In a startup? You're in the business of building and selling dreams.

As a startup, you are in the business of building and selling dreams.

The founding team’s responsibility is to build the dream. Really understanding the customer’s pain and build a solution that solves that pain. 

Marketing’s responsibility is to sell the dream. The prospects have a problem but are not aware of a solution. They come to know of your solution and are curious about the new possibilities. They want to see what the new and improved world could look like. Successfully selling the dream will result in a demo request/ trial sign up. 

Sales' responsibility is to make sure that their expectations meet the reality of the dream that marketing sold. This means understanding the benefits that they are seeking, the stakeholders involved, budget and implementation timeline. This is important as over inflating the dream will lead to loss of a sale or worst, customer churn. This happens when they realized that the dream they bought isn’t quite what it is. You get a sale when expectations of the dream meet reality.

Customer Experience’s responsibility is to maintain and enhance the dream. This can come in the form of providing stellar customer service and ensuring that the dream still meets the reality of the product. The dream can be enhanced by providing additional value via customer success i.e. training or industry knowledge webinars. To do this well, customer experience will have to know the details of the dream that sales sold. Dream maintained will result in renewals. Dream enhanced will lead to referrals or up sells. 

Consistently engaging with prospects/ customers will allow us to uncover new information about the dream. This information gets passed on to the product team to continue making the dream a reality. It’s a continuous loop.

I guess that is what makes startups so exciting.

We are in the business of building and selling dreams. That's pretty cool.