If you have a product idea, sell it before you develop it
Authors: David Schiller & Dr. Kevin Keim
Intro: You are always in sales
Whether you’re developing a product, seeking investors, or even applying for a job, you are always selling or proposing something. Entrepreneurs must constantly sell their vision, product, or service to various stakeholders, like perspective customers, investors or grant authorities. Therefore, sales and venturing is very close and understanding both the venturing process and the sales process is critical for success, as they play interconnected roles in product development and market fit.
Why do you need to know you customer needs before development: The venturing process
The foundation of a successful business is understanding what customers want before jumping into product development. Too often, startups focus on building a product, only to find out later that the market doesn’t need it. The solution a startup proposes must be needed by the customer. They must be willing to invest in solving a problem.
Why is the first step venturing
The first step in any entrepreneurial journey should be customer interviews because they allow you to validate your ideas before you invest significant resources. By focusing on selling the concept first, you learn whether problem is worth solving.
Let go of the belief that “if you build it, they will come.”
The essence of venturing
Venturing revolves around three key questions:
At this stage, the goal is to validate your assumptions through customer interviews, conversations, and feedback loops. This ensures your product has a real market fit before any significant development begins.
What are the goals: Keep your focus
The goal in the venturing process therefore is to identify real world problems that you can, want and should solve with building a solution to them. However, you don’t necessarily want to talk to as many people as possible, but the right ones and eventually can become co-creation customers, partners or investors. To identify these, you need to talk to a lot of people e.g. industry experts, potential future customers, VCs; sometimes even lawyers and consultants that have expertise in the industry you want to build a solution for.
To get these people to talk to you, you need to actively reach out to them, ask for introductions from your network and spend time at places where you can meet them (e.g. tradeshows, networking events). To be effective, you need to have a clear goal in mind and stick to a rough conversation structure.
Example conversation structure
Conversational tactics from sales
To be successful in venturing as well as sales, it is important to be able to have great conversations, in order to do this, you can learn some basic conversational skills, like e.g.:
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Building rapport
A great conversation is one where you find common interests, effortlessly create a bond, and let the other person shine. The strong harmonious connection that develops through this is called rapport. ???????????????????????? ?????????????? ???? ?? ?????????? ???????????? ?????? ??????????????.
A few tips on building rapport:
Pitfalls to avoid:
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(The art of) Active Listening
Demands your undivided attention and concentration on your counterpart. Rather than listening to hear and judging through your own filters and biases, active listening demands that you listen with the intention of truly understanding and finding out the truth.
Sounds simple but training your mind to fully engage in the act of listening requires discipline and practice.
Listen for dynamic information that will help you see the world from their perspective. Try to identify the pictures in their heads, the emotions that are driving their decisions, and the fears that are influencing their perceptions. If you have a sense of how the world looks and feels from their point of view, you can diminish negatives and build up trust.
Pay attention to nonverbal cues like body language, tone, energy, context, and environment. By piecing all these clues together, you’ll be able to uncover what someone is really telling you—which may be different than what they’ve explicitly said with their words.
Sales listens to the customer, and closes deals or disqualifies prospects
In Sales, the target is clearer – help the customer to decide. You can argue how to think about it, in our opinion sales is helping the potential customer to take an educated decision while being respectful with each other's time.
This means during a sales process, you also do discovery (e.g. understanding the customers situation, needs, challenges, their impact and priority). In addition, as your goal is to help take an educated decision, you disqualify prospects from being a potential buyer, if qualification criteria (e.g. focus industry, budget, timing) are not met. This is important, otherwise you drain fill your pipeline and days with unnecessary meetings and therefore waste each other's time. Here it is important to take responsibility and be strict about it, because as a seller, you are more experienced in understanding what is a potential deal and what is not. You probably sell your product or services every day, some of your potential customers only buy solutions like yours every few years.
If on the other hand the discovery went well and the prospect is qualified, you build a business case (e.g. one tool is a ROI calculation) with him, involve all necessary stakeholders, build a clear roadmap to success, make an offer, negotiate, take care of the paper process and finally close the deal.
Parallels and differences between sales and venturing
As you can see, there are many parallels between venturing and sales. In both cases, your conversation partner, their situation, problems to solve, etc. shall be in focus. Also, you have a clear agenda and know where every conversation should be going but are a bit more flexible when it comes to venturing because you’re not yet fixated on problems that your solution solves (as you haven’t fully built a solution yet and have room to pivot). You can use the same conversational skills which will help you to have smooth conversations, build trust and therefore work together well.
The main differences are that in sales, you look for specific pre known problems that your solution can solve for various prospects and want to clearly identify the ones that are qualified and help them to make an educated decision for or against your services/product. The time spent with a potential customer is way longer, because you need to figure out the way to success together in detail, including all the administrative and political details of making a deal happen.
Conclusion: you are always in sales – especially when you have a product idea
The reality for any entrepreneur is that you are always selling, whether it’s a vision, a concept, or a fully developed product. Understanding the nuances of both venturing and sales can greatly increase your chances of success. In venturing, you validate assumptions and develop your product based on real customer needs. In sales, you match your product to the customer’s needs, addressing objections and closing deals.
No matter the stage of your business, the sales mindset is always relevant.
If you want to dive deeper and receive a practical guide on venturing, please reach out via DM to David Schiller or Dr. Kevin Keim .