Ask HN: Desperately need “sales for nerds” advice
My background is software development but I spent my COVID year creating a brand of skincare products for climbers.
In terms of product dev we did great: we have at least one product that could revolutionize climbing & climbers really like our whole line-up. Our IG, brand & message is well-received.
BUT: I feel like I can’t SELL if my life depended on it. Talking to people, let alone selling, turns out to be extremely hard for me.
I am DESPERATELY looking for advice on transitioning from development to traditional sales. I LOVE what we built but my lack of sales acumen is slowly killing the brand. Any advice from the HN community?
The brand is http://www.chalkrebels.com
155 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadMuch of the content is obvious in isolation, but put together it helps orient your outlook.
Your products dont generate enough revenue / profit to dp sales, the cost of sale is too high. You want to do marketing.
0. Find all the climbing groups on Facebook and join them (also make a list in Sheets / Airtable)
1. Start adding value to the community. Do NOT talk about your product.
2. Optimize your personal Facebook page to drive people who view your page to your website or landing page
3. Be active, create a brand around you, not your product
4. Add value --> people click your profile --> they see your banner image --> they click through to your website. You might be successful linking to the homepage, product page, 'our story' page, but you may need to create "thought leadership" on climbing. The goal of this thought leadership is to indoctrinate your audience into how you think about climbing, build authority, and drive people to your email newsletter, Facebook Group and product pages.
5. Send website visitors to your own Facebook Group about climbing (also give them a reason to subscribe to your climbing newsletter)
6. Start hosting AMAs in your group with famous rock climbers that have their own audiences. Being seen with these folks will turn you into an authority.
Because I have 'an audience', I can now reach out to the leaders in my field and build relationships with them by offering them a platform --> to my audience.
Without this audience, they probably wouldn't reply to my emails / DMs.
I've used this strategy to grow my SaaS from $0 to $135k ARR in about 4-5 months.
I don't talk about my product at all .
I give value, pre-usage and post-usage,my product is just a tiny piece of the puzzle.
If you want an example of how to optimize your Facebook profile, see mine: https://facebook.com/nickfromseattle
I'm converting website visitors site wide at 20%+.
My SaaS landing page has a 44% conversion from visitor to free trial and we have almost 2,000 users.
My email list is 3.5k and my Facebook Group is 2.1k.
The value of the group for a marketeer might be immense, but every new marketing dweeb in the group decreases the value of the group for the people who actually climb. I don't want to be a part of a growth hacking strategy.
If you're there cause you like the community, fair enough. If you're shilling a product, folks will know it. Just don't.
At the end of the day, you'll look like the parent poster for this and even if you are well-intentioned in your contributions to the community people will suspect that you're using them.
> 1. Start adding value to the community. Do NOT talk about your product.
And you are correct, if he is not a climber and can't add value to the community, this strategy won't work.
Communities will ban marketers trying to market to their community.
So the answer is, don't market to them - be helpful and add value.
If you are helpful and add enough value, your target audience will seek you out to learn more about you.
For a lot of people, it's easier to stick with fb groups than keep up the latest trends.
Easy to add people, chat, schedule events, etc.
It covers many useful ideas, best practices, and suggestions from industry experts.
The key aspect to remember about sales is that it is not actually about selling but about trying to understand and solve a potential customer's problem, which is a mindset that's probably much more familiar to engineers than how traditional sales is commonly perceived ("pushy", "sleazy", "deceptive").
If you're able to understand a potential customer's problem, sales should happen almost automatically.
Plus, stop thinking of "marketing" and start thinking of "teaching".
For example, on the Chalk Rebels page, I have to scroll a ways down to find out what the real deal is. Put the whole "use less chalk" near the top.
I was in a similar situation to you ~10 years ago and had to learn sales the hard way.
The podcast is my attempt to make it easier for others to avoid all the mistakes I made when learning sales.
