B2B Sales: Choosing your First Customer
Are you ready to sell your product? Are you sure about your Product-Market fit? What to do next?
There are thousands of articles talking about how to disrupt the market, achieve high growth week over week, content marketing, and growth hacking.
How about the traditional enterprise B2B products? I know enterprise customers are not attractive with their lengthy sales cycles, personal connections, and complex procurement processes but some of us are still making a living by selling products to these customers.
Targeting all is targeting none
The word targeting itself means to choose a subset and ignore the rest. Yet I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a decision maker guilty of targeting all buyer’s segments driven by the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
I know you already defined your targeted segments while developing the product and I’m not asking you to redefine them. You are just choosing the first group of clients you will target to be able to decide who will be your first buyer/buyers.
You have limited resources
Whether you like it or not, no matter how much energy you have, how motivated the team is, your abilities are limited.
To execute a successful sales campaign, you will have to dedicate a lot of your time and effort to it. Therefore, you can’t expect to execute multiple concurrent campaigns. The best approach is to devote all your available time, assuming you have other tasks related to product management, to one campaign to achieve maximum result.
Start with the low-hanging fruit
You want to choose buyers where you have the strongest network of connections, to make it easier to reach for the right contacts. Don’t try to make it harder on yourself by choosing a tough segment to concur at the beginning. Although I’m a big fan of Brain Tracy’s approach to eat the frog, which means to start with the toughest task, I would recommend taking it easy at the beginning and start with the low hanging fruits, those easy deals where you already have an insider or an influencer that will help you close the deal, give you advantageous insights, or at least connect you with the right decision maker.
I use the below diagram to classify my buyers
In the above Diagram, I classified the buyers to four groups based on influence and sales cost. The stronger the influence, the higher the probability to close the deal. At the same time, the low sales cost will help you chase more leads at the same time and gain a higher profit.
Therefore, you should start with the green box, the buyers group that is low in sales cost but where you have the strongest influence.
The main target of your business development strategy is to move all your other buyers’ groups into this sweet spot, by lowering your sales cost, and strengthening your influence. Anyways, this is another topic that I wish to discuss with you in a separate post. The important part here is you should start with the green box.
I know that this is not the most glamorous approach but I’m not here to dazzle you with sparkling, yet unrealistic approaches. When it comes to sales, especially in B2B sales, I like to be down to earth as much as I can. Remember this is a new product and you are up against technology giants who have strong connections with your buyer and will spare no effort to kill your deal before it starts.
Good luck with your first deal :-)
