How many of you are struggling to grow Sales?
“We had a great product but we shut down because of low revenues or growth.” - A Founder
This is the story of many founders including me. I started a small ed-tech gaming company to teach concepts of Mechanics and Probability for 8th grade students using mobile games. We designed a great game story, broke down the concepts into 50+ levels of the game and developed the prototype for 10 levels. But shut it down in 8 months. We never had revenue.
"No revenue = Death for businesses."
As founders we were super proud of the product, we fell in love with the game and everywhere we went, we spent time talking about the design process of the game. We had answers for most of the questions except for one - what is the revenue? We winded up the start-up and I parted ways with my friend to join Almabase.
I bootstrapped Almabase to profitability and here to help any hackers or founders grow their sales. Any body need help with sales?
Well, I'm in a similar situation with Bee Informed. It's my first project so I took a bit harder path. I've first built a product and now I'm checking where to fit it.
However, I still believe in the idea and have a luxury to wait till I find the customer.
So, any help to speed this up would be highly appreciated!
hey @brunor let's jump to my slack workspace - https://join.slack.com/t/sesamint/shared_invite/zt-f2tlermo-WaBC8jYfaPC8fl5nP3snrQ. Happy to continue the conversation there.
Thanks for this @sandeepm. I am interested to hear your thoughts on getting your first customers as an online business. What are some of the first things that you do and how do you help businesses get over that initial first customer barrier.
@gordon you're welcome! Here is how I went about getting our first customers. As a starter it was difficult for me to bid for keywords, get on top of search engines or any review platforms.
I went to conferences (not a possibility anymore), I did feet on street sales in my city (might be tough, but doable), I hung out in community forums and participated in the conversations (time taking, but useful to understand users) and lastly shortlisted 20 potential customers based on the persona, found their email using tools like voila norbert and cold emailed them (this is quick, doable)
Here is an example, let's say you built a software that creates an exclusive community for restaurants to help them retain customers.
I would immediately go to all the restaurants in my neighborhood and install the app or software that magically turns the incoming orders via UberEATS into a customer community. Show the restaurant owner the possibility of giving exclusive deals for the community members and retain them.
If I'm building a software like @rrttalv did. His software boosts sales using social proof. I will first narrow down an e-commerce category that has least trust for online purchases. In my opinion categories like Florists (I spent 1hr to find a trusted florist to send flowers to my girlfriend, I couldn't find any social proof but took the risk of using a particular florist), a new D2C brand, home made crafts like art etc has lost trust and I usually look for social proof before buying products from these categories.
I will first order a product from them, write a review and write an email to the business owner of how they can use my social proof using Social Oracle to boost sales.
Once you have 10 customers always focus on getting referrals. Referrals are the social proof. People buy from people.
Get the first customer you will get the 10th customer, get the 10th customer you will get the 50th customer, get the 50th you will get the 100th customer.
I hope this is helpful. Let me know your thoughts.
Best,
Sandeep
Email Outreach x7 is so wrong approach... Congratulations if you have double optin or fully confirmed permission to write to potential costumer and cudos to them if they are ok with you sending emails 7 times to "reach" them, but let's get real - 99%+ of those sale funnels, shitty pitches and "outreach campaigns" are pure spam, with a lot of bad practices and intentionally badly understood approach to unknown people like above mentioned "let's send him spam 7 times because he/she maybe doesn't have time to answer or all of the sudden he/she will change mind about something they don't need".
It's ultra annoying for someone who 99.95% is not interested in your product or service but still you are trying to "approach" him. I am getting several of those self-proclaimed experts pitches a week with a services that for god-knows what reason, following their own agenda, ignoring unsubscribe requests and sending every few days obviously scripted and automated sale funnel without any regards or thoughts is it that something that I would be interested.
Its not, its just people are doing it plain wrong. I spent 8 years in sales and email + LinkedIn are my top channels with 90% response rate.
The reason why people are not getting answers from potential clients like you is as you said but in one word: "RELEVANCY".
You don't care about their offering and you are not the right stakeholder to approach in the first place.
Simply said, they are playing the volume game, but they should play the quality game.
Agree 100%. Relevancy is key. Select a small niche that is highly relevant for your product and get 10 customers.
I agree with your point, but the only difference between sales and spam is that the former is targeted to the recipient and the latter is pure broadcast with no real targeting.
That's the whole point of 'sales' - you reach out to people who are neither looking for a solution right now, or are not aware of the problem they are facing and convincing them to talk to you. It is an annoyance when the seller does not get their targeting right.
So it's likely that the people who have annoyed you with their spam have essentialyl not targeted the recipient right or have not got their communication correct.
