Selling less early may mean more later, when you’re a start-up selling a whole new category of product:
A distinguishing characteristic of many companies that make it, researchers discovered, is that they do not attempt to sell 50 products, but instead “go find early adopters, people who are risk-oriented senior executives who have been looking for it, [the new product] and haven’t been able to find it,” explains Dean.Those executives, Dean explains, recognize that a given product could make a huge improvement in their firm’s competitive position if it works. They’re willing to put up with the hiccoughs of a new product to make that gain. “It’s a different mindset,” says Dean. “You’re trying to sell one product to the right person.”
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“I saw tech firms say, ‘We’re hiring a sales executive from SAP or Seibel and we’re going to go out and blow the doors off the marketplace. That’s the model that does not work early in a tech company’s lifecycle.” Instead of a sales force or sales manager, says Dean, “You want an evangelist to go out and bring on one, two or three sales.”Companies that believe they can sell a great deal of a new product, particularly one that is in a new category altogether, face numerous obstacles, Dean notes. First, target buyers probably do not have money budgeted for the new product, and even senior executives can’t do anything about that. “You just don’t sell a product out of a brand new category overnight,” says Dean. “You have to get into the budget and emotional cycle.”
The typical sales process from a standing start takes about six months, Dean says. “Sometimes you get lucky, but few people have the juice to change their company budget to do something midstream. In the best of all possible worlds, you want to evangelize the product in time for the next budget.”