From Products To People
My name is Sas Ponnapalli. I’m currently the owner of the Beam Health Group, where we get medical practices set up with telemedicine technology. My career started out as an engineer, from working with hardware systems and designing biotech hardware to software, then to executive technical management to finally an entrepreneur. The most significant challenge I’ve had to date was going from a product-driven mindset to a people-driven mentality. What I mean by this is that as a hacker, your mind gets used to solving problems as quickly as you can. You’re always thinking about shipping products, and to overdeliver, you try to get things done as fast as possible. One of the biggest things I’ve learned throughout this journey is that being good at sales involves an entirely different mindset.
The Wolf of Wall Street is one of my all-time favorite movies. I loved the testosterone-infused aggression that fueled the guerrilla sales tactics depicted in the film. I always figured sales was supposed to be like that, where to do it efficiently, you needed to be quick on the phone, and get people to buy as fast as possible or someone else will. I reasoned that to overdeliver on sales, you need to widen your funnel, and eventually the numbers will work out.
What I’m learning while at Beam is that this isn’t the case. To sell to the modern consumer, you need to be able to completely understand their perspective. The chance of you selling a surfboard to someone who doesn’t surf is rather small, no matter how good your board is. Similarly, aggressively spamming customers who haven’t bought into your vision leads to lower conversion rates and a general sense of frustration amongst founders. Your potential customers perceive your brand worse than Comcast, and you start questioning whether what your building is even worth it.
I’ve found some success recently by taking a step back, focusing more on people, rather than products. It’s about addition by subtraction. I’m not trying to say entrepreneurship doesn’t involve long and hard work; it does. It’s that work isn’t always quantifiable. In engineering, it’s all about shipping products, and every day, you get measurably closer to your end goal. However, sales are more about understanding people, before selling to them. This means you need to take that first step in understanding as many people as possible to find those that are interested in your product. Only then are you making faithful customers, who will remain loyal as you scale. As a small startup, being genuine is the greatest competitive value you have.