How do you pre-sell when learning about customers?
Hi fellow IndieHackers,
I've been following IH from the start but never actively participated until now!
Scratching my own itch, I’ve prototyped a tool that allows me to find real estate development opportunities.
Several contacts in the real estate domain have responded very positively to the tool, so I want to see if there is an actual market it could address.
Currently there are two things unclear to me, and I would love your opinion on them:
- Based on the first interviews I've held with prospects, I found out that I'm not really solving a problem, but rather optimising a process. How do I propose such a tool, if it doesn't address a direct pain/problem (although I do feel there's much to win with my tool!)
- To validate, I'd like a financial commitment before starting to seriously build out the tool. However, I also need to learn more about the market in order to improve product/market fit. Can these two steps be combined into one interview/conversation, and if so, how would you go about it?
I appreciate your feedback!
Thanks,
Glenn
Well, if you believe that you're product would be a win for the customer but not directly addressing a pain-point, then the tool you'd like to develop is likely to be a "vitamin" product (vitamins vs. pain-killers). But if the customer is to save an X amount time, then that is where you need to emphasize during your marketing campaigns. You can still present it as it's a pain-point for the company you're pitching to. I'm a huge believer in "People don't know what they want until you show it to them. "
You'd like to start building the tool as an MVP, I suppose. Well, still, allocating resources to a project without any precise validation constitutes a huge risk (Even that's an MVP). But instead, you need to come up with a MEVO, a Minimum Economical Viable Offer, which is basically what you’re pre-selling to the prospective customer. A MEVO putts enough information together to help your audience gain interest in what you plan to create. Here’s Dan Martell's podcast going through MEVO in detail. (https://thefoundation.com/podcast/episode156)
Preselling software was this week's topic on our blog page indeed. I recommend you take a look.
☞ https://blog.keyzy.io/5-steps-to-a-software-pre-sale/
Appreciate the input! I'm doing more research into how to sell "vitamins" - it was the missing keyword. Completely agree with the MEVO to test if the proposition is actually an economically viable one.
Very interesting!
Regarding point (1), I thought about that a lot, and decided it's better not to interpret "problem" too literally. If a process can be significantly optimised, it can very likely be rephrased as a problem. For example in your case, being inefficient finding real estate development opportunities might mean your customers are missing out on the best opportunities to competitors. Suddenly sounds like a problem to me!
Point (2) is well covered by sales advice elsewhere I think. But the way I've heard to handle this is to start with trying to pre-sell, and then if they say no dig into what is stopping them buying. You'll get more distilled market insights that way anyway.
Sound promising. Good luck!
That's a very valid point, and the way you put it:
It indeed sounds like a problem - perfect!
I found that for myself I could talk anything into being a "problem" - however not all problems are worthwhile. That seems to be the crux: it can be said to be a problem (whether it's a pain or an optimisation) when customers can be spurred to "solve it".
About point 2, that sounds good. Do you mean here on IndieHackers? Do you have a go-to sales advice part? I've found the sales advices are quite fragmented, which makes it difficult to determine which go hand-in-hand and which are actionable (and worthwhile).
Thanks for the feedback, very helpful overall!
Yeah "scale of problem" is also tricky. Is it a problem "worth solving"?... Vitamin vs painkiller etc. Sometimes solving a small problem is enough of a wedge to get to a bigger problem, because there's often a least a handful of people who care enough about the small problem to talk to you.
Agree that advice is fragmented. Plenty of people including myself would recommend the advice in "the mom test". I personally thought listening to the salesforfounders podcast was a very good collection of the best advice.
Appreciate the input! Thanks
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That's very helpful, thanks!
What I read from this is that it is important to make their benefits explicit (in retrospect, this makes perfect sense). An immediate thought I have is: the value is not only "bound" to hours, but especially in project value (being able to find an opportunity at all, or before others). So what I learn is that I should try to make all of those benefits an explicit part of the conversation, and then sum it up in preparation of the pitch:
On a tangent, would you say it's essential for these conversations to be in person? The first conversations I've had were all in person but they took a lot of time (also on the part of the interviewee - it cost time to set-up, etc). And lastly, in this case, how many commitments would you strive for?
This comment was deleted 3 years ago