How to talk to potential customers - spoiler, you’re doing it wrong.
“They tell me they’re interested, but when it comes to activating their trial… they vanish”.
“They sign up, look around for a few mins and then… they vanish”.
“It’s getting awkward, I see them at networking events following the trial, and they run away from me!”
Okay, the last example is a little dramatic, but you get what I mean. These are all examples of what startup founders are telling me when trying to land their first customer.
The thing is, I’ve been in this position too. I’ve heard this feedback as well.
A few years ago, I was marketing lead at early-stage startup, Careercake. I came in to help the founder validate the product and to grow the user base. They’d secured paying customers in each vertical, now it was time to grow.
Simple, right?
On paper we were doing everything right. Or, so we thought.
The process went as follows:
Run buyer persona sessions and create HR Manager Harry and L&D Manager Lewis profiles. CHECK!
Write down the job titles, locations and number of businesses with 50 - 1000 employees. CHECK!
Arrange 10 interviews for next week to talk about our product. CHECK!
Obligatory visit to the pub to congratulate ourselves on this progress. CHECK!
When talking to organisations, brands would tell us they LOVED the concept of what we were trying to achieve, and told us they thought we were doing an awesome job.
The compliments came flying in.
So, why did nothing land?
It turns out, compliments don’t pay the bills. Compliments don’t get you any closer to validating an answer; they just cover the cracks.
They’re given by people who haven’t the heart to tell you they don’t want to pay for this product. And at their very worst, they give you superficial intel which can only lead you to make poor strategic decisions.
Something had to change.
Let’s dive into how to talk to potential customers and actually land paying B2B clients.
How’d you solve a problem like your failed startup customer validation process?
The problem with many marketing resources available is that they’re focused on helping startups to land their first 100 customers.
When actually, the challenge is landing your first recurring customer. (Emphasis on the ‘recurring’ part, please).
Back then, I relished the chance to listen to every podcast and watch every webinar that would tell me the secret formula of creating a repeatable sales and marketing process.
That’s all great, but when you’ve not even completed the basics… well, it’s all just a bit of a vanity project, isn’t it?
The easy part is reading a guide or listening to an interview with a startup’s founding team; the tricky part is the doing part. The bit that we tend to be a bit scared off.
So, what we did was create a customer development process that worked for us, and was comfortable for us. It’s a process I now offer early-stage startups looking for go-to-market support.
The rules were: not to accept compliments, to get really bloody specific, and to not talk about our product. There was nothing new or revolutionary about this process. It turns out we needed some structure, a process to try and remove bias, and a way to understand that customer psychology.
Some of the resources that were invaluable around this time included The Mom Test, Customer Camp, Lean Customer Development, and What Triggers Customers to Buy (Everyone Hates Marketers).
A customer development process for our startup
that helped us land a paying B2B customer:
Okay, I know it’s obvious, but we really did begin with creating an actual TAM, SAM, SOM model. We didn’t just give it lip service. At the beginning, we felt we would be offering a product that followed a sales-led growth approach. So with this thinking, we were able to physically write down the size of the market available to us.
Next, we made sure we were regimented about talking to 20 customers a month. Each would be conducted following a script of questions that sought to understand what people were actually hiring our platform to do. Some of the conversations went well, others… not so much.
We took it on the chin when someone actually didn’t like the concept or they couldn’t understand it. Every time we had a good call where the audience ‘got it’ we’d use part of this to inform what would eventually become the value proposition.
We realised that we didn’t need to listen to everyone. Only the people who were going to actually buy from us where the most important. If you listen to too many people, you end up creating a product for nobody.
Lastly, by asking this audience what else was out there and who they felt we were competing against we realised that we weren’t creating a new category in the slightest. In fact, we were creating a niche or re-segmenting an existing market. This made things a LOT easier later on the line. Trust me.
The important bit: some of the lessons we learned from this process.
We cast the net WAY too wide at the beginning.
Just because someone had ‘HR’ in their job title, didn’t mean they were ready to buy.
We neglected to think about who else we were competing with.
I don’t just mean particular products, but also things like opinions and the pace of change.
We didn’t realise that the TYPE of problem determines the sales approach.
Were we selling a vitamin or a painkiller?
We thought they were as obsessed with our brand!
Well, duh.
We learned that by being a startup and being incredibly niche we were able to start to take business away from the market leaders.
(I LOVE that last one).
Why am I ranting about this?
I’ve been fortunate enough to advise early-stage startups for a while now, and there’s a noticeable trend emerging.
Some - not all - startup founders tell me they know their audience and all they need help with is go to market strategy. It’s not until we dig a little deeper into the conversation, that you realise that the basics of customer development haven’t been touched.
I’ll talk about the importance of getting into the mind of your customer, understanding their process, and why positioning is so important and you can literally see them switch off.
It turns out the process of ‘customer development’ isn’t sexy to everyone.
If a resource doesn’t include part of the startup scene’s lexicon: pivots, flywheels, go to market, playbook! Then the founder ain’t buying.
When I ask startups “who are you selling to and how big is that market?” … and I’m told: “CEOs and Sales Managers of SMEs in the UK” - alarm bells ring. Big time.
Seriously, do you honestly think the likes of Salesforce and Airbnb grew by casting the net this wide? Of course not.
Let’s be honest. You’re not going to navigate through this process by listening to a podcast or even reading this article. It’ll help, of course, but it’s all about the doing.
To me, the themes of ‘doing’ and ‘accountability’ are the most important themes I would love for you to take away from this. Personally, there needs to be more emphasis on this stage - whether you’re in an accelerator, have been awarded investment, or going it out alone.
But that’s for another article.
There we have it! We hope this post helped explain more about how to talk to potential customers and help land real B2B clients.
Want to actually do something about the problem you’re facing when landing your first customer?
Download your copy of How to Talk to People and Land your First Customer - customer development for startups.
It covers the following:
Uncovering your customers’ actual buying process
Questions to ask when running interviews
What is your customer hiring your product to do?
JTBD for beginners
Asking unbiased questions
Your competition isn’t who you think they are
I should you how we applied all this theory in the startup I worked at.
If this is all a little too much, feel free to learn more about my services, go-to-market strategy for pre-launch startups.
