How do you find customers for your new, or existing, product or platform? For entrepreneurs, startups and mature businesses, it takes more than cold-calling to have customer discovery conversations which: 1) validate hypotheses you are testing regarding product/platform and market features and functionality, and 2) identify target customer segments whom you feel are the right “fit.”
Traditional sales methods have everyone running around like a chicken with its head cut off, talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of things, hoping someone buys what you are selling. That type of wasteful activity ends up making no sense at all, especially to technical entrepreneurs who are used to using credible data for decision making. If you are, essentially, “selling” your product or platform to a decision maker who is basically Yourself, be who you are: a scientist.
Even if that means becoming a sales scientist, or a sales person who uses the left side of their brain.
Become a scientist who is savvy at business development, the sales process, and how to have a relevant customer discovery 
conversation. Just as you collect data from a series of experiments about your new technology, you will find that the more potential customers you interview, the more commonality in responses you start to collect regarding particular areas of your business.
So where do you find these customers to have these discovery conversations with?
My recent involvement with the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps process is related to my interview with sales thought leader Sam Richter about using internet search to find potential customers and define market segments interested in your product or platform. Most savvy sales leaders utilize a CRM tool (Client Relationship Management) to aggregate data and customer discovery conversations (aka, “prospecting”).
Key take-aways from this interview include:
- Everyone’s in sales {even if you are a scientist}
- Establish your relevancy
- Focused web searching, not surfing, establishes relevancy
- We are connecting on a human level, not a technical or sales/marketing level
- Business development involves The Platinum Rule rather than The Golden Rule
- Web searching provides data for asking questions, not finding answers
- Think of data differently
If you provide perceived relevance and value in your conversations with potential customers, you will be allowed to ask them for a referral to other individuals/decision makers. Ultimately it makes these folks want to speak with you again, because you inspire them with your vision and insight into their problems and their industry.
Understanding the context in which potential customers make decisions is a critical factor for customer discovery and business development. Because customers buy you, not your product or platform. You are the physical embodiment of your innovation (or the products/platforms of the companies for which you sell).
Sam Richter’s book, Take The Cold Out Of Cold Calling, Web Search Secrets, remains a cornucopia of how to make the internet divulge all sorts of information resources that can assist you in defining potential markets, channel partners, industry issues and trends, you name it. I bought this book years ago and it remains a daily reference guide. Sam’s insights allow me to quickly get to the information that provides me my own “discovery” about questions that need to be answered on behalf of colleagues, clients or mentees.
Let me know whether this information is relevant and valuable to your sales and customer engagement initiatives.
Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo and business- and revenue-producing collaboration and communication tools to small and mid-sized businesses and startups. She was named one of the Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers 2013. Her book, Do YOU Mean Business? focuses on technical / non-technical cross functional collaboration strategies and tools.
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