FREE Service for All Current Members!
TAO’s Executives in Residence guide members seeking advice, insights, or mentorship to help their business prosper. EIRs provide a deep bench of knowledge that members can engage and utilize. Our EIRs have ample experience in running companies, building startups and, investing in businesses. They continue to share experiences as a way to give back to the Oregon technology community.
What can EIRs help with?
- Define product offerings and market fit with competitive differentiation.
- Develop sales team revenue strategies that help address performance challenges, integration issues, prospecting, and closing deals with customers, investors, and partners.
- Learn optimal leadership practices through hybrid work issues of decentralized teams by geography, cultural differences, and work/life balance.
- Communicate strategies that address goals while making significant changes to meet growth projections to increasing product acceptance, exposure, and sales footprint.
- Understand what competitive differentiation can do to help enhance your product innovation, widen marketplace superiority and elevate brand prowess.
- Utilize best practices on how to validate an initial idea, build a preliminary business plan to support it, and develop and MVP to test in market.
- Analyze financials, spot short and long-term operational gaps, and recommend efficiency measures to adjust company strategy, sales, and product(s).
- Evaluate/Coach Sales leadership teams to help with performance challenges, integration issues, prospecting and closing deals—existing and/or new customers.
EIRs Have Lent Their Expertise to Managerial Levels:
- CEOs who are looking for leadership coaching or considering major changes in their business model.
- CTOs who need outside ideas on application upgrades, operational efficiencies and employee-facing technologies.
- CPOs/Engineering Leaders trying to analyze various product designs/UX interfaces, adding new features/functions to existing products, or gaining insights for product development.
- CMOs who are faced with integration challenges between Marketing, Sales and Inside Reps and how to create a best-case scenario roadmap for all parties involved.
- CROs who reach out for counsel on the latest sales techniques, and best practices for Inside Sales training, risk/reward options, funnel filling, and cold to warm call wins.
- Startup Founders that are rapidly accelerating their product development all the while trying to decipher customer acceptance and market viability.
- Individuals who have added management responsibilities, new team members and/or a new boss—how to negotiate balanced outcomes and increased growth.
Notable Quotes from TAO Members that have benefitted:
Merify:
“The EIR group truly gave us invaluable insights about honing our investor
pitch, thinking through our strategic sales approach and helping navigate a
crowded competitive landscape.”
—Jarod Courtney, Co-founder/Head of Growth and Missy Capone, Co-
founder/Head of Insights, PR Brand Strategy of Merify
OuterSpatial:
“EIRs were instrumental in laying out options for expanding our direct sales
strategy, giving us a deeper understanding of our operational issues.
They helped us find ways to improve our go-to-market, pricing, and,
customer onboarding. In addition, the EIRs embedded themselves into our
team in a way that went well beyond the typical advisor relationship.”
—Jereme Monteau, CTO of OuterSpatial
Cinder:
“Over the last two years, we have been fortunate enough to work with both
Greg and Jackie through the EIR program. They’ve been extremely helpful
in coaching individually and as team leaders at Cinder. They’re knowledge,
networks, and support are invaluable and a wonderful resource that TAO
provides to members! Their collective insights and perspectives on
personal growth, team building, sales strategy and integration across
different departments has been extremely valuable.”
—Katy Byrtus, Workforce Solutions Partner and Réland Logan, Director of
Connection + Growth of Cinder
If you’re a TAO member company, we’d be happy to talk with you about
your challenges and where our EIR group can assist. Why not try our free
member benefit today with our TAO EIRs—you’ll never know how much it
may impact your business, too!
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This guest blog was written by Greg Jorgensen, a consultant/board
advisor for technology companies and early-to-later stage startups. He’s
also a TAO Executive in Residence.