Sales cannot happen without outreach.
"Sales cannot happen without outreach", that's right. But you have at least 100 ways to reach to people and present your ideas, products, services, which they might purchase, or not. I could talk and write for days about content marketing / blogging / SEO / advertising / specific communities and groups / offline work etc, but I would never spam, regardless is it really researched potential client or just a blast to scrapped emails and pray to get a customers. Even if you send it once, or even twice max, if reply doesn't come take a fucking hint and stop sending unsolicited emails! That is not pointed on you obviously, but in general, to all outreach experts that think that me or anyone else need to be aware of their services.
Sorry to be a bit pedantic here, but what you have referred to is marketing. Sales is a complementary way to reach prospects. I believe OP is specifically talking about sales in his message.
But completely agree with your point. I am not a sales guy myself. I do send outreach emails but forget to follow up even once most times. I would recommend marketing over sales to anyone with a product to sell - because it's a lot more sustainable over the long term and easier to scale up.
I know very well what are the sales, and even better what is under marketing. One leads to another, everything is interconnected, I get it.. My pick is on the pushy, excessively aggressive cold email outreach commonly known as spamming. Sales, professional outreach, marketing and spamming can not be in the same basket, sorry. There is a way, there is a hundreds of ways to do it better, regardless how you call it. Anyway, I'm out.
@Dotz @hubbion interesting points. My two cents, Sales =! spam. Spam = Spam. Unfortunately we are tagging a single data point into generalization. The best practice in cold outreach is to always have an unsubscribe button (all the email tools have made this mandatory). The receiver always have an option to unsubscribe and the further outreach would stop.
The 7 step cadence also has a frequency factor to it. The best practice is to send one email a week for first 3 emails, then tweak it to 1 email a week & half for the next 3 emails and 7th email is say sorry & break-up.
If you feel you are solving a pain for a certain receipt only then you should send an email to them. I cannot sell slack to my mom because she doesn't want it. The outreach starts with a hypothesis that a certain segment of users in the market might have this pain so let's reach out to them and test if the hypothesis is true or not. This is no different than bidding for certain keywords and tweaking the bids, keywords and target audience based on the performance.
Hope this makes sense.
Best,
Sandeep
I could really use some help for https://www.simpletasking.com
@steban happy to help you.
I liked the simplicity of your product. But I don't know why I should use your product. To make work simple is not a value proposition. There is trello, basecamp, asana, jira. Why should some use your tasking product?
Is it built keeping specific persona in mind? Like for freelancers who work on multiple projects.
Can you tell me the three problems simpletasking is solving for a user?
How many users do you have?
I'm happy to help. Can you DM me on twitter?
Thanks
Sandeep
Thanks a lot for taught your fellow indiehackers about sales.
You're welcome :)
That's great work Sandeep! I am sure you learned a lot.
I just launched a video course on gumroad & got like 5 customers to pay for it by posting within my network & also sending it to personal connections.
Would love to have a feedback on can I scale this to having some consistent sales daily.
Course Link: https://gum.co/aZmeh
@Sj20 kudos for putting this course on the first 5 customers. Where do your potential customers hangout? Who are the folks who are currently doing social media ads? Are these freelancers who are just getting started by selling their services?
here is how I would think about it - target a small niche (could be anywhere between 1000-5000 people), go to the place where they hangout and start sharing one tip a day, start engaging actively on those discussions for the next 60 days. Periodically brag about your course. Soon people will discover your course.
In addition to this whenever someone buys your course, ask them to write a review on social media and reshare that as social proof.
Hey Sandeep,
Yes, twitter is one place wherein I have started becoming active & then Facebook groups (but they don't allow any promotional posts). I have asked for reviews from the customers. Hoping to post that on the product page as well.
Awesome story!
Everyone needs help with sales - what's the best way to learn more about an effective sales strategy that works? Like a 0-to-hero template?
I can think of 100s of ways to find customers but I am not a sales guy, meaning I can't just jump onto a zoom meeting and sell it using psychology tricks.
Do you think there's a way to hack sales?
@orliesaurus
I cannot imagine a World without sales. I see that sales have been portrayed as some form of trickery performed by a person wearing a suit. Forget wolf of wall street. Forget the jargon. Forget Jerry Maguire for a moment. Forget psychological tricks. Let's get to basics, that is my 0-to-hero template.
Sales is an art and science of transferring feelings and solving problems.
Here is what should a founder or a Indie hacker do?
Make Sales function the centerpiece of everything in building the company. It has a multi-fold impact. Below is the new way to look at sales.
