How to sell your product
There are two core skills you need to build a start-up: development and sales. The first one is obvious — you need to be able to actually build the product you’re bringing to market. Yes, you can outsource this, yes you can hire out, but if you’re truly passionate about the solution and have the vision, being able to build it gives you a level of control and intimacy with the product that outsourcing doesn't allow. As a close friend recently said, “It’s as if a part of me is in the product.”
The second one is not always obvious. Sales and marketing is the giant elephant in the early-stage-startup-room, where the business plan looks like this:
- Build the product
- Launch the product
- ???
- Profit
No one ever sets out trying to avoid that third step, but all of us have secretly fantasized that if we could just build that perfect product, put up an order page, and launch on HN that overnight the business will take off, followed by VC funding and champagne. It’s not hard to see why. Technically talented people look at the first two steps and can conceptually envision how they’d get to the product build. Even ‘business’ people can get their heads around the build aspect: find someone who can do it or outsource the work to a development firm. But selling? It’s hard to think about.
You need to think about how you’re going to sell
Recently, I had a conversation with a close friend at a well respected hedge fund who had startup idea around a two-sided marketplace that he wanted to start with his coworker. Their initial plan was to spend $10,000-15,000 for a development shop to put together a prototype of the website and see if it took off. Neither of them were going to be full time or even really part time (both worked 70+ hour weeks), unless the idea really took off. I asked him how they were planning to get both merchants and customers:
“We’ll just e-mail a few businesses, let them try it for free. I think we can convince at least 10-15 businesses to sign up right away.”
I pushed on this a bit. What is the incentive for the businesses to respond to your e-mail? How could you convince them to interact with the site if there are no customers? How many businesses would you have to reach out to through e-mail to close on one active business? My friend couldn't produce a satisfying answer, and he knew it too. He is arguably one of the most intelligent people that I know, but he still struggled with ‘How to sell’.
Get better at it or make it easier
So how do you fill in step 3 and sell your product? There’s the hard way: if you have the time and/or resources, learn to sell and practice selling all the time. Take in Alec Baldwin’s advice from ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’: Always Be Closing.
Sell, sell and sell again. Practice until you no longer fear the rejection, and sell until you can convince your customers that they need your product. There is something to be said about the hard way — great salespeople, the ones that can sell anything, are invaluable to most organizations. If you find one that you enjoy working with, hold on and try to never let go. If you become one, congratulations — you've developed one of the toughest skills in life, not just in startups.
However, if you’re like me and enjoy the product and problem-solving side of entrepreneurship more than selling, but don’t have the resources or willingness to hire a salesperson, the best thing you can do to help sell your product is the most obvious — build something your customers want. It comes back to the two core skills: building and selling. The better you are at product, the less skilled you need to be at selling. Sales will never magically appear, but when you've hit the sweet spot on product-market fit, you’ll start noticing that sales calls no longer sounds like sales calls — they’ll sound like brainstorming sessions.
I had a great example of this today on the phone with a commissioner of an NYC agency. Halfway through explaining what my product did, she stopped me and started talking excitedly about all of the major projects they were working on, and how our product could be used in each one. Before I knew it, she asked me “How much does it cost?” (which I had not been mentally prepared for, but she didn't even flinch at the price tag). Our conversation never actually got to part where I had to sell, because as it turned out, she had been waiting for my call for a long time. At that point, it didn't matter that I wasn't the best salesperson in the world — all I had to be was the person delivering the message and answer questions, she had already sold herself.
If you take away just one thing from this post, it should be to reflect on your startup’s current capabilities and think about how you’re going to sell. Do you have a natural advantage building or selling? Are you going to have to become a seasoned salesperson or just spend more time on your product? Sure no startup is alike, and this advice isn't going to pan out exactly for everyone — some mobile apps are so inherently viral that they’ll never need to sell outside of a few Techcrunch articles, and some customers are so challenging to penetrate that deploying heavy sales teams may be the only way to succeed — but if you’re a middle-of-the-bell-curve startup, doing this will prepare you well for the road ahead.
If you enjoyed this read, I’d love for you to ‘Recommend’ this piece so that others can enjoy it as well. If you have advice to share about selling like a boss or startups in general, tweet me at @andrewjiang.
