Some Ideas on Sales and Marketing for The Strategic Founder.
1. No matter how great your product is, if you have not figured out how to market and sell it, you have a bad business.
While some people are only in love with their product, it is worth noting that marketing matters as much as product (even though a great product helps great marketing and vice versa).
2. Make things so great that users can’t ignore you.
Your product must deserve remarkability. The only way to do this is to build what matters a lot to specific people. Seth Godin, the author of Purple Cow, said that there are two laws of remarkability, which you must fulfil so you won’t be ignored: (a.) Your product must be so good that it is worth remarking about by its users. (b.) Your product must be launched in an environment that supports remarkability (the environment where the users are).
3. Make something customers would feel proud to tell their friends.
This is an extension of no. 2 above. Eric Ries, a great entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, said that the best way to confirm that your growth hypothesis is true is to test whether your next customer is brought to you by the action of the previous customer. This is why the best companies are those that are so good that they rely on viral marketing and word of mouth about their product to spread like a wildfire. Think about companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Word of mouth marketing and viral marketing are probably the best forms of marketing for most modern businesses. Utilize them.
4. Start with the fanatical small number.
It was Paul Buchheit (the 23rd employee of Google and creator of Gmail) who said that it is better to make a small number of people extremely happy than to make a great number of people moderately happy. It is this mall number of extremely happy and fanatical users that will then tell their friends, who then tell their friends, who then tell their friends (the chain reaction goes on infinitely), about your great product. It is the same principle Geoff Moore discussed in his Crossing the Chasm and Seth Godin in his Purple Cow.
5. Go to the right platform.
Know your users well and know how to target them there. As Seth Godin noted in his law of remarkability, if you want to get the right users, it makes all the sense to find the right platform or environment, as the case may be for your business. In his book, Growth Hacker Marketing, Ryan Holiday talks a lot about spending your limited resources in targeting the right users – that is, the people who need your product the most, not people whom you may have to do excessive work on before they use your product. And you only achieve this is by going to the right platform or marketplace.
If Facebook is the right platform for your kind of business, focus on it. If Twitter, focus on it. If Instagram, focus on it. Just focus on platforms that fit your particular need. Fortunately, since you must have been a domain expert in the area you are solving a problem, you should which platform serves you better. And if you can’t figure that out beforehand, your expertise in that domain should give you an edge to make some good hypotheses about which should be experimented on with low cost to see which works best.
6. Learn to get your hand dirty.
It is not enough to have ideas. Many people often fantasize about their great ideas. But only in execution does the magic happen. That is where the real growth and revenue generation happen. Steve Blank talks a lot about the need to step out of the building and engage with customers.
That is necessarily hard – for almost all entrepreneurs, especially the first-time founders. First- time founders often think they can change the world by staying inside their room writing wonderful codes or doing some other technical stuff. But they often quickly realize that they need to also do the business of running a company – which is engaging with real users and often asking them to pay for what they do. Learn to get your hand dirty. Doing that is hard, so don’t be surprised when you find it hard to do.
7. It is hard to make money.
As you must have known, it is extremely hard to make money. While focusing on building the best products that people want is paramount in order to raise a successful business, to sustain the business, you must figure out a way or ways for the company to make money.
It is hard to do that. Most users find it difficult to pay for what they use. It is hard to close deals, especially if you are in enterprise business. Getting people to pay for what you do is so hard partly because it is hard for users to make the money they have to pay you, and partly because paying for something is decision-making and people’s minds are so fickle that they can change on a whim. So, with this mindset, you ought to work harder in trying to close deals and harder in focusing on the people who really want what you do and can pay for it.
8. Don’t be mean; mean founders rarely succeed.
Some people take pride in ruthlessly extracting money from other people and winning every deal, but such people rarely succeed over the long term. To succeed in the world of today, meanness does little to help you achieve it. First, because you reap what you sow. Second, because the startup world is governed by the act of benevolence rather than meanness. So, to succeed, you must be nice — in truth!
You must work for win-win solutions. Otherwise, you will fail over the long-term. As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his famous essay, Compensation: you will get in direct proportion the things you have given out; no give, no get. Or as Joe Polish put it: “Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.” If you want to make your product great and for it to grow fast, don’t be mean; be nice; create more value than you extract or capture.
9. Hire salespeople if you have to.
Although it is very important that you learn to close deals yourself (because you are the chief evangelist for the company), if you have any need to hire salespeople to help you close deals, go ahead. This is particularly important for those in the enterprise businesses or B2B, where professional salesmanship may be of great relevance. But make sure that your lifetime value (LTV) of each acquired user is great than the customer acquisition cost (CAC) of such a user. And don’t forget that your CAC also includes what you pay salespeople to help you acquire the users.
10. Pay for advertising if you have to.
Although most startups founders of today are growth hackers. That means they design marketing into their products from day one. Advertising may still be important depending on your unique circumstance. But as the great Eric Ries noted, for paid advertising to be sustainable, the advertising cost must be paid for out of the revenue generated from the business, and not out of onetime sources such as investment capital. That means the business should fund its advertising if you hope for sustainability. Otherwise, you are in for a fiasco.
11. Utilize cheap PR.
There are many opportunities for cheap PR. Don’t hesitate to ride on them. If you build what matters, you should be proud enough to get the word out. You are an entrepreneur and not a ‘professional.’ Learn to do some ‘crazy’ things that get you attention, so long as it is right. Learn to talk about your product everywhere you go. Learn to ride on big waves or events or trends. Learn to get the press to write about you. Any (right) thing that gets you public attention should be applied without any hesitancy.
12. Apply whatever hacks that work.
Whatever marketing hack that gets the job done, apply it. There are many growth and marketing hacking tools and strategies out there. It could be building virality into your products; it could be building network effects into your business; it could be building a formal referral system that gets users rewarded for referring new users; or it could be creating a cheap buzz or PR.
13. Aggressive marketing pays.
Whatever form of marketing you are applying, you ought to be aggressive and ferocious about it. And it pays to utilize various forms of marketing to see which works best for you. This is called “testing growth hypothesis.”
(More ideas about sales and marketing in the Startup Growth Section and here.)