You can’t possibly reach level of someone who spent all life in sales in short period, why bother?
Do everything yourself is not scalable
Edit - Sorry, I forgot to add that the dangerous part of giving up is that it’s just as hard for non-sales people to hire sales leaders as it is for non-technical people to hire technical leaders. OP has to have enough confidence to keep learning, even if it’s just enough learning to make a great hire.
Imagine Steve Jobs writing code or Wozniak doing sales, as an extreme example of my obvious point.
Otherwise you'll endup jack of all trades but with no good sales, no good product etc.
Since focus and energy of a single man, even genious, is very limited.
I started out putting computers together from parts in the 90's and sales wasn't an easy thing for me to do, would love to help.
Take 77 off my username and add gmail and you can reach me there.
You will hear this advise again and again, people buy from people. Nobody cares how good you're in talking, they will focus on why they should buy from you. What is your story? and how credible you're. So I agree with @nickfromseattle comment. Go and build your personal brand first.
Keep in mind, you're the best person who knows the product as it is yours. You can answer any question about it easily.
Just go and start talking to potential customers, it will not be easy in the beginning but you'll enjoy the learning process.
Or, start local, give it to the local climbing gyms people to try etc. That might be a more up/down approach.
Ask yourself: What's my "beachhead?" Where can my product find a loyal early following?
Maybe instructors? Maybe climbing gyms? Maybe among people with the "leave it cleaner than you found it" outdoor ethic? If you can find some strong spokespeople in your target beachhead who loves your product, that helps a lot.
Searching Amazon also seems to show that gymnastics and weigh lifting are a market as well.
You really want a strong brand. Shark tank might be an option too.
I was thinking along a similar line. There are popular rock climbing channels on YouTube. Some of these channels already include promotional or sponsored content. One option is to pay to include your product in a video ("sponsored by Chalk Rebels, get 20% off your first order with this exclusive discount code").
Or send them your products and ask if they would be willing to try and review your product, no strings attached. There may be a risk they may not like your product (hopefully not). Also, best to keep in mind that some proportion of subscribers to a climbing channel will not necessarily be climbers.
Most Subscribed Rock Climbing YouTube Channels (2017~2020):
The list of channels is in the description below the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZiPIulY6v8
First, this is a really exceptional product. I’m excited enough to try it that my local outdoors shop opens at 9:30 - I’ll be there bitching and moaning at 9:31. :)
Second, if you’ve got a stranger so damned excited about this that he’s going to make a spectacle of himself just to try it, you’ve got something really really special.
All that said, I need you to stop what you’re doing and give yourself a big pat on the back. Sales is damned tough even if you feel comfortable doing it. Everyone struggles especially with new products. Frankly, if you’re caring and loving enough to come up with something so great, you’ve got this.
Sorry I don’t have any specific advice. Maybe I’ll have more after I complain my way to a local supplier. :)
Go to climbing gyms, ask if they would be interested in trying out your product, and if they like it, can they hand some out to their climbers to get product feedback. They'll likely agree to do it; almost every gym I've been to loves giving out freebies to their members.
This is probably a great time to do this. It's not summer climbing season yet, still rainy in a lot of places, and gyms over here on the west coast are opening up. People want to get in shape for the summer climbs.
If your product is good, when the summer climbing season hits, these climbers will go all over the place and chat with other climbers about your product. It's a really good chance to build up both credibility and interest! I wouldn't worry so much about online marketing, if they like your product, they'll paste it all over climbing groups for you.
Would you mind if I free-associated through your page, from the perspective of a climber, while speaking a bit to the sales side of things? (I've done B2B Enterprise sales in a past life, and for the consulting stuff I'm working on, I'm now doing more/different sales.)
Phew. Here we go:
1. Your primary value prop is "Use Less Chalk"
As a climber, I don't care about using LESS chalk (it's extremely cheap, afterall) I care about _sending_. So maybe instead of "Use less chalk" it's "Do more moves before you have to chalk up".
