millions.) I rallied our engineering team to work for the next few months to get the demo of the prototype ready. As much as we could, we integrated the customers’ users and technical evaluators into our prototype development process. Then came the meeting with the potential customer. And it went great. The users were in the room, the buyer asked lots of questions, everyone made some suggestions and then we all went home. And the follow up from the potential customer? Crickets…</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Even our user advocates stopped responding to emails.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>What did I do wrong?<br /> </strong>In my unbridled and very naive enthusiasm for impressing a potential customer, I made a rookie mistake –<em> I never asked the user champion or the potential buyer what were the steps for turning the demo into a purchase order</em>. I had made a ton of assumptions – all of them wrong. And most importantly I wasted the most precious things a startup has – engineering resources, time, and money.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">In hindsight I had no idea whether my potential customer was asking other companies to demo their product. I had no idea whether the buyer had a budget or even purchase authority. If they did, I had no idea of their timeline for a decision. I had no idea who were the other decision-makers in the company to integrate, deploy and scale the product. I didn’t even know what the success criteria for getting an order looked like. I didn’t check for warning signs of a deal that would go nowhere: whether the person requesting the demo was in a business unit or a tech evaluation/innovation group, whether they’d pay for a functional prototype they could use, etc. And for good measure, I never even considered asking the potential customer to pay for the demo and/or my costs.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">(My only excuse was that this was my first foray into enterprise sales.)</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Be Ruthless about the Opportunity Costs of Chasing Deals<br /> </strong>After that demoralizing experience I realized that every low probability demo got us further from success rather than closer. While a big company could afford to chase lots of deals I just had a small set of engineering resources. I became ruthless about the opportunity costs of chasing deals whose outcome I couldn’t predict.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">So we built rigor into our sales process.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">We built a sales road map of finding <u>first</u> product/market fit with the users and recommenders. However, we realized that there was a <u>second product/market fit</u> with the organization(s) that controlled the budget and the path to deployment and scale.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">For this second group of gatekeepers we came up with a cheap hack to validate that a demo wasn’t just a <a href="https://www.zendesk.com/blog/tire-kicker/">tire-kicking</a> exercise on their part. First, we asked them basic questions about the process: the success criteria, the decision timeline, did a budget exist, who had the purchase authority, what were the roles and approval processes of other organizations (IT, Compliance and Security, etc.) and what was the expected rate of scaling the product across their enterprise. (All the rookie questions I should have asked the first time around.)</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">That was just the starting point to decide if we wanted to invest our resources. We followed up our questions by <em>sending them a fully cancelable purchase order</em>. We listed all the features we had demoed that had gotten the users excited and threw in the features the technical evaluators had suggested. And we listed our price. In big letters the purchase order said, “FULLY CANCELABLE.” And then we sent it to the head of the group that asked us for the prototype.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">As you can imagine most of the time the response was – WTF?</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Figure Out Who’s A Serious Prospect<br /> </strong>That’s when the real learning started. It was more than OK with me if they said they weren’t ready to sign. Or they told me there were other groups who needed be involved. I was now learning things I never would have if I just showed up with a prototype. By asking the customer to sign a fully cancelable purchase order we excluded “least likely to close prospects”; those who weren’t ready to make a purchase decision, or those who already had a vendor selected but needed to go through “demo theater” to make the selection seem fair. But most importantly it started a conversation with serious prospects that informed us about the entire end-to-end approval process to get an order- who were the additional people who needed to say yes across the corporation – and what were their decision processes.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Our conversions of demos into orders went through the roof.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Finally, I was learning some of the basics of complex sales.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">—</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Justin stared at his uneaten pastry for a while and then looked up at me and said smiling, “I never knew you could do that. That’s given me a few ideas what we could do.” And just like that he was gone.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Lessons Learned</strong></p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>In complex sales there are <u>multiple</u> product/market fits – Users, Buyers, etc. — each with different criteria</li> <li>Don’t invest time and resources in building on-demand prototypes if you don’t know the path to a purchase order</li> <li>Use polite forcing functions, e.g. cancelable purchase orders, to discover who else needs to say “yes”</li> </ul> </blockquote> <iframe loading="lazy" width="100%" height="91" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1801963893&width=false&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=false&show_comments=false&color=false&show_user=false&show_reposts=false"></iframe> <div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled"><div class="robots-nocontent sd-block sd-social sd-social-official sd-sharing"><h3 class="sd-title">Share this:</h3><div class="sd-content"><ul><li class="share-print"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="" class="share-print sd-button" href="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/16/founders-need-to-be-ruthless-when-chasing-deals/" target="_blank" title="Click to print" ><span>Print</span></a></li><li class="share-email"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="" class="share-email sd-button" href="mailto:?subject=%5BShared%20Post%5D%20Founders%20Need%20to%20Be%20Ruthless%20When%20Chasing%20Deals&body=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2F2024%2F04%2F16%2Ffounders-need-to-be-ruthless-when-chasing-deals%2F&share=email" target="_blank" title="Click to email a link to a friend" data-email-share-error-title="Do you have email set up?" data-email-share-error-text="If you're having problems sharing via email, you might not have email set up for your browser. 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