Tag Archives: Persistence

What are the Three Clarities that Every Start-up Needs? Three Points

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Situation: Starting a new venture is a daunting task. You must determine market need and land your first few key customers on a tight timeline and budget. What are the most important areas of focus for the start-up CEO? What are the three clarities that every start-up needs?

  • The answer lies in the Three Clarities.
  • Clarity #1 – Deep Knowledge of Customer Pain Points. Your eventual success is not about the technology – it’s your ability to understand and address the needs of your customer. Research and talk to potential customers. Ask them about their pain and problems. What makes their job or lives difficult? Learning these facts takes time, patience, persistent questioning, and open listening both for what they are saying and what they are not saying. Once you have a clear idea about their need and can succinctly define it, you must determine whether your capabilities can address the customer’s need. Avoid talking about your product or solution until you clearly understand the customer’s need.
  • Clarity #2 – Understanding the Purchasing Behavior. Once you have identified your target customer, their need and your ability to meet that need, you must understand their current purchase behavior. Have they ever bought from a startup before? What happened when they did? Are they happy or unsatisfied? Where are the gaps in satisfaction? Particularly for a start-up without established credibility, it is critical to identify those purchasers who will take the risk to buy from a new company. From what you find, determine how you will frame a personal relationship with the likely buyer – how you will frame both your solution and the buying experience. Build a psychographic of the buyer so that you can quickly determine likely customer candidates.
  • Clarity #3 – Understanding the Decision-Maker’s Sense of Urgency. Who makes the purchase decision? In B2B sales is it the CEO or someone further down the organizational chart? Who approves the purchase budget? Why now? Do they have their ”hair on fire” so a decision must be made now? The essential question is: what are the alternatives to not having your solution?

Thanks to Naeem Xafar of Blitzerrmobile.com for his contribution to this article.

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What are Attributes of a Highly Effective Sales Force? Three Points

Situation: A CEO wants to improve the effectiveness of her sales team. As CEO of a young company she faces a choice between using contract versus direct sales reps. She seeks the advice of other CEOs as to what has worked most effectively with their sales approaches and teams. What are the attributes of a highly effective sales force?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Spend time vetting either contract or your own sales reps:
    • The choice of contract vs. direct sales reps is driven by market conditions and end desires.
    • Utilizing a contract rep is an effective way to gain entrée into the customer. Even though they are 1099s, they must be managed as though they were company employees.
    • It is important to spend considerable time vetting candidates for direct sales. Attitude, desire and commitment are much more important than experience and technical prowess. Spend as much time as necessary to make sure that you are hiring the best people. Test them, check references from employers and customers alike. Leave no stone unturned.
  • Measure:
    • What gets measured get done. Determine what behaviors are necessary for success and develop metrics for these behaviors. This enables you to manage success.
    • For one CEO, the biggest challenge is selling above the gap – selling high and wide within the customer organization. Most reps concentrate their efforts on a few people in the client organization – generally low and mid-level people – and fail to establish relationships with senior management.
    • It is important, and rare, to have those senior relationships. Getting them requires deep understanding of the customer’s business combined with confidence, determination and persistence.
  • Respect and manage reps:
    • Many companies treat sales as a “necessary evil,” setting up an antagonistic and ineffective relationship between sales and other departments. This causes the salespeople to hide much of their information or spend time “scamming the system” rather than working as part of the team.
    • The best companies treat sales as a revenue engine and encourage, value and respect input from the salespeople. This encourages sales to be part of the larger team.
    • There can be challenges transitioning people from a pure product sale to a long term service business relationship – a transition from Hunter and Farmer. Most believe that these are two very different personalities. It may be better having hunters who bring in the business and then transition the customer relationship to account managers to maintain long-term relationships.
    • It may be necessary to design two compensation plans to incentivize the desired behavior of each group.

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