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Samuel Pavin Show Notes Samuel Pavin is a Brand Strategist and Director of Samuel Pavin Group Ltd, specializing in business and marketing strategy. A Marketing Lead for ilab, and a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) for Huawei. Most passionate about I’m doing so many things these days…. Right now, I spread my time between a role of a marketing lead with Startup space and a Startup Accelerator in the university of Queensland Australia, which is kind of going back to the early days when I was working in France with startups within IBM. I’ve been working as a consultant for Brand Strategy between businesses and marketing, businesses and marketing. I work with startups as well as with events, conferences, and bigger companies. I’m also busy with social media, and social profiles, working with social media agencies as an ambassador of a few companies and I’m a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) for Huawei, the technology company. The greatest part is the interaction with so many people and the chance to learn so much about new technologies. It’s has been an amazing journey. This is what I’m literally craving… For a few years I was busier with consulting and a year ago I started to work more with startups again. I realized I missed that and that’s what I’m really passionate of doing. Samuel’s customers I have a different type of customers. I work with young, small technology startups, as well as other companies mainly from the world of events and conferences, working with them mainly on social media. I don’t limit myself to any industry or geography. I have customers from Europe, Asia, and Australia. Samuel’s best advice about approaching customers My vision and my best advice to startups is the same – The main missing link in their chain to success is the lack of understanding their customers. So many entrepreneurs work without really understand their customers. They should review their audience and understand where they stand, what they want, and what are they up to? It becomes very easy to meet and ask people around. And I don’t mean talking with your family and friends. Biggest failure with a customer I’m not sure if this is the most serious failure, but it was the best and biggest in learning from it. I worked as CMO in a startup and our audience was B2C and B2B, but we didn’t manage to get enough traction; the growth of the company was too slow, and the company failed. It was a big failure, but a great opportunity to study and understand that in a startup we should try and be most prepared. We weren’t good enough in the B2C side in reaching out to media and attracting our customers. And we missed working right with the B2B as well. I had a lot of personal learning. Biggest success due to the right customer approach I think the best success, especially in the way it was built, is the work I did with IBM, which was to work with startups in France. There was nothing and I was given three months to put together an initiative that would become IBM global entrepreneur project. Within three months, I basically built, launched, and then went on to lead the project for five years. We grew and kept growing and reached the goals, and it’s not only grown in numbers but was also growing in quality and in return of investment for IBM through the years. We built the brand and IBM went from being a big tech company that none of the startups really understood, to one of the preferred partners for startups. Recommendation of a tool for customer focus, marketing, or sales? I tend to stick to the basics and not the new shiny tools. The one tool that startups should use from their first day of approaching the market is a CRM (Customers Relation Management). I’m talking about collecting all the information about their customers from the first step. You need this information on board and ready from the beginning. If I have to recommend a specific tool I use and like: it’s available on the web and the...