I.E. "You know that long crux sequence on your project? You have to slap like 8 compression moves in a row? With regular chalk, you're desperately wishing you could chalk up before doing the last move, but with ChalkRebel chalk, _you don't_ and you can fire the move without chalking"
(Er, I was at the Red River Gorge, Kentucky for the last month, and almost sent a climb the 5th go, but it was slopey crimps with difficult rests, and humid, and as after I fell on my last attempt, I saw damp fingerprints on the last hold. Terrible.)
So - you're not "selling chalk", you're trying to help people accomplish their goals!
Climbers spend so much money on shoes, a lighter rope, travel to the climbing area, etc.
We spend weeks/months/years hanging off tiny little edges, hanging weight off our bodies, to try to squeeze another few percentage points of strength into our muscles.
I dedicate an incredible amount of time and effort to climbing. HELP ME BE SUCCESSFUL! Sell me your chalk!
Start getting testimonials. ASK FOR TESTIMONIALS!
I'm doing this work for some other (software related) products I'm building, and the selling goes SURPRISINGLY WELL when I force myself to... sell.
I have very limited time right now, but I'd love to talk more about all this! I'd love to hop on a call to talk through it! There are some super successful sales folks leaving comments, I'm not "super successful" (yet) but I'm in a similar spot as you, I've just happened to done a bunch of sales in the past. So... we should deff talk. We'll both enjoy it! Send me an email, or visit my website (HN profile) or set up a coffee call: https://josh.works/coffee
Good luck! I'll buy some of your chalk soon!
Also, you may want to offer US pricing and shipping if possible. It's a small thing, but as an American the prices in Euros slightly throw me off and present an impediment to purchasing. It's not logical per se, but it helps to see pricing in the local currency if you want to sell to me.
The marketing looks solid, but with the wrong message... change that message and your sales should soar.
(not expert, should probably ignore)
If you want to learn to sell get a job in a car show room. If you can get one with the sleaziest car salesman you can find, people don't like dealing with them because they are a caricature of a person but thats what you need to do, sales is a performance.
"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini
"Persuasion Engineering" by Richard Bandler & John La Valle
1) high sweat, oily skin (use liquid chalk as a base layer & top up with chalk powder) 2) high sweat, dry skin (magnesium carbonate / silica will help you) 3) low sweat, oily skin (the alcohol in liquid chalk will help you) 4) low sweat, dry skin (you lucky SOB!)
My impression is that most climbers can switch to liquid chalk except for category 1.
I completely agree. A blatant example is the smartphone market. Sure, not including chargers and headphones will reduce waste, and going 100% sustainable energy is good, but if they were serious about sustainability, they would make their products have more longevity, be more user-repairable, and stop marketing them like fashion items/Veblen goods so people don't feel the need to upgrade every year.
That said, given the product, I'd suggest a two prong approach that combines push and pull.
The pull means working on creating demand. This will probably seem more familiar to you. Try to engage with the target audience (climbers, outdoorsy people, etc) in forums they frequent. Online social media, etc. If you can afford it, try to get testimonials, product placements, endorsements, etc. by people who are known to the community. Even give-away freebee samples at events. There's lots of tactics around this. I would suggest reading "Guerilla Marketing" by Jay Contrad or similar books for inspiration.
The push is about sales distribution channels. It's great that you've already set up a web store. Perhaps try to get listed Amazon and other online marketplaces (tmall, etsy, etc.) But more importantly try to get retailers, both online and offline, that cater specifically to your target market to carry your product.
What I'm describing is a fairly traditional approach for lifestyle-oriented goods of this sort. It'll be a tough slog as there is always a lot of competition, but hundreds of companies succeed at this every year. Best of luck!
The only risk is that they have to trust you and you have to prove that your products does not have any chemicals that harms consumers. Perhaps have your products verified in a lab.