Discovering Product/Market Fit

by Mike Harris | Jan 21, 2020 | B2B Marketing, B2B Strategy

Discovering Product/Market Fit

Will the dogs like the dog food?

(B2C)Product/market fit determines whether you grow steadily, slow, or not at all. Remember, a B2B tech or SaaS product exists for only two reasons:

saves time
saves money

A consumer tech or SaaS product exists for these reasons:

attractiveness
immediacy

You must prove to yourself and your investors that your idea will fly in the marketplace. But the typical Catch-22 is that you don’t have a ton of money for formal market research.

You don’t need it. Use these no/low cost techniques to disover product/market fit, before you develop it.

Why do this?

To see your product’s value from your prospects’ standpoint.
To hear what your salespeople will hear.
To learn how to align your new concept with the marketplace

Sales & marketing are social processes

The first thing to understand (and many people don’t) is that business is a social process. To do this successfully you’ll be spending the bulk of your time talking with people…not staring at a laptop screen.

If this provokes anxiety you’re in good company. Many people are hesitant to reach out to strangers. If you take the plunge, however, you’ll find it gets much easier as you go along.

Discovering product/market fit: a 5-point model

Work through the following 5-point strategy model as a first step to discovering product/market fit. Just apply what you already know, or strongly suspect, is true about your market. Support each assumption with whatever market information you have on hand.

What are the trends in my industry?
What’s driving the trends?
What are we doing about the trends?
What are our competitors doing about the trends?
What should we be doing about the trends to grow revenue and profits?

Now you have a baseline.

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Your Hidden Competitors

by Mike Harris | Sep 2, 2019 | B2B Strategy

Your Hidden Competitors

Your competitors are increasing.

Some are well hidden.

Young companies today have access to astounding shared resources for designing and manufacturing products more quickly and efficiently than ever before.?

Take, for example, car design and manufacturing. A 12-year-old company in Arizona could turn the auto industry on its ear by using collaboration and co-creating to design cars. Their? innovative manufacturing model uses?3D printing?for manufacturing, bypassing traditional and heavy manufacturing costs.

Moving Supply Closer to Demand

Local Motors? mission statement is ?Our goal is to operate an efficient, multinational Microfactory network in order to build game-changing products and deliver a world of vehicle innovations.?

Frankly, it could be tough for established car manufacturers because Local Motors? model attacks the auto giants? big weaknesses: capital, operations and labor intensive infrastructure built up over decades. Large manufacturing companies typically cannot shed heavy operations investments quickly.

Local Motors? vision is clearly audacious but so was Henry Ford?s.?

There are more examples of successful companies using shared resources and/or collaborative models to bypass capital intensive business models in their respective industries including?Uber,?AirBnB?and?WeWork. So many, in fact, that CEOs need to start educating themselves about it.?

Summary

The implication is simply that the supply chain is moving closer to demand and innovation to serve markets more efficiently. The solution, as Local Motors sees it, is rapid partnering, collaborating and co-creating locally on goals of mutual interest and benefit to multiple parties.

As middle and upper-middle classes grow in developing markets, the demand for consumer and B2B products is surging in those markets. Is it possible that the supply and demand chains in those markets will look decidedly different than those in established markets?

Companies that adopt these new models may be invisible today but they can become formidable competitors tomorrow.

Your competitors. Feel free to reach out.

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About Mike Harris

Mike is the founder of Harris CMO Partners, a Nashville based firm offering on demand CMO services for SaaS and tech companies.

He enjoys writing about what's working in B2B sales and marketing.

Website content and all attachments are the property of Harris CMO Partners LLC.

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Sales presentation best practices

by Mike Harris | Sep 30, 2019 | Chief Marketing Officer

Sales presentation best practices

B2B sales presentations – score quickly with a football mindset

sales presentation best practices

Just move the ball 10 yards

It’s generally over when a salesperson opens the presentation with something like ‘I was born in a small town…’.

No matter how many qualified leads you or your demand gen team find, you won’t move the ball far with an opening like that.

Let?s try to understand the sales presentation in terms of a football drive. By the time you’re in the sales presentation, you already have the ball on your 25-yard line. The most any presentation can do is get a first down conversion. Enlist your audience in the effort.

