Ask HN: How do you talk to customers?
How do you go about getting to those customers. You might have few contacts in your target area, but it might take more than a few customers.
Do you just call company x,y,z and hope to get to person x or what specific steps do you take to get in front of your customer?
7 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] thread1. Yeah, sometimes you just gotta cold call. Even better, show up. Ever watch the original Wall Street? Bud Fox calls Gekko every damn day. To get in front of your very first customers, you need to be doing this too. Go to where your ideal customers are and start talking with them (tangentially) about your product.
2. MAJOR CAVEAT: This first conversation should NOT be about you, product features, design, how much VC you've landed (or want to land). No 'push notifications' here guys. You should be listening to your customer, asking them about what problems you THINK they have that you THINK your product will solve. If it's not the type of product to obviously solve a problem (maybe you've not figured out what problem it solves or it's something that's more for fun), let the customer play with it and ask the customer high-value questions while they use it.
3. Here's the secret to successful sales in one sentence: it's not at ALL about you or the product. Remember that, listen, and your customers will start giving clues away about how to sell to them. If you get good at asking the right questions, it's like calling the Nintendo cheat hotline back in the day: the wins come really easily once someone tells you how to do it (I'd like to publicly apologize to my parents for the 1998 phone bill right now).
4. Always, always, always track the conversations. Every one. Even that 2 second one getting coffee this morning. Look for patterns (what worked, what didn't, similarities between cohorts at different stages in the buying cycle, what questions you asked that elicited the most helpful responses, etc). As Paul Graham says, to get your first users, you have to do things that don't scale. However, assuming you do this successfully, you'll need to rapidly build systems that do scale, so doing this extra work now will pay off like mad. Moreover, these conversations should help you find opportunities for the next iterations of your product. In the book Traction, the authors talk about doing sales and product iteration concurrently, and they're 100% right. If you do one without the other, you're going to struggle.
5. BE where your customers are. Remember when you had the hots for someone in high school? What would you do? Everyone, and I mean everyone, tries to put themselves near where this person is--maybe you sit nearby in class, or try to pass them in the hall, whatever. Same stuff with landing customers. Pretend like they're your crush, find out everything you can about their industry, their job (what they REALLY do and worry about, not just their title and organization), maybe some things they enjoy. It's okay to be a little creepy when prepping and strategizing sales--more info is better, because it helps you develop a more holistic picture of your ideal customer, and that narrows down the channels you should try to succeed. Just don't be obvious about your prep. Remember: the will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital.
6. Sales come from emotion. One of the biggest problems I see when engineers sell is that they use language that makes sense to them and is technically correct, but makes the customers feel stupid. Metadata to you is a 'wikipedia for your most important software' to the lay person. Make sure you emphasize the BENEFITS to the potential customer--they don't actually care about the feature. If you have a sciences background, you will probably screw this up. That's okay, just keep working at it--if you are cognizant of this and work to correct it, you'll be doing sales like the sales pros in short order.
This is definitely not inclusive, and each bullet point deserves its own book, but in my experience, they'll deliver the most value for where you are ...
All you have to do is ask.
The same goes for cold calls-- be genuine.
There are 100s of ways of getting customers. It starts by understanding WHO exactly your target customers are-- and knowing what their world looks like.
Here's the best book on targeting, planning & executing a solid sales strategy-- Mike Weinberg's New Sales, Simplified > http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15863998-new-sales-simpli...