I recently read The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki (it’s a great book by the way - you should read it) and came across a small section that is focused on sales that really resonated with me.
It covers the process of talking to a sales prospect and the right way to move through that conversation:
Reading this makes it sound simple to sell. Experience would prove otherwise, however I think by following this process you are going to make life a lot easier.
A big part of my life at the minute is Sales / Business Development. It’s an area that I would say suits my personality; I like talking to people, I’m not afraid of putting across my point and I can talk to other humans without breaking out in a cold sweat.
However, I have found that there is an art to communicating with other people that are busy with their own jobs. Even warm calling requires a specific strategy based on prior communication with that person, you need to quickly gauge the situation and get your message across.
The biggest area that I have been working on recently is the way I communicate via email. Email is such a huge communication method yet I have never really considered it an area that I need to look at. I read an article on how to write better email (http://www.justsell.com/writing-better-email/) and started to use some of their points.
The main point is to keep the email short and to the point. I remember reading a business book (I can’t remember the title though) that said keep email to under 3 sentences if you don’t know that person very well. Over the past couple of weeks I have implemented this strategy and have seen some great results, people respond!
This is a great achievement in the world of Sales as most of the time you do get ignored - especially in cold / warm sales.
I am committing a sin and not backing this up with data but both myself and a colleague have noticed an improvement in response since sending a short email. I have expelled sentences such as “hope you’re well” and “I hope you have a great weekend” from my phrase book and stick to the pure basics, in a recent email I put the question in the subject line and just asked again in the email - I got a response in under 30 minutes.
If I were to apply this new email approach to this blog post it would read:
Hi Reader,
Keep your email under 3 lines and get to the point. It really works.
Thanks,
Simon
“you’ll see many processes (e.g. fundraising, product management, leadership, etc), you’ll learn from mistakes (yours AND other’s), and you’ll build a great network of contacts.”
A few weekends ago I attended an event called Launch 48 at UCL.
The premise of the weekend is to build a web startup in 48 hours. It’s a gateway to meet other people interested in entrepreneurship and startups and get involved in actually building something (as opposed to writing a business plan).
I joined a team called cartime.us, a new approach to car sharing. It was an interesting idea, but I was mainly attracted to the concept because of the team working on it. It was a mix of entrepreneurs and people working for large companies, varying in skill set from shit hot designers to a risk manager at a large bank.
An interesting thing from the weekend was that we had no developer in our team - other teams compained they only had 4, we had 0!
This didn’t phase anyone, we knew what we wanted to build was just a splash page, which any half intelligent person could put together (I wasn’t able to do this) and then make the design as good as possible, basically working to our strengths.
What this experience showed, and reinforced my belief in, is that you don’t need a developer to launch an online business. you need the basic skills covered and you need a team of talented individuals around you that can adapt to the situation and still create an awesome experience for people to view and engage with.
If it looks good, and the message is clearly communicated you can prove the concept whilst finding the person to actually build your site. The moral of the story is to highlight to people that you shouldn’t put off launching a web business because you don’t have a developer, you should find creative ways around it, play to your strengths and prove the concept. Once this is done you will be able to recruit a developer easily as you can show your idea is a winner (hopefully).
I went to an event at UCL last Friday (brilliant event btw) and started discussing the concept of serendipity with another attendee. It may sound boring, but it was far from it, it was actually a really insightful look in to the attitude a lot of young entrepreneurs seem to be practicing.
Voltee has launched and I have told very few of my friends.
This may seem strange, most of the time when you do something cool and enterprising you tell everyone that will listen. However, this time I have taken a different approach and kept quiet. The reason for this isn’t modesty, it’s because Im embarrassed of the site we have launched.
I don’t mean how it looks, it’s a good looking website, but it lacks so many features that I wanted to include that it just doesn’t give a fair representation of the product I wanted to create.
This may indicate I am not ready, but the site is ready. It does the basic tasks it requires and allows me to gauge how customers interact with the product. These interactions will then influence future changes, and as we only have basic functionality these changes can be introduced much more quickly. This iterative approach allows customers to shape the product and these are the people the site is being built for.
This concept is part of the lean startup approach championed by influencers such as Eric Ries and Steve Blank (two guys I respect enough to let them dictate how I run my business). This first version of my website is called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and, despite the embarrassment, I am enjoying the structure and seeing a real benefit from the information we gather.
I now know I need to redesign my email marketing and communications, we have redesigned our home page already and changed the sign up box - all within 2 weeks of launch, and the change list is increasing as we gather more data.
It is a great approach and I recommend reading up on it (see my reading list below). As the company ages I will keep updating how I am finding this approach.
I would love to hear if anyone else has experience with a lean approach, or is thinking of going this way.
Yesterday I spoke at Birmingham City University and said I would post some blogs and books that I think would be of interest to anyone looking to start their own business.
Here is my list.
