Hot answers tagged sales
60
Sales people are not usually very technically literate, so they rarely have information important to coders, and they often compensate for that by "winging it", i.e. making stuff up that sounds good to them but may or may not be right.
Coders don't generally trust sales people. We'll believe your product can do something when we see it.
Coders don't want ...
17
If I can't get a price without talking to a sales person, I will not even consider a programming tool. Likewise I will not type my real phone number into a website if I think a sales person may start ringing me. I do have work to do after all...
I have also too often seen sale people lie to possible customers about what software I am working on can ...
16
What you are talking about is something we've struggled with a lot over the past 10 years. We call it our "go-to-market strategy." For most of that time, we've used a strategy similar to your second one. We call it "signposts in the marketplace", and the idea was that if someone was looking for the kind of thing we do, we wanted it to be easy for them to ...
13
Your instincts about this are great! Google Ads and a dummy web site is a great way to test your idea, as is talking to potential customers. Most people don't do either of these.
At Blue Fish, we use cold calling both for sales and for market research. When doing research, I've used two approaches, depending on what I'm trying to learn.
The first approach ...
13
All you have to do is spend 2 minutes talking to the cliche sales guy to discover the answer. Used car salesmen are of course the standard...
I have had far too many conversations with sales folks who know nothing about the product they are trying to sell. They promise the world, and know nothing about the details. Often this is a waste of time.
The ...
12
Testing is very important. In some markets $49.95 will beat $50. I know of a test that $10 beat $9.49 4 to 1!
In all things testing is perhaps the most useful thing a start- (or any other company, really), can do.
Testing separates the winners from the losers and continued testing separates the flash in the pans with long tern success.
What you will find ...
12
Get over it.
Sorry to be so blunt -- but until you have the money to outsource sales -- it is up to you.
Do you bleieve in your product?
Do you believe that it is valuable?
Do you believe that the product will benefit the customer?
Do you believe?
Then spread the good news.
There are many very good sales methods which are not coehersive. They focus on ...
11
This is a good idea if you have the incentives right. It's especially nice if you can do it on 100% commission -- that way if they fail you've wasted time but not money -- not a bad risk.
Here is a 2-page agreement with no legalese that I used years ago for our comission-only outside sales guys.
Some general points from that document:
Commissions with ...
11
I took a look at your web site. You have chosen an unbelievably competitive market, where your competition can afford to run TV ads during the Super Bowl. Your chance of success is vanishingly small.
So ask yourself, how much in sales did you make in the last quarter? And how much in the quarter before that? Is the sales number at least doubling every ...
11
1) "First, provide value!" That is the mantra of Jeffrey Gitomer, a top U.S. sales trainer and the author of a slew of best-sellers about sales. The one generally considered the best is "Sales Bible, the ultimate sales resource" Be sure you are looking at the revised 2008 edition when you read the reviews of it on amazon.com
2) FORGET cold calling. It is a ...
11
The only thing that really makes a difference in organic SEO matters these days is quality content and links to your site (from other good sites i.e. not mass-ad sites).
I don't know what your business is going to be about but you should think about how to get generating useful content for your users, in a broader sense than only the services that you ...
10
I would recommend you consider pricing your subscription software without the cents but ending in 9. So in your $50 example . . . use $49. Ultimately, it really depends on the nature of the software solution you are offering, your overall offering mix and pricing structure and who your target customers are.
Value Messaging: It's not the price they don't ...
10
I look at most of those "most important entrepreneur traits" articles as absolute garbage. Success attribution is one of the worst skills in entrepreneurs and those who analyze them.
But there was something I have heard recently that really struck the chord with me:
"With passion and vision comes delusion. Good entrepreneur has the ability to recognize when ...
10
Great question. Here's two studies that have some good statistics and graphs on this issue. This research included over 25,000 Internet consumers from over 50 countries.
Article 1: Friending the Social Customer - The Nielsen Company (2010)
Fast Facts:
More than 40% of consumers go online to check reviews and consumer feedback before purchasing ...
10
Entrepreneurship is about solving TWO problems: value creation and value distribution.
If you've initially "marketed" to your close friends, then you've never gotten real customers and so you never really distributed your product. That's ok. But let's go straight to the meat: do you have a viable product for which there's a demand?? The best way to tell is ...
