Misunderstood "entrepreneurial sales", entrepreneurs themselves may be the best salespeople

Introduction: Paul Graham often said that early start of two things must be done early, first, product development, and second, customer service. Customer service means marketing, marketing is often a kind of awe, many people will be "I have never done sales, I do not know where to start" as the reason, but in fact, the entrepreneur in the sale itself has a lot of advantages.
Background: This course invites Clever founder Bosmeny to impart experience around sales and marketing issues. Clever is a start-up company that provides educational data services and was involved in YC entrepreneurship training in the summer of 2012. As an educational application platform, Clever's success is unmatched. Since Clever was launched 2.5 ago, the company has added thousands of school users to its platform.

I am the CEO of Clever, and this course is mainly about sales experience. When I was in college, I majored in math and statistics and thought I would go into the financial field after graduating and start my first job in a hedge fund, but eventually I was persuaded to join a friend's start-up company and work in sales. Before that, I knew nothing about sales and spent years studying sales there. Later, I founded Clever, hope to develop an educational application platform for the school, my company's other two joint founders are product-oriented professionals. Originally I thought my previous sales experience should not be much help, but the result is unexpectedly, the former sales experience has become to help clever rapid growth of a big boost.

Misunderstood "Entrepreneurial sales": The best salespeople are the founders themselves

First of all, it is to correctly deal with the marketing concept of start-up companies. Most people think that sales mainly rely on the secret, such as to have a good tongue, glib, attract attention to the ability of others, these are what they think some of the marketing must kill skills. I have talked to many entrepreneurs marketing, most of them will say: "Our focus is on products, committed to the development of excellent products, until the success of product development, and then hired professional marketing staff to carry out marketing activities planning." "In my opinion, the best marketers are the founders themselves." Paul Graham often says that there are two things that must be done early in the business, one is product development and the other is customer service. Customer service means marketing, marketing is often a kind of awe, many people will be "I have never done sales, I do not know where to start" as the reason, but in fact, the entrepreneur in the sale itself has a lot of advantages. For example, the enthusiasm of the entrepreneur for the product is one of the first, followed by the entrepreneur's industry knowledge and entrepreneurial process to solve the problem of the experience, these two are the real business success of the magic weapon.

In fact, clever start-up sales work mainly by my two small partners responsible, although they have never been engaged in related work, but marketing itself is not difficult, but to do wholeheartedly. When I started clever, I had to stop working on my job and study the solution as long as I met a critical problem for my company.

Three basic methods for getting initial users

A mention of sales, people will naturally think of sales funnel, this way of sale in different stages, step-by-step to attract consumers to buy. Usually the most common is sales expectations, the first phase to find potential customers, the second phase to further understand these potential customers, and then pick out a number of reliable customers and they signed an agreement, then start to have revenue. To facilitate understanding, the following on each stage and the stage of some of the relevant strategies to explain, these are proven by clever practice useful things, not very abstract, should be very helpful for entrepreneurship.

The process of anticipation is figuring out who will accept your product. According to the social technology diffusion model proposed by the American communication Everett Rogers, there is a bell-shaped curve, which includes five parts of brave adopters, early receivers, early adopters, late followers and stragglers. In particular, the quantification of this curve makes it easy for a start-up to understand that early sales are less difficult, and that entrepreneurs can clearly tell which part is a delicacy, or a potential customer. In this process, you may be frustrated by the fact that only 2.5% of the company is a potential customer, but I don't think so, even if only 2.5% of the companies accept or consider an offer, this expectation will be very helpful to the start-up company. You will realize that sales will become a digital game, even if you want to cover these 2.5% or get a little bit of early sales, send a lot of invitations and have to introduce your products to many people.

For example, in the early days of Clever's inception, we were all doing these things, contacting more than 400 companies in the first two months of YC and trying to get through their phones and introduce them to their products.

There are three main approaches to sales expectations and customer development in general. One is to set up the company's Web site, which I did not use, one is the exhibition, can attract a lot of people's attention, there is a well-known promotional mail. When it comes to the exhibition, perhaps you think of the CES exhibition or E3 exhibition, after all, these local product sales are more likely to happen. But in fact, early in the start-up, no matter what the exhibition should be as far as possible to participate, because those places have your potential customers. If you want to sell products to CIOs at other companies, the place they often gather is a hotel in Milwaukee, where you should go. Clever has been involved in a number of such exhibitions since its inception, usually prior to participating in the participants ' information and then sending invitations to each participant in advance and arranging time to meet them as much as possible. As a result, my partners and I have a full schedule for each exhibition, and through these efforts we have gained a lot of early customers.

A lot of people don't know how to write a sales email just now. In fact, this is not difficult, the key is to be concise, marketing emails to write clearly "who are you?", "What is your product?", "Are you very welcome to consult?", "If the customer wants to know tomorrow can talk about?" And so on, for different objects mail content can be different, as long as the right person, more than a number of promotional mail is always good for no harm.

This is the sales anticipation, and it's so important that you have to build the sales channel before you can get someone to accept your offer. Next time, if you get a sales call, don't hang up and listen patiently, the results may be unexpected. I've helped a lot of entrepreneurs, and many of the first salesmen will end up waiting for people who want to get to know their products, but in the past few months entrepreneurs have spent so much of their time developing products that they want to proudly introduce themselves to each other, including every feature of the product.

Good sellers are good at listening.