Books:
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson - ReWork
Written by the successful entrepreneurs behind 37 Signals (Basecamp and Highrise are two of their best known products). A really interesting book about their views on building, running and growing a business. This is the book I would recommend if you were to only read one of my recommendations.
Eric Ries - The Lean Startup.
This book takes a scientific approach to setting up a business, but don’t let this put you off. It looks at releasing a product early and gathering information from actual users and using this feedback to decide the next steps of your business. It promotes an analytical approach to making decisions and measuring your performance. This book is a major contributor to the approach I have taken in launching Voltee and is well worth a read.
David Cohen and Brad Feld - Do More Faster.
The founders of Techstars a Tech Accelerator in the USA and extremely successful entrepreneurs. This book covers some of the main points to focus on when setting up a business and is written by the founders of a range of companies that are / were part of Techstars. I read this book in 2 days and it is one of the most interesting business books I have read.
Blogs:
I use Pulse Reader (an iPad and iPhone app) to read a number of blogs, mostly focused on the tech industry.
The benefit of using an app like Pulse is that you can quickly scan stories from a large number of blogs and pick out stories that interest you.
It would be great to hear other books and blogs that people recommend so please add any in the comments section.
So we should be launching this week. It’s going to be a small launch so we can start to test the system and get everything organised. Our main marketing materials go out next week so hopefully that will lead to more activity.
The past couple of weeks have been interesting and one problem I have had is focus. In other words I have so much to do what do I focus on?
Its easy to focus on tasks that seem important but in the grand scale of it aren’t. To give an example, we aren’t a registered company at Companies House. What’s the point? We aren’t generating revenue, in effect we aren’t a business. It takes a lot of form filling to register a company and if it’s your first time doing so you will need to Google most of the terms to try and work out what you are doing. You can use this time to build your product, make some sales and do something that will make you a real company, then when it’s a legal requirement for you to register you register.
I recently spoke with Lara Morgan, the Founder of Pacific Direct, who said if you do admin in the working day you are doing something wrong. The working day is for sales, or in my opinion, product development (if you’re a techy).
So when deciding on what to do I have taken this advice to try and make sure what I am doing is focused on generating revenue.
I discovered another good tool in a blogthat said ask your business 3 questions;
It’s this last question that I find interesting. I looked at everything I did in a day and compared this to what I wanted to achieve in Q2. There was a distinct mis-match. I found that I wasn’t working enough on getting charities to sign up to Voltee, which when I think about it is the most important thing for me at this stage.
If I hadn’t done this exercise I would be setting myself up to fail from day one as we would have launched with not enough charities!
This is a short term approach, I am doing what I need to do to make sure the launch is successful. So what about the long term? I focus about 15% of my time to long term planning. I figure that if I don’t focus on the short term there won’t be a long term to worry about.
My plan is to spend short bursts on long term planning, say a couple of days every 3 months, once we are up and running, but at this stage my priority is making sure there is a business to build on and I know in my own head which direction I want to be heading in.
I’ve recently been travelling in India and as anyone who has been travelling in Asia will appreciate I quickly became sick of the hard sell that Indian shop owners and street vendors employ.
For those of you not familiar with this annoyance, the strategy employed in India is to try and drag you into their shop “to look, not buy”. It doesn’t matter if you are interested in what they sell or not, “looking is free”. Simply, they try and push their goods on to you, and they are extremely persistent. They don’t take no for an answer and will keep chattering away at you.
On the odd occasion you are interested in the goods on sale and you stop and look the shop vendor is on you like a flash throwing material on you, pushing bangles on to your wrist, or throwing enough carpets on the floor to fit out Buckingham Palace twice over. They will not let you quietly peruse their goods and make a decision.
The effect that this had on both myself and my girlfriend is that we quickly stopped engaging with these shop vendors and would quickly ignore them completely, we wouldn’t even acknowledge they existed (dark sunglasses help with this).
You could argue that we weren’t interested in their products anyway so they have lost nothing from this effort and the hard sell helps them distinguish themselves from other “quieter” vendors. However, I would retort by saying that we didn’t only ignore vendors of products we weren’t interested in, we ignored everyone, including vendors that sold products we were interested in.
The conclusion that we had reached is that the hassle of the purchasing process was not worth the final product, we would simply wait or forgo the product.
What I have taken from this is that bombarding the potential customer with messages getting them to buy a product, or in my case sign up to the site will not work, and will quickly lead to the customer putting on the dark sunglasses.
I would change this approach to focusing on 3 (obvious) principles:
1) focus on the shop front. I paid a lot more attention to the shop if products were displayed nicely and by this I mean put what your selling in front of the customer, not the salesperson.
2) provide the correct information. Most of the time this is price and product information. This is where you make the sale. By providing the correct information in a format that allows the customer to choose about the purchase will reap more rewards than the hard sale.
3) provide customer support….. When it is required! That’s when the customer asks you!
Its not for me to say if I’m right or the Indian shopkeepers are right but I am going to employ the principles above to Voltee and hopefully that will prove that I was right.
