Accelerate your b2b startup revenue

Product is done, where’s sales ?

Hans Baumhardt | 20 February 2017

This is a reference clipboard of the common principles and methods I use with early stage businesses to create and validate commercial go-to-market plans.

Commercial go-to-market platform

There is enough uncertainty in your product, market and business model so use a proven framework like the A16Z Go-to-Market Best Practices for Startups

First box is “value proposition” and the rest covers all the building blocks of consideration. The slides are brought to life in the gritty startup story “The hard thing about hard things”, which has great quotes to enjoy like:

“there’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.”

Ben Horowitz

New or existing market ?

Bringing a new product into an existing market category to optimise, or creating a new market category (aka Ansoff matrix) ?

This will focus messaging and audience engagement on either early adopter education & evangelism, or competitive benefits positioning for a mainstream market. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers that considers how a proposition, messaging and engagement changes through the product:market life-cycle. Still relevant in the lean startup world of today.

Diffusion of innovation with lean markup based on bryanmmathers.com

Sales or marketing lead ?

Is the proposition lead by sales or marketing ? For a super-clear explanation check out Leslie’s Compass: A Framework For Go-To-Market Strategy.

The article suggests your proposition is either commodity toothpaste, or a specialist jet engine (outcome: minty breath | hot air). This focuses investment on volume marketing with online transactions or the intimacy and cost of high touch consultative sales.

lead with sales or marketing by value and category from hjbconsulting.uk

Clear message that earns the right to sell

The first box in a go to market plan is to have a clear value proposition and message for each specific audience (market, profile, persona). In a perfect world that proposition will have been identified through market validation experiments. That needs to be extended into messaging to answer three key questions which earns the right to sell.

Early Market

Creating a new category needs a stack of investment in educating and evangelising to the innovators and early adopters. Optimising an existing category takes less early market effort, but benefits qualification and references still need to be generated here fo mainstream credibility.

Start with Why, the golden circle approach for vision and emotional connection.
How does your proposition work.
What can you do for me: factual proposition of the needs we meet, problems we fix (pain) or new capability enabled (gain).

Mainstream market

The mainstream market is defined as being risk adverse. They will never go first and depend on the comfort of credible references from previous markets

What can you do for me: factual proposition of the needs we meet, problems we fix (pain) or new capability enabled (gain).
Why should I care: the benefits and outcomes the proposition delivers, and how they are unique, or different to your competition. This will vary depending on the audience’s involvement: user, influencer, buyer will have different cares.
Why should I believe you: reference stories, testimonials and our credibility that create an emotional connection.

It will take many iterations with sceptical prospects to iron this stuff out so it makes sense, and you can stop sweating during delivery. Wear a dark jacket and remove the friction of conflict, superlatives and incomprehensible jargon to nail a simple story in the language of the buying audience.

Lean startup go to market elements from www.hjbconsulting.uk

Hire a commercial leader ?

Hiring the first sales specialists once you have proven the model @10 customers:

Magicians, Marines and Medics – Understanding Sales Roles (Mike Adams)

When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two (Jason Lemkin)

Hiring the a sales leader when ready to scale doesn’t work out 70% of the time. It can take a year to do right.

The 48 Types of VP Sales. Make Deadly Sure You Hire the Right One (Jason Lemkin)

10 Rules to Being a VP of Sales in a Startup (Brendon Cassidy)

Sales method

Any sales methods such as Sandler, Spin, TAS, Value-Add, Miller Heiman, Challenger et al. can be useful, depending on your proposition from transactional to consultative.

To identify long term value I generally start with the principles of Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship by Mahan Khalsa. Its packaged by Franklin Covey as “Helping Clients Succeed”. Great proposition, why wouldn’t you ?

I have used this to help consultants transition into sales for over 20 years. It is simple, elegant and anyone with an engineering or consulting background will grok it. No cunning sales tricks. My desk copy just happens to be dated 1998. A great year.