IMPORTANT: This lecture is only for students assigned to the supplementary curriculum "Diploma Supplement on Innovation" offered by the Innovation Incubation Center (i²c)! For further information, please visit http://i2c.ec.tuwien.ac.at/home/are-you-a-student/how-to-apply/
***ECTS Breakdown***
3 ECTS = 75 hours
40 Lectures (prüfungsimmanent)
35 Group exercises and assignments
***Content description***
1. Marketing & Sales Lecture (lecturer: Dieter Rappold):
Any startup has the goal of becoming a successful business. While product development is a primary component of a successful startup, equally important is the ability of a startup to become self-sufficient with profitable customers. While many non-technical people think that a product is thrown together over the weekend, reality is that product development takes time, hypothesizing, testing, processes and some trial and error. Many non-business people think that throwing a marketing plan together and starting sales takes a weekend to develop. But the reality is that successful marketing and sales takes time, hypothesizing, testing, processes and some trial and error. How does a startup, especially one that does not have a marketing and sales expert, take the necessary steps to develop a successful marketing and sales strategy, objectives and tactic to lead to a profitability?
This course is designed to outline key areas of marketing and sales that startups should focus on from the day they say 'ya, let's do this!' till the day they are ready to launch.
Content Overview:
- Difference between marketing and sales
- Basics of Classical Marketing: 4 P’s, 6’Ps, Markets; Buyer Personas; Buying Process, Marketing & Sales Process
- B2B, B2C, B2G, B2B2C – distribution options
- Developing a marketing strategy, objectives and tactics
- Sales Process, Call Process
- Customer behavior: needs, wants and desires and decision making
- CRM – Customer Relationship Management
- Negotiations
- e-Marketing incl. Social Media Marketing, Growth Hacking and SEA/SEO
2. Branding Workshop (lecturer: Florian Hämmerle):
Let me tell you a story … a shortcut to powerful branding
Corporate Branding is said to be expensive and time consuming, its impact on a companies success simply not quantifiable. Furthermore brand strategies require fundamental know-how on marketing – a vital obstacle for startups, small or medium enterprises. But without an authentic and convincing communication even good ideas remain unseen, their sales under their potential. The Viennese branding studio Hämmerle & Luger wants to clear up misunderstandings. By focussing on tools that are intuitively applicable they help create and maintain strong brands that do not require any marketing expertise. The Workshop „Let me tell you a story … a shortcut to powerful branding“ delivers insights into their core methods. It shows easy and intuitive ways to focus a brands communication by finding an emotional and meaningful key message.
Content Overview:
- Brand communication
- Branding tools
- Key message
3. PR Workshop (lecturer: Bernhard Holzer):
How to find your best stories & getting heard out there
Many start-ups have or will have all kind of stories to tell, but their visibility could be better. Therefore we will try to give the start-ups not only basics, but also ideas, methods and inspiration how they can improve regarding press work.
Content Overview:
- Short but important theoretical approach to storytelling.
- How can I structure a story?
- Basics, hints and tricks how PR & storytelling can give your start-up a huge boost.
- Examples – how and why PR & stories work in real life for start-ups and what we can learn out of this.
4. Go-To-Market + Growth Hacking Workshop (lecturer: Alex Pinter):
One of the biggest levers companies have that can dramatically change the position in the market is developing a stellar go-to-market approach. Figuring out the right go-to-market approach is no trivial exercise – it separates the companies that will be successful and sustainable in the future from those that won’t. 9/10 start-ups fail, 66% drastically change their original plan before finding product-market fit (think: pivoting). It’s the only thing that matters. According to Marc Andreessen, start-ups are going to fail, if they lack “market”. In a great market - a market with lots of real potential customers - the market pulls “products” out of start-ups. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and a killer team, and it doesn’t matter. This lecture is all about figuring out the best go-to-market approach, nailing monetization, and hence, scaling this business model to grow fast. A start-up’s lifecycle as well as its addressable market, its respective sales learning curve and options for pricing brand new products will be discussed.
PART 1: GO-TO-MARKET APPROACH
The go-to-market plan is a subset of a start-up’s marketing plan and addresses how to execute on a specific growth strategy (think: scaling). Every company, regardless of size, should have a marketing plan in place. A go-to-market plan is only needed if you are looking to expand into new markets, sell new products (services), or do both.
PART 2: GROWTH HACKING
Growing a start-up comes with both opportunities and challenges. Growth hacking is more than just a buzzy phrase - it's an essential concept for businesses that want to grow quickly. It is the interfere of programming, data analysis and marketing. Business success has always depended on finding creative ways to reach as many customers as possible. Now, since the internet has made acquiring customers faster and easier than ever before, a huge range of new opportunities emerged.