They’re not interested

Few people will be interested in when or where your company was founded. Or about your product?s ?state-of-the-art? features. Or about your onboarding process.

They’re not interested because 99.9% of the time they?re thinking about themselves, their problems and their challenges.

You must rise above that noise.

Sales presentation best practices: Part 1 – quick interaction is key.

The best approach to sell ourselves, our company and our offering is to tell stories not about us, but about them and other clients we’ve served. And we then map those stories to challenges the prospect wants to overcome.

You have, at most, a few seconds to launch a story so engaging that your audience can?t help but pay attention. You can help do that by quickly getting your audience to interact with you and each other. Here?s how you do it.

Engaging the prospect

Whether you’re in a one-on-one presentation or in a room with people, you must get your audience engaged quickly. Look confidently at the person, or a person, and say something like, ?Sally, congratulations on your company?s new product launch (or success at XYZ tradeshow, or whatever). I know your time is valuable so let me ask ?what would you like to get out of our time together today??.

Sales presentation best practices. Find a friendly face.

Regardless of the answer, build on it. ?Yes, that was a concern of most of our new clients when they first became interested. Can I share a story about that??. Have a couple of 2-minute sound bites ready that tell interesting, positive client stories.

In a few seconds you have the audience?s attention and shown that it?s all about them. You’re already moving the ball downfield.

“Just to refresh, here’s what makes us different…”

Next, say something like ?If you don’t know about our company and our solution, here are the top 3-4 things that make us different.?

Do not make your sales presentation solely about your product. Why? Because, if they’re like most B2B prospects, they’ve already done their research and know something about your product and company. Let them guide you on what more they want to hear.

?Sales presentation best practices: Part 2 – ask these questions.

Next, go into the challenges facing their company, their industry or their market space.

?We all know that lots of companies your size struggle with data security (or whatever relates to what you?re selling). Data breaches are costing companies your size an astonishing _____ dollars a year. And we all know what happened to XYZ company after their last cyber-attack.?

Next, ask:

?What other stories have you heard?? You must get your audience talking with you and each other to keep them focused. And in the process, you’re gaining more yards.

Next, say (don?t ask):

?Tell me how well your current solution is working.??

It?s likely that you?ll get a litany of things they?d like to improve. Even if they say the solution is all they ever dreamed of, you can now move into total cost of ownership, terms, vendor likability, customer support and other variables that impact the entire customer experience. If you?ve done your homework you already know where the fulcrum is and where to lean on the lever.

Finally, ask:

?Now that you’ve shared the changes you desire, what questions do you have for me about how we can deliver those changes??

You may get some questions, you may not. It doesn?t matter because you already have your call-to-action ready.

?At this stage, companies that became customers decided that a pilot (or trial, or visit to our headquarters, or a chat with a current customer or user, or fill-in-the-blank) is the next step. Let?s go ahead and set that up while we?re together today.? More yardage gained.

Getting to the first down: stop talking

Once you’ve introduced the next step, just stop talking. Someone will say something, guaranteed. If all goes as planned, you?ll get the conversion and the opportunity to gain 10 more yards in the next series. If it doesn?t go as planned, just back up a bit to the step that makes sense. Quarterbacks think on their feet.

Remember, never ask a question that can be answered with a ?no?, because that will stop the conversation cold. For example, ‘would you like to set up a pilot?’. You will almost always get a ‘no’ response because it’s more comfortable than taking a risk. You must keep the conversation alive all the way through the buying journey until the deal is signed and the first check clears the bank. Only then is it a touchdown.

Also, here’s where you will encounter objections. That’s a good thing because, if you’ve done your homework, you know which objections are coming and how to respond to them.

Conclusion and resources

Keep repeating this process until you cross the goal line. Unlike football, however, you?ll need a whole different set of plays for each conversion. Do your homework and have a game plan for each prospect.

If you understand sales presentation best practices, you know that getting and keeping your prospects? attention is tough. Especially in complex sales situations. If you?re not achieving the results you want, there are plenty of resources to help.

If you or your team need help to improve the results from sales presentations, here are some of the experts and resources I recommend: ?Patricia Fripp,?ZoomInfo, GONG, and Sales Hacker.