Give buyers a clear path to getting value

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:02:48

   the time with the customers itself? I think there are two things that stand out as, and then there's like a laundry list below it, right? But this is maybe the like broader generic advice that I would have to certainly founders that are starting to sell their product and don't have a lot of go-to-market experience that I think have maybe more impact than any other, you know, below these two. The first is I would be fairly prescriptive about how to effectively buy your product. Because if you aren't educating the buyer on how to onboard, receive value and ultimately buy your product, the customer like doesn't know how to buy your product. And so I would come in with like a bit of a combination of like agenda and opinion on here is the like happy path from where we sit today. And if this resonates

2. 1:03:41

   with you and is something that you think you can receive value around to like where we are, when you are fully onboarded and receiving value from the product, and we can just sort of roadmap together here, the different steps. Now, like Mr. Customer, is there anything that I have left out of this process that is important to you? that we should incorporate, whether it's like security checks that you may need to go through or procurement that we want to introduce or legal review that I haven't included.

3. 1:04:08

   But we sort of start with, and this is very abstract, we sort of start with like, we, you know, meeting two, we come with like our prebuilt custom environment to show you exactly what it would look like on our product. If that resonates with you, we sit, we put you in like a two week free trial of the product during that trial. Like here are the outcomes that we're going to be driving towards. If we deliver on these outcomes, we like onboard the rest of the team. Let's like schedule meetings that sort of align to these different steps. And so then you and the customer aren't flying blind. I think the thing that happens more often than anything when I meet with founders, it's sort of like, we have so many of these opportunities that are in like purgatory where it's like we pitched them they said they liked it we ended the call i've followed

4. 1:04:57

   up three times they aren't really responding and if they do respond it's like give me a week and i'll get back to you a week passes they don't get back to me and it's because we haven't like aligned on the like happy path to receiving value from the product that we're selling so i'll pause there that's like one of the two things yeah yeah what's the other the the second thing is like um a little bit of an urgency driver, where if you can create some form of FOMO, for lack of a better word, I think that much of sales is psychology. And so for many customers, what I'm about to articulate is true. We certainly never want to say anything that is untrue or misleading. But if we have, we're in the month of July, if we have a goal to onboard three customers to pilots in the month of July, what we articulate to a customer as part of the maybe like first call when we are receiving

5. 1:05:53

   feedback, like, yeah, this is actually really cool. I'd love to try it. What we say is something like, we are onboarding three customers into our pilot program this month. Two of those spots are already spoken for. There is much interest in the third spot. If you would like to move forward with a pilot, if you could let me know, that would be like really appreciated on my end. But also like, Like, I can't guarantee the spot if you don't speak for it today.

6. 1:06:18

   Yeah. And I think that's true because you can only onboard so many at this stage. That's exactly right. But it does sort of force a decision and potentially drive some urgency. There is like a psychological aspect to this where it's like, oh, gosh, two two thirds of the spots are already spoken for.