Content Overview:
- Importance and components of a GTM strategy
- GTM framework (where to sell - who to sell - what to sell – how to sell)
- Best practices, and shared experiences (incl. founder’s misbeliefs)
- Growth hacking frameworks
- Best practices, and shared experiences
- Case studies and useful metrics
5. Monetization & Pricing Strategies for Start-ups Workshop (lecturer: Alex Pinter):
One of the biggest levers companies have that can dramatically influence a company’s well-being is developing a proper business and pricing model in order to generate profits. Figuring out the right models that suit the company best is prior for a business’ long-term existence – it sets the future successful companies apart from those that will poorly fail. As planning on making money is an essential part of every business, being aware of existing business models and how to encounter the struggle of choosing the best available possibility eases the startup phase for businesses. Monetization is the final piece of a systematic look at a business model. Profit-seeking companies need to choose a model that will successfully generate the highest possible revenue.
PART 1: MONETIZATION
For startups, it seems, figuring out how to implement monetization is a little like taking out the trash. It’s a chore that you don’t need to do immediately, but the longer you put it off, the worse everything starts to smell. It takes a while for a founder to fully develop and acquire stable sources of income, but sooner or later, a startup will need to pick a model to optimize its possible earnings.
PART 2: PRICING
Prices for products or services are inseparably connected to a company’s marketing, financial and human resources. Pricing decisions are crucial to the success of any business with tech-based businesses being no exception. Often when you are starting out- or even when you are an established business for that matter- it is often difficult to determine what price you are going to charge your customers for access and use of your products. Is there any word that confers some whisper of dark arts than pricing? Or any question that instills less confidence than, “How did you derive your pricing strategy?” Many times, start-ups replicate and tune competitors’ pricing strategies. If everyone else prices monthly per seat, then so should we…
Content Overview:
- How to build a $ 100 million business
- Market thumbprint (where to sell - who to sell - what to sell – how to sell)
- Choosing a business model
- Best practices + common mistakes founders make
- How to price a product/service
- Choosing a pricing strategy (incl. common mistakes founders make with pricing)
- Choosing a revenue model
- Types of revenue models
6. Sales Guest Lecture (lecturer: Alberto Nodale):
Content Overview:
- Sales E-Mails: Sales E-Mail Mentality, Follow up Philosophy, Writing good subject lines and how to get responses to your E-Mails, E-Mail Automation - a modern fad or powerful sales tool?, Sales-Email analysis and improvement
- Sales Calls
- The CRM-tool Close.io
- Q&As
***Lecturers***
Dieter Rappold is the founder and CEO of Speedinvest Pirates, the growth marketing unit of Speedinvest and partner for more than 80 European Startups. He founded one of the most successful Digital Agencies in Austria with knallgrau (later Virtual Identity) in 2001 and scaled it to 50 employees as part of an independent agency with more than 180 employees and 21 million euro in annual revenue. Thus he has over 17 years of experience working with large Brands like Coca-Cola, Heineken, BMW, Opel, Telefonica, HVB and others on international Web Projects and digital strategies. He is an accomplished speaker with more than 100 keynotes, lectures and interviews on digital marketing, making him an expert on the field.
Alex Pinter is co-founder of Trayn, a platform for strength and conditioning coaches to create fully individualized training programs for athletes faster and easier. It was officially launched in 2014 with selected professional sports teams in the US and Canada. Prior to that, he was a strategy consultant at Accenture for many years and worked with numerous international clients across Europe (main industry focus: consumer goods, retail, high-tech, and chemicals).
Alberto Nodale founded his first startup at 22 and won multiple awards in Europe. Later, Alberto made his way into working with a rapidly growing Y-Combinator company. At Close.io he now helps sales people all over the world increase their sales as a Sales Executive. By learning from the best in Silicon Valley, he has closed deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and now also passes on his knowledge as a speaker and coach.
Florian Hämmerle studied Intermedia Design in Vorarlberg, worked as a marketer, illustrator and brand designer for various agencies in Vorarlberg, Tirol and Vienna. Tired of constraining job definitions he turned his versatility into business and founded Hämmerle & Luger together with the graphic designer Vinzenz Luger. The branding studio works with agile teams, its size adapts to the challenge given and is driven by a simple cause: to make branding accessible to everyone.
Bernhard Holzer is a PR professional and one of the most well-known communications experts in the Austrian and German Startup scene. He worked in a leading communications position at Germanys biggest Startup-factory Rocket Internet in Berlin. Before that he founded zoomsquare, Austrias Startup oft the year 2013. He also set up the StartupPR and Storytelling company woodspr, focusing on Austria, Germany and Switzerland (DACH-region) as well as international Tech media.
The student has to be enrolled for at least one of the studies listed below