When you are building a product, you are building it with your unique insight about the problem. You never know whether that is something people want. You need to validate it. Sales empower you to put the product in front of real users (potential paying customers). Forget about landing page, forget about positioning, and all the jargon out there. Write down what is the ONE pain point your product is solving. Solving that ONE pain point is your value proposition. If there are existing solutions, then speak about how you are solving the pain point better than the existing solutions. Here is a simple template for the founders or sales folks to reach out to potential customers.
Email Outreach template:
Hey {{first_name}},
<Who are you><build rapport>
<why are you reaching out><what is the pain point you are solving (value for them)><why should they take action now (show them what they are losing out because of inaction)><have one clear call to action>
Best
Sandiep
Most of the time you wouldn’t see replies coming in for the first email. Usually, you should have 7 email cadence before giving up.
This outreach will help you validate your product, get those first paying customers, and give your race car the necessary tires.
In the early days of building the company, Sales and Support are the same. One of the founders does both these activities. Both these functions feed each other. I have often seen that the language or the level of transparency the customer displays before (evaluating the tool) and after (becoming a customer) is different. Being in support or onboarding the customer will help you understand why they choose you, and what does success mean for them. These insights will help you sell better.
There is a lot of buzz around growth hacking and most of the founders spend a lot of time reading about it. But one of the key aspects to figure out even before growth hacking is “positioning” of the product. Positioning is tricky and it is always a work in progress. It takes quite some time to get the positioning right. Positioning is key for building a brand using marketing. The inputs to build positioning will come from sales.
April Dunford, Author of Obviously Awesome says -
"If you have enough customer traction positioning could be as fast as a couple days."
During the sales process, you should ask prospects - where do you search for solutions to solve your problems, where do you hang out most of the time to discuss your problems, who else in your networking are facing similar problems and who are some thought leaders I should follow. In this process, you will find the potential marketing channels, the language they are using to describe their problem (this will become your website copy), and the kind of conversations they are having.
One common mistake we did is to build features that we thought would make sense for customers. Every time we pushed a new feature we only saw that there is insignificant usage of it. Later we tweaked the process of building new features or product improvements. We prioritized product improvements based on the inputs from prospects during the sales calls. The continuous feedback from sales calls will help you build the product roadmap.
Sudheesh Nair, early sales team member of Nutanix (a public company) and currently CEO of ThoughtSpot says -
"The sales function is no longer about just sales, this function is a centerpiece to make the product better. Selling-understanding customers-improving the product-Selling again. Different motion altogether."
How to sell SaaS?
Anyone can learn sales. Unfortunately, no B-school or University has a course. I did a search on platforms like Lamda School, Upgrad, etc but even they don’t have any courses. For the starters in sales, be it a founder or someone trying to sell SaaS here are some key pointers:
Again no tricks, no jargon. Just keep it simple by understanding your customers and solving their problems. Hope this is helpful.
That's an excellent reply. Thank you so much. You should turn this into another post really!
@witsuma Thank you! I'm glad that you found it useful. I have turned this into blog post - https://sesamint.substack.com/p/a-world-without-sales
Great! Maybe post that on Indie Hackers tomorrow I'm sure many would enjoy it :)
Amazing write up! Thanks for sharing will definitely keep that in mind because I have no experience in doing sales! appreciate the help
@orliesaurus thank you! I'm glad that it was helpful. Happy to help with sales any time.
We have curated a list of podcasts on Sales, guess it will be helpful https://blog.mails.wtf/top-sales-podcasts/
@gordon @kirso @hubbion @steban @Jondeporta @Sj20 @rrttalv @orliesaurus @witsuma @brunor I have created a slack space to continue our discussion on sales. I felt in this way I can help people at scale. Here is the link to join my slack - https://join.slack.com/t/sesamint/shared_invite/zt-f2tlermo-WaBC8jYfaPC8fl5nP3snrQ. Looking forward to seeing you all.
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@rrttalv Hey Rico, looks like you have a good product there. I have questions for you:
I'm happy to help you further. You can DM me on twitter.
Thanks
Sandeep
Another thing I could think of is you should make your Social Oracle live on Shopify app marketplace.
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Thanks for sharing this info. Ask the personal blog folks what problem are they trying to solve with social oracle? What is the expected business outcome?
Ask the above two questions to the e-comm person and SaaS person.
The interactions seems pretty cool. Looks like you are solving a good problem for them. When you say interacting with visitors - are they able to chat instantaneously?
Let's connect over twitter and continue the conversation. Happy to help you get revenue :)
Sandeep
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No worries. I opened my DM on twitter for you and pinged you.