Sales and Marketing When You are Starting Your Business
Investing the time on simple things is what you need to do. You are not working complex sales process and metrics... for a while.
Early stage founders are getting a lot of advice today from Sales and Marketing professionals that have grown a great career in selling software. They have lingo, processes, some have capital to invest, and communities of people to refine their practice. What they rarely do have is the experience creating a process from scratch.
Founders often look to those professionals for guidance on how to shortcut the building of reproducible business models. But it doesn’t work.
That experience of creating doesn’t seem important – where you need to go with the sales process is what these experienced people know. However, the experience often will not appreciate the purpose of sales early in a company and how that purpose isn’t the exact same for every early stage company.
Companies need users and customers. The process is about understanding who they are and their motivation to "invest" in changing their behaviour. Founders (almost always the CEO) must do this and what they need to do is relatively simple.
You need to build a really simple sales pipeline.
Over time you can add complexity but at the start you are trying to extract as much learning from each and every person that enters your sales process. What does simple look like?
Something to collect contact information of someone that is interested in your product or having them sign up and use it on their own.
Contacting that person and having a conversation with them. Who are they and why do they care?
Did they buy your product? Why or why not?
As you keep going through this process you, the founder, develops a deeper understanding of who is interested in your product and why. You can apply that knowledge to help you get more people trying out your product. As your record stuff like where did they come from and why did they decide to use the product, you start to flesh out a sales process. It starts to look like (new stuff in bold):
Social media posts and landing pages with different messages
Something to collect contact information of someone that is interested in your product or having them sign up and use it on their own.
Email campaign to drive interest to those that have signed up
Contacting that person and having a conversation with them. Who are they and why do they care?
Did they buy your product? Why or why not?
Are they still using your product and how often?
From there it keeps going and as the volume of calls increases, you start to see patterns. David Skok’s SaaS posts are very relevant and fundamental in understanding where you need to go. At the start you are trying to get in the head of your customers. Even if you think you are the customer you will likely find other people think different or buying decisions are not what you anticipated.
The purpose of the process of developing a sales pipeline from scratch is to develop a compelling story of why you and why now for this product. The story is much better when you have customers and conversations to enrich it and it is probably a lot different than you initially thought.
Do not try to shortcut developing repeatable processes by using sales and marketing professionals.
At what point does the professional sales and marketing processes kick in? Not always but it is likely around the time the CEO is overwhelmed… and that is a lot further out than most early stage founders think. This might feel messy at the start but that is just how things are. A clean process comes from practice, not because you designed the perfect process.