Build Sales Through Community

The following is adapted from Takeaways: Secret Truths from Leading a Startup.

Sales is social. Whether you realize it or not, each sale contributes to the growing sense of community around your products, your team, and your mission.

No one knows this better than my good family friend Dean Sleeper. Dean bootstrapped his digital signage firm in Seattle from a small, scrappy outfit into an international, enterprise SaaS company. 

Forging Lasting Relationships

I met Dean in 2000 as a nine-year-old at our family’s retail technology trade show in Chicago. A gregarious bear of a man with shoulder-length gray hair, he was standing inside his tiny booth next to his favorite barista, whom he’d brought from Seattle to craft cappuccinos with ornate latte art—for free—and serve them to a long line of chatty, excited attendees. 

Later, he explained to me that the cappuccinos were his secret weapon. His improv coffee house created a lot of buzz and lured attendees to his booth and away from the heavy hitters like IBM, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard.

After a few years, Dean and his booth became legendary. The “capp booth,” as it was called, was a known central meeting place at a number of major trade shows.

Fast-forward to September 2014. I was visiting Dean’s offices in Seattle before launching the sales initiative for Loopd, my digital wearables startup. In the fourteen years since I’d met Dean, his company, AccessVia, had grown significantly to become the gold standard for retail in-store signage before he sold it to Lexmark (a major desktop printer manufacturer). During our meeting, Dean explained that growth has less to do with the product and has everything to do with customer approach.

Dean knew that this skillset enabled him to build a large community of customers worldwide. Though it began as a joke, he decided to rebrand his company around the concept of the “Eternal Order of AccessVia” (like the Hibernians and Freemasons). He even gave himself the title of “The Very Potentate.”

With a chuckle, Dean explained, “Our customers have been our friends, so we have a clubby environment. We have learned so much about their business objectives. We know their game, they know our game, so we created the legacy of the Eternal Order of AccessVia to celebrate our friendship. All our customers are automatically members. Because we needed someone to be the head of the club, I nominated myself. No one has objected yet!” 

Although it might sound hokey, the idea was well-received among his customers, who couldn’t help but buy into this element of comradery and fun. More importantly, it showed the degree of trust they had in Dean, his employees, and their collective creativity. It also created a connectedness among customers, who in turn became strong advocates of AccessVia.

Setting the Scene

Toward the end of my visit to Dean’s office, he led me to the “secret lodge” of the Ancient Order of AccessVia, an on-premise cowboy saloon and game room with a full bar, thirty-foot-long shuffleboard table, billiards, leather couches, a stage, and a big-screen TV. Originally designed to close deals, this lodge is now a legendary attraction among his loyal Eternal Order customers. 

Some schedule special visits to Seattle just to drink local craft beers, listen to music, and play shuffleboard with Dean, his team, and other customers. While they are there, they also happen to renew their contracts—almost like an afterthought.

Following Dean’s convincing lead, Loopd brought in a Ping-Pong table and basketball hoops to our office next to AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. We would invite customers and investors over to challenge us to a game or discuss baseball.

Personal relationships take time and are built upon successive conversations and low-barrier opportunities to simply spend time together. By integrating novelty items like Ping-Pong tables and basketball hoops, we created more excuses to hang out with potential and existing customers in a casual way. 

These experiences establish a trust and rapport that wins business and builds loyalty. Even in a competitive sales situation, customers will likely still choose you because of the relationship. 

For more advice on creating a sense of community with your customers, you can find Takeaways on Amazon.

Brian Friedman is a millennial entrepreneur who went from a blank sheet of paper to a successful multimillion-dollar exit in less than three years. During this time, he secured over $2.5 million in angel and venture capital financing, hired more than ten employees, opened  offices in San Francisco and Taiwan, and sold global brands like Intel, Cisco, Castrol, and Box. His ideas about analytics and business practices have been quoted in TechCrunch, Yahoo!, Forbes, and other leading publications. He started the largest Wearable Technology Startup meetup in the US and now serves as VP of digital innovation on the executive team at Aventri, a leading enterprise cloud-based, event management software company.