(In a totally different way)

growth.

Fighting.

experience

Challenge.

experience growth magazine Issue 7. Autumn 2015 Subscribe to eg

3 Start

tips to

from the

Sell by Cheryl Nankoo Executive Coach

Issue 7. Autumn 2015 experience growth magazine Subscribe to eg

A s a sales consultant, I’ve been approached by many organisa-tions who say - We

want to grow our business! We want to sell more! We want to be market leaders! When I ask simple questions like - what do your customers want? Do you understand your target market? What are your USPs? I’m often looked at blankly be-cause a lot of organisations are grown by practitioners that get so excited by their product that they haven’t thought about who will buy it or how they are going to sell it. I was once approached to sell a new technology product. I was given a product demo, a glossy brochure, pricing and a contact list so I could “hit the ground running”. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the target market were on the wrong platform for the product and the pricing had been plucked out of thin air. It took months before I was able to help them to be ready to really start cam-

paigning, by which time there was a competitive product on the market and their reputation had gone downhill! Entrepreneurs often get excited about the product they want to develop. They spend hours refining their proposition, designing their product and getting enthu-siastic about how great they will be at delivering the service that they forget one very important thing – what their customers really want and their sales ap-proach. Repeatedly, I’ve seen founders build some medi-ocre product, announce it to the world, find that users never show up, and not know what to do next. As well as not getting any us-ers, the start-up never gets the feedback it needs to improve the product. So, here are 3 tips to get sales right from the star…

1. Start with a small audience! Successful start-ups have always started by designing a solution for a small inter-ested audience. For exam-ple, I recently heard Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Ap-ple, talk about how he made a computer that his friends were really interested in and we all know how Facebook started out for Harvard University

students. In both instances, the products were designed with the customer in mind who were really interested in the solutions.

2. Be open to feedback! Engaging with customers and getting feedback on your product before an offi-cial launch can be hard and demoralizing. Your custom-ers may give some harsh feedback but you will have a product that they will buy at the end of it.

3. Understand customer pain points! When designing a product it is very important to visit potential customers to un-derstand their pain points. Your product can then be designed with the customer in mind and you will soon get people buying. You may not have the power to reach a big audience, so it’s more important to choose a very interested one. Your prod-uct can then be defined with their help. Sales and customers then become at the heart of your company rather than the product. So, although having a sales led approach may be more painful to begin with, it will make your product a lot easier to sell later, especially when you may choose to hire sales people.