Do not know if you have found that good salespeople often say little, they spend only 30% of the time spent talking, the remaining 70% of the time they used to lay a phone, and asked the question is very strange, mostly "why do you want to answer my phone?", "If it were you, What are you going to do about this question we just talked about? "," What is your ideal solution? " Wait a minute. In fact, they are not simply talking, but doing their best to discover the needs of customers, trying to understand the customer's problems, this is the secret of sales. If one of you used uberconference, you know that every time you hang up, it sends you a feedback message that compares the amount of talk you have with others. It is not difficult to find a rule, good salespeople are often better at listening, and more to listen to understand the customer's real needs.

The only means for entrepreneurs to open the door to sales: repeatedly defeated and repeated war, perseverance

Sales is a long-term adherence to the work, when you send out of the promotional mail did not receive any response, you may wish to try again, the phone is not connected, may wish to leave a voice. It's not that simple to make a deal, it takes a lot of steps, it doesn't happen by chance, it's done after a different level of effort. For example, the first time to send a promotional message confiscated to the reply, and then the second return is not received a reply, the result of the third time someone want to buy your product. Such a result can not help but surprising, many times we may have conversations with customers on the phone, the results of the past has been sent to a dead end, did not receive any response, this time if you decide that the customer is not interested in your products and, then the business soon to nothing. To make the deal come to an end, you have to stick to it and not give it up too soon.

However, long-term adherence will be limited by time, after all, after the start-up time is your only resources, very valuable. You cannot continue to follow every customer who may buy your product, but rather to filter out the customers who are willing to buy it as soon as possible. In a way, customer rejection is a good thing because it helps you move forward and devote more energy to the customers who actually buy your product.

As a result, entrepreneurs have to be more than ordinary people's enduring power and ambition, but to use the right place.

When you call all the customers and follow up with some customers and finally the deal is reached, you are not the last one. The last step seems difficult. In fact, it is very simple, the two sides of the agreement on the content of repeated consultations, and finally reached agreement. If it is YC incubator startups, it is simpler because YC has its own standard protocol template. It is worth mentioning that YC will expose its standard trading templates, and everyone will be able to use YC's standard template, which is good news for startups who want to do their own sales.

"Sweet traps" in marketing promotion

In sales, people often go the wrong way, even the smart ones can make mistakes. This is because they have not determined their goals, the goal of the sale should be to reach a deal, to obtain the reference customers, the agreement after the entry into force to obtain revenue, if not to do so, their company is doomed. But surprisingly, before signing up, the smart people would double-check the terms of the contract until they were satisfied with the content of the contract before continuing the next step, and I've seen many entrepreneurs who are picky about the terms of the compensation. In fact, a direct contract to continue the next step will be better, too much debate on the content of contracts may sometimes be a trap, inadvertently may be too deep.

There is also a trap for entrepreneurs most often mistakenly entered. Usually if the customer says "I will use your product, but I only need one or two of them", or say "You know, I like your product very much, but it doesn't have the function I want, and we're not ready to buy" and so on reject rhetoric, Most people, especially those with ambitious ambitions, will want to improve their product features to meet the needs of their customers. But the problem is that it doesn't work, I have ever encountered such a situation, when the customer proposed the lack of a certain function, I will keep in mind, wait until the improvement of product features and then go back to find customers, 10 times there are nine times in the absence of some or a variety of features as a reason to refuse to use my products.

If the customer refuses to purchase on the grounds that the product lacks some function, then you respond to him and say "no problem, we can sign the agreement, the agreement will stipulate that the product will add this function", in which case you are in a passive state. If this is the case with clever, I will respond: "No problem, if most of the customers ask this question, we will consider improving the product." "Once a lot of customers are asking for it, product improvement is a must, and you don't have to worry about the improvement being one-off."

In addition, I strongly recommend that entrepreneurs avoid free trial of the trap. If the customer offers a free trial, this is reasonable, but the problem is that the initial capital is very scarce, you need to clear orders, users need to use your products, need customer commitment, and these are free trial can not bring you. You spend so much thought to do sales work, and finally let the customer free trial, which is actually a very scary thing, you think the sales work has finally progressed, but the result is that you have to give customers a free trial. By contrast, I handled the request for a free trial very well. When the customer asks for a free trial, we will tell the customer that clever does not offer a free trial, only accept a one-year agreement, but the first 30 or 60 days can be free trial, if the customer can not accept, the transaction will not be able to go on. This approach can not only achieve the purpose of the entrepreneur, but will not offend customers, so that customers feel uncomfortable. Therefore, when dealing with customers, a little bit of flexibility may result in the difference of the day.

All in all, if your product has done sales expectations, and many customers have talked, and talked about several of them, successfully developed a contract, but also solve the problem of free trial, then the successful completion of the first sale is not far. At the beginning of the business, you just have to look at the sales and other business to do the same thing, do not care about the size of the order. Even small customers have to strive for. But one thing you have to keep in mind is that once you've accumulated enough upfront customer resources, you're going to start thinking about what direction to extend. Christoph Janz has an article on sales that is well worth reading, and he mentions how he persuaded 1000 people to buy a product that sold for 1000 dollars. Although now you do not know how your product sales will be, but as long as you are willing to work hard, one day to reach the high-frequency sales cycle, this is the strength of the sales team. If you're only selling 1000 dollars a year, and you're flying around the world to meet customers, repeatedly demonstrating products and spending three months talking about contracts, it's extremely necessary to rethink. If the status quo without considering the scale of expansion, then the company will be able to be at the same level, may be forced to raise the price of products. In the final analysis, the sale is nothing but a reasonable price for the product, so that the transaction can be achieved smoothly.

The above is my experience in different companies engaged in sales, the content of the main focus on how to start from scratch, thick thin hair, these content for the entrepreneur is not very transparent, and my own experiences is one of the best teaching.