9
Using Facebook Connect and now we're seeing more Twitter Connects accompanying the Facebook option is a very good option. The point is take all the barriers to entry away from your potential users.
Easy to remember: Users don't want to have to remember 12 different passwords, one for every site, so giving them the option of quickly logging in with their ...
9
First, price isn't going to be the issue - service and reliability will be. So the structure of your quote needs to deal with that in such a way that you can alleviate concern on their part of what happens if your product doesn't work at a critical time (having no idea what your product is, I can't give a more concrete or relevant example).
I would give ...
9
Sales people want to focus on the best aspects of their products and technical people need to deal with the worse. My favorite question to ask is, "What do your customers hate the most about your product?" I have to know if your Excel export function works with 2007. No salesperson wants to dwell on this stuff.
Most technical people didn't go into their ...
9
All answers above are good, but I'd like to provide another angle.
I've been in enough fast growing startups to notice a pattern. Tech startups usually start with one good sales guy (the CEO), and a team of techies forklifting the product that the sales guy/CEO is pushing. The founding CEO is usually tech/product savvy and can discuss aspects of the product ...
9
We already spent years of engineering work and price was the last issue we thought about.
Yikes! Well, we made the same mistake in my first startup, and I hope yours goes better than that did.
You need to figure out what it's worth to your customers, and price it accordingly. And as a marketer once told us in that startup (and we were damn fools not to ...
9
Sounds greedy to me. Depending on the stage of the company, the company needs as much capital as it can keep for growth. His incentive should be growing the company, which he also directly benefits from, instead of taking away from revenue. Sales incentives should be reserved for the sales employees, not the owners. He is thinking short-term. Do you ...
8
Start with a few real classics:
1) Zig Ziglar - Secrets of Closing the Sale
2) Tom Hopkins - Mastering the Art of Sales
Some more modern books:
3) Seth Godin - Small Is the New Big: And 193 Other Riffs, Rants
4) Rich Dad's Advisors: Sales Dogs
5) You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself
Blogs:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
...
8
Since everyone has highlighted a lot of the good stuff, I'll play devil's advocate here. I've spent a year developing Facebook apps, so I know a little about this stuff.
Fast Pace
Facebook moves very fast when it comes to making changes and obsoleting things. What works today might not work tomorrow, and most certainly won't work in a year. So, unless ...
8
Let me offer some insight as someone who was "brought up" in the information marketing industry.
Ultimately, as the others have said, you're going to need to test (never stop!). However, let me offer some guidelines you might consider, so you can shortcut your path to success.
On the topic of multi-page versus one long page, the long page almost always ...
8
I have had a project which implemented videos on the landing pages. The video resulted in better conversion.
Video with audio triggers attention - many people browse multiple sites in multiple tabs - many loaded pages are actually not read thoroughly - we suspected that one of the reasons the video page resulted in better conversion was because of this.
...
8
My advice - sales people, particularly out-of-office/commission-based guys, do best when they have a concrete, well-defined, ready-to-market, "complete" product - not a 'start-up' product.
In my experience, commission-based sales people don't typically want anything to do with the "pain of a start-up" - they want easy, straightforward money. For non-sales ...
8
Was there a question in there? I'm going to assume it was: How can people sell eBooks when the same information is available from a few hours of searching?
Because paying $10 for the answers instead of 2 hours of searching means you value your time greater than minimum wage.
Because you can't trust random info you find on the Internet, but generally ...
8
The small company I work for does almost no marketing directly to the clients that we service. The method we use is to form partnerships with other agencies that are bringing in clients and offer them a service they do not already provide. So if you do the back-end programming really well maybe consider reaching out to design only agencies and offer your ...
8
In my experience (sales at a large company), I would always have to write stuff like this myself. Customers were generally reluctant to write something not because they didn't want to, but because they didn't have the time or motivation to sit down and write it.
Whatever you write should flatter your customer as much (or more) than you. This will help your ...
8
It's hard to give a good answer from the vague info you've posted, but I will share one piece of advice when selling anything...
Once you set your price it should be something that you are proud of and can defend easily and without resrorting to crazy examples. If you can clearly demonstrate that your software proves $2500/mo in value, then charge $2000/mo ...
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