MAP Accelerator Program — Week 8
As spring knocks on our door, Solstice AI is warming up as well and the pace of everything accelerates. This week was all about product and sales — kinda a neat follow-up from last week’s pricing session and cold emails.
Product
The main concern with product design and development is to create something that can be scaled up and the more a customer uses it, the more value it creates for them. A lot of products on the market don’t offer that, except beer maybe. But I’m sure everyone can think of a few products that fall into that category. The advantage of such a flywheel effect in a product is that (1) the product becomes stickier (less churn rate) and (2) existing users will basically do the marketing for you. These days this might happen less often, but try to remember when you first discovered Spotify (or any similar product). How many people you told about how great it is as you used it more and more every day.
In order to achieve this, you of course need to understand customer needs, but also know how you product is positioned in the market. Ideally you also have some sort of moat that makes it hard to replicate your product — this doesn’t apply to Spotify or beer though.
Sales
Once you have a great product or service, you need to sell it. Depending on your business model, this process can vary, but for enterprise or B2B the recommendation is to create a structure for your sales process, called a sales pipeline. This can start with somewhere around 15–20 steps but can later be refined to eliminate steps as you learn more about how to be efficient. Each step adds friction and has a clearly identified “close” condition, which is the prerequisite for the next step. While executing these steps, make sure to stay on target. While sometimes you need to adapt to a specific customer, any deviation can delay progress and ultimately derail the sales process altogether.
These steps you create can be loosely categorised in 5 different phases: (1) prospecting, (2) building rapport with the customer, (3) presentation of your product, (4) handle objections and questions and (5) closing the deal.
But this is just the macro-perspective on your sales process. We further got a lot of useful tips about how to practically apply this macro structure and speed up the process:
- Find the right role within the customer’s organisational structure to approach (corporate reconnaissance). A multi-prong approach is also possible, but needs to be done carefully and you need to take care that you (1) have a consistent message and (2) don’t look like you’re going behind someone’s back.
- All the lessons learned from the cold-email session last week still apply when contacting potential customers via LinkedIn or email: (1) personalise your message, (2) keep it brief and concise, (3) follow up with more context and (4) if they keep ignoring you, finish with a break-up email putting the ball into their corner.
- When suggesting a meeting, make sure to suggest it 3–4 days in advance and provide small time slots. The second part is more important than it seems, as it suggests that you are busy and therefore can make you look more exclusive to talk to. Compare that to a somewhat “desperate” message saying “I’m free Monday afternoon and Wednesday to Friday all-day”.
- Identify the path of least resistance to establish your credibility, like a pilot project — and importantly: define success criteria of the pilot in advance. Otherwise, with hindsight on their mind, the customer might bail on your sales pipeline once the pilot is completed and they’ve got the insights they needed out of it.
- Depending on what “tier” you talk to in a company, your messaging has to adapt slightly. A lower tier analyst needs to be asked how your product can make their life easier, whereas a higher tier C-suite or VP needs to be shown how your product/service can improve the bottom line of their company.
Enterprise Customers
Another session this week was a bit across the board and my main takeaway was about enterprise customers. They are different than your regular subscribers or retail customers (depending on your business). My 3 main takeaways were:
- Enterprise support needs to be instant. If there’s a major problem, ensure that the customer has direct access to the top — the CTO or CEO should respond within a few hours. Enterprise customers kinda expect this level of royalty treatment.
- Lawyers might be a big hurdle, especially when it comes to negotiating minor details. Take this with a grain of salt, but if a big enterprise customer wants to get you, they usually can. Even if it is just by exhausting you with lawsuits to a point where you cannot operate your business anymore. The solution to that: smother your customer with love, so they never have a reason to come after you. But be careful that you are not too exposed on this front — otherwise, even if they’re happy with you — they might still decide to go for a hostile takeover of your company.
- Large companies no longer only look after what their customers want. Think Google. They mainly are focused on what they want to support in the future, which obviously limits their product/service portfolio and opens the door for disruptive startups.
