Marketing Column

 

Eskimos Don't Want Your Ice

 

By Rob Vanderberg

 

Nothing happens until somebody sells something. - Arthur "Red" Motley

A sales "compliment" that has always bothered me is, "He/she can sell ice to Eskimos."

What is that supposed to mean? Does it mean that Eskimos aren't smart enough to notice that ice isn't exactly the thing they need more of? Or is it the old caricature of the snake oil salesman bamboozling people with outlandish claims (read: lies) of benefits beyond one's wildest expectations? Either way, relying on dumb customers or lies to close new business isn't the right way to reliably get your first sale.

Entrepreneurship has glamorous connotations of pioneering, leadership, innovation and, last but not least, making a boatload of money. But a customer buying your product/service is what makes your company a real business, and not just an incubator of ideas and technology.

Getting that first sale for a startup is tough for a variety of reasons. You don't have the brand recognition/awareness that established companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Intel, and Dell have. Years of investing in their brands by advertising and delivering quality products/services that the market wants creates strong awareness and recognition of who the companies are, what they do and why that is valuable enough to buy. Maybe even more importantly, new customers don't have existing customers to speak to about their positive experience using your product/service. Which reminds me, you do have a valuable product/service right?

A critical component of launching a new product/solution is a thorough understanding of the problem your offering will address and how that offering will improve the prospective customer's business. The best way to do this is to engage your prospective customer prior to beginning product development. If you personally have not come from the target industry as either a buyer or seller (or even if you have), please invest the time speaking to as many prospects as will listen and have them share their perspective with you. Gathering and distilling many prospect voices into a meaningful feedback sample is the biggest favor you can do your product development team and especially your sales team. Every organization needs a mission statement, and every sales rep needs to be able to walk into a meeting with a strong value proposition.

A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. The more specific your value proposition is, the better. Strong value propositions deliver tangible results like:

>> Increased revenues

>> Faster time to market

>> Decreased costs

>> Improved operational efficiency

>> Increased market share

>> Decreased employee turnover

>> Improved customer retention levels

 

Startups need to leverage the research phase of product development into the critical preparation phase of salesmanship. A comprehensive understanding of the customer's terminology, internal processes and political/decision-making landscape are all things that can be uncovered far more easily/quickly by making your future customers your partners during the product development phase. If you can turn even one of your research partner/customers into a paying client, you've just overcome one big obstacle to getting your second sale. Customer No. 2 won't bear the risk of being first. Happy selling!

 

Rob Vandenberg is VP of Sales/Marketing for Lingotek, the premier provider of language information technology. He was previously VP of Sales/Marketing for HarrisConnect to whom he sold LocalVoice, a software company he co-founded in 1998. He can be reached at rob@lingotek.com.

 

Launch - May/June 2007

 

 

For the full "digital magazine" version of May/June 2007, visit: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/growutah/launch0507/