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Cart is ahead of the horse. Getting out of the office to talk to potential customers has NOTHING to do with selling. It has to do with learning about the sect
by goatherders 10y ago
Cart is ahead of the horse. Getting out of the office to talk to potential customers has NOTHING to do with selling. It has to do with learning about the sector you THINK you want to be working in. In other words, you need to accept that your foundational knowledge is largely made up of information that made its way to you by going through your filter of preconceived notions and biases. My advice to my sales team (and to you) is to stop thinking about your needs (selling something, validating your product, etc.) and start thinking about discovering their needs. You do this by asking questions and listening.
People love to talk about themselves and their businesses. You will get a ton of positive response by picking up the phone (or sending emails) saying "I'm new to this sector and I've been learning everything I can online and through books and trade magazines. But I know I would learn more by talking to someone working in the field. Could I stop by Monday morning for 15 minutes and learn about your business. I'm interested in finding out how you came to even be in this business, what parts are enjoyable, and what parts are challenging. Thank you for your consideration."
- quirkot 10y agoI agree largely with goatherders. Perhaps the question you should be asking is "how can you go listen to your customers"
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- andai 10y agoYes indeed! I would add on to this, instead of asking "how can I make $X?", ask "how can I provide $X of value to people?". You provide value by meeting people's needs. So it is very valuable to learn about those needs!
- goatherders 10y agoExactly. Everyone wants to buy but no one wants to be sold. Clients need a navigator on their journey to find a solution to their problems. They care about that. I tell my team the answer is never "no", its either "yes" or "not yet.". Most salespeople want only yes because they care about their needs. They become great salespeople when they realize their job is to serve their clients, not themselves. The OP should view his research the same way - stop thinking about your dreams of building something and start thinking about helping people. The sales will solve themselves if you get to that place in an authentic way.
- danpat 10y agoAbsolutely this. This is also one of the reasons why there seem to be many successful business where the founder "scratched an itch" - they built a business on something they knew a lot about.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vecter 10y agoI think the "build a product to scratch your own itch" is one of the worst pieces of advice for entrepreneurs, especially first time entrepreneurs. The reason is that most entrepreneurs end up building businesses to scratch an itch, not solve a real serious problem. Source: been there, done that.
- DGAP 10y agoFrom where I'm standing, both of your statements are true. It's important to build for a need (itch), but you should be sure it's something important that customers are willing to pay for.
- vecter 10y agoNot only that, but there should be a large addressable market.
- pbreit 10y ago100% disagree. Building something to scratch an itch is by far the easiest way to proceed initially. Many, many tools and services were built to scratch an itch.
- vecter 10y agoI can't tell you the number of times I've been pitched a bill splitting app. It's an itch, not a real problem. For all of the positive examples of companies that were "built to scratch an itch", there are thousands or tens of thousands of failures where the itch turned out to be a tiny market worth nothing, or no market at all.
- na85 10y agoWhat industry are you in that this is common, or even accepted? Nowhere I've worked would have answered yes to a site visit by a random salesperson.
- arbuge 10y agoI do not think the approach he described would lead to the conclusion he's an obvious salesperson.
- snowwrestler 10y agoIt's not sales, it's mentoring. A lot of established business folks like to do a bit of it.
- goatherders 10y agoI run the sales division of a nine figure web hosting company.
- conanbatt 10y agoThe fact that you work in a "9 figure web hosting company" might be a cue of why you can start a conversation, because of the brand of a company. Im sure Airbnb can get into a broker house any day to have a chat. Do you think it would be easy for you to walk into Uber in the next few days and someone tell you what you should be building that they would buy? Im honestly asking, i do b2b, please tell me some secrets :)
- goatherders 10y agoBefore that I ran my own semiconductor brokerage abd the approach was the sane. "what about your job sucks?" "it sucks when I plan a build for Monday and 49 chips show up but 1 doesn't arrive until Wednesday. So my customer is mad that we are behind schedule and I pay mt staff to stand around.". So I started selling complete kits. One vendor, One PO and one box of components that arrives on time with everything in it. Doesn't matter that I now have a known brand behind me. Customers want the same essential thing: That you care about their success. I still answer my cell in the middle of the night during an outage because clients want to know i care and feel their pain because my company is impacting their ability to be successful, to pay employees, to pay bills, to feed their families. The point is the same throughout and hits at my philosophy. I don't sell servers or hosting or support. We sell good days. We sell a developer wowing his or her boss. We sell an absence of worry that a client will be pulled away from time with their family to solve a web issue. We don't sell RAM and processors. We sell good days.
- smilebot 10y agoMy potential customers are college students. Do you have any ideas on how I can approach them? I'm working on a cheap textbook finder app.
- brett40324 10y agoAs in 'i misplaced my book and i want geo locate it', or 'I need to find this textbook to purchase'? You should skip the students and work toward relationships with campus bookstores, community colleges, trade schools perhaps, and show them why their students should be encouraged to use your app.