7 Fatal mistakes in the start-up marketing process

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Beijing Time September 4 News, according to foreign media reports, Steli is the sales and service company Elasticsales co-founder and chief evangelist, but also a number of start-ups and business people sales advisers, the following is his start-up marketing business as the theme of an article.

7 Fatal mistakes in the start-up marketing process (Tencent technology map)

Elasticsales has been fortunate enough to serve many of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley to help them develop and operate their marketing campaigns. Every week, we have discussions with a number of startups to see what challenges these sales teams face. In many service processes, we have accumulated some experience, but also found a lot of problems, many young startups in marketing activities are easy to make the same mistake, and these errors could have been avoided.

The following list of 7 fatal mistakes in the start-up marketing process is expected to provide some reference advice for start-up marketing campaigns.

1. Not understanding your customers. A lot of startups are going to profile the needs of their users. Although your product or service is targeted at a specific market, you need to understand that each of your customers faces challenges that are different. Many founders will do some research before product marketing, but will not ask questions about the user's specific needs and difficulties. They are just gushing about their product advantages and how many useful features they have. Although the founder of his creative passion is understandable, but can not ignore the user's understanding.

2. Product selling points do not meet the needs of target customers. Most startups will elaborate on the additional features of their products, but will not offer solutions to the problems customers really need to solve. To do this, as a start-up, you have to understand the needs of customers by asking. To get a potential customer, your product has at least two or three features that make the user feel useful, rather than the 100 features you take for granted for the product.

3. The founder has not "intimate contact" with the customer, this will lose many opportunities. Most start-up founders don't sell their products in person, and they don't come to the scene to contact customers. The experience was crucial to startups, and they lost it in vain. First, the founders lost the opportunity to direct contact with their earliest customers and develop long-term customer relationships. Second, they lose the opportunity to receive direct feedback from their customers, which generally provides the best advice for improving the company's products and services.

4. Start-up companies have not maintained continuous follow-up. A lot of start-up marketing activities are no longer followed up, or after one or two follow-up. Start-up founders may worry too much about sales, fearing that taking too much of their customers ' time will make them dislike each other. If you lose potential customers because of your follow-up, they will not belong to you sooner or later. It's not that you call your clients frequently until you get bored with them, but even if you don't follow up on a potential customer, you won't have a new customer. Therefore, you should keep track of potential customers until they give you a clear answer.

5. Start-up companies have optimized the user interface/user experience, but neglected the sales funnel. Most companies do not even optimize the sales funnel. Today, startups can get a huge amount of data, but they don't track the basic metrics of the sales funnel, such as phone/email, effective contacts, potential customers, the transaction/transaction value reached, and the timing of the deal.

6. Price positioning is unreasonable. The founders usually think that the lower the price the better the service. Of course, low price tags will reduce the entry barriers to customers, but also dilute the value of your products. If your email or website plugin can provide a lot of value to your customers, you can also charge a monthly subscription fee like Netflix. When your product gains a lot of user attraction through viral diffusion, you need to consider your own price positioning to maintain your business development. Your products provide value to customers and they need to pay for them. You need to sell the value of the product, not the price tag to attract customers.

7. The founder does not ask about product marketing business. Sometimes you just have to take a quick look at the marketing business to get the whole process to go in your direction. After a series of phone calls, product models, and later follow-up, some founders were still reluctant to ask their customers for fear of losing their business. If you spend a lot of time nurturing a customer relationship, why not contact your client directly and build a friendly relationship with your customers?

Some entrepreneurs set up their own companies because of their love of art, fashion or technology. A successful enterprise also needs to be a qualified sales staff, can sell their products or services, so as to achieve their own ideas. All of the above 7 fatal mistakes made in the start-up marketing process are traceable. Therefore, once the start-up sales team realizes that they have made these mistakes, they should correct them immediately and you are not far away from success.