At the risk of stating the obvious, sales is everything. At the end of the day if you can’t sell it (in enough volume to be profitable), you may have the coolest product, but your landlord will be kicking you out of your apartment. As a result, sales has attracted a lot of attention from consultants, bloggers, writers and who knows who. Dharmesh Shah and Mike Feinstein each have recent posts on the subject of sales.

I know a thing or two about selling services (at least one kind of service), and I can testify that no matter how much better than your competition you may be, sales is way harder than it looks.

Having observed many dozens of start-up (actually now that I think of it, deep into the hundreds of start-ups), there is just no question about it: sales are tough. There seems to be a very common delusion that “my product is so obviously great and the current pain is so obviously acute that customers will beat a path to my door.” Well, a lot of people have built it and they did not come.

 Dharmesh Shah has this to say in a recent post that is applicable to the delusion I just mentioned:

You may think that your product is revolutionary and is creating it’s own category and that you have no direct competition.  But, as it turns out, your potential customers didn’t get that memo.  Doesn’t matter what market you’re in, people believe they live in an age of abundant choices. 

If nothing else, your customers have the choice of doing what they are doing now. BTW, that is almost always the safe and easy choice. Dharmesh has a number of good points that seem to me to amount to a short list of common sense things to do to overcome customer inertia. He lists them under the name “Maximally Buyable Product,” which seems to me to capture the essence of his point: Ya gatta make it easy to buy. As he puts it:

The MBP has the set of features needed to capture the maximum potential opportunity in a market.  These are the features that make it easy for people to try, buy

As I think about all the start-up clients I have worked with over the years, it is hard to see how these principles don’t apply to almost all of them. Some of these principles, such as “easy to try,” don’t work so well with large expensive pieces of equipment (think industrial robots for example). Having said that, if the customer can’t do something that is the equivalent of trying it, you have a tough sell coming. 

Services are another thing that can be hard to try. For example, providing analytics around evaluation of patient care to a hospital can be a very big undertaking (even if they start with one small department) with massive consequences for reimbursement (revenue). Services have another dimension: the customer gets comfortable with the provider – they often become friends. So, switching has costs over and above the purely economic and the buy decision becomes complicated by this dimension. 

Dharmesh’s bottom line advice is something along the lines of design your product offering with MBP principles in mind. My add on to this is, if you can’t design in these principles (because of the nature of the product or service) then keep them in mind and address the basic issues they are designed to address in some other way. Like many things, Dharmesh’s MBP principles are compelling and reinvigorating, but they have to be considered in the context of your business.

Mike Feinstein also has a recent post on sales. He gets down the repeatability of sales issue. If each sale is an individual undertaking then the cost of sales is likely to be way too high for most products and services. Here is how he puts it:

In the end, you have to be able to turn the sales process into a recipe.  It's almost impossible to build out a sales team without a well-defined recipe.  A very entrepreneurial salesperson can help define the recipe, but you shouldn't hire more than one of these.  Get the recipe right and then start to scale up the sales team.  And, don't hire salespeople too quickly as it takes some time to integrate each one and make them productive.

But, the same point as I made above about Dharmesh’s MBP is also true for any sales recipe. Some products (and services) are just too big, expensive, unique, whatever for the sale to be easily reduced to a recipe. In the end the sale is unique to the business.

Mike’s bottom line advice is something like: figure out what your sales recipe is and then build your sales force around the recipe.   Hard to disagree with, but keep in mind that some businesses will require the ability to adjust the recipe for almost every sale.

Both of these bloggers seem to me to be focused on sales of “commodity” type product. If anyone has advice (or links) around selling big stuff (expensive robots or complex services) let me know. I would like to capture that advice in this blog as well.

No matter what kind of business you are in, sales are like air, you can’t live without them, but unlike air they are not easy to come by.