I agree. Going head on into sales makes all the difference.
My first company was an ISP that we started with a $40k seed investment, out of a basement. I literally sat down with the phone book and started phoning companies to people to host web sites with us. This was in '95, and many of the people I called did not even know what the internet was, much less had any idea of why they'd want a website, so it was a difficult proposition.
All I knew about sales, I knew from a one day course and two weeks experience doing calls for a charity.
My main takeaway from said charity, who had professionalized extracting money from people, was that if you worry about your product, you don't understand; when you do cold calls, it's 99% about emotion and gaining trust. They'd even diagrammed out how you wanted the person on the other end to feel at any stage of the call.
And it worked, scarily well. Despite the fact that I'm an introvert and was painfully shy and lacking in social skills. I winced before making every call. I'd sit there and have to breathe to calm myself before dialling even the first digit.
Way too often when people complain that their product isn't ready to sell, it's because they try to sell it on price and feature bullet lists without building any kind of rapport and trust first. That's hard enough in person, when people have far more to judge you on.
But if you cold call, if the person on the other side does not trust you, you could not even get them to accept cash from you for free.
If you don't get them excited about you, no feature list in the world is going to get them to buy it from you, because all their defences will be set to "full nuclear deterrent".
But if you get them to trust you, they'll often go out of their way to give you all the information you need to successfully sell it to them. Sometimes that mean you go away with a list of changes you need to make to your product because you genuinely wasn't ready. But if you get people to be excited about you, sometimes you can even get them to pay for some of those changes as custom development.
My first company was an ISP that we started with a $40k seed investment, out of a basement. I literally sat down with the phone book and started phoning companies to people to host web sites with us. This was in '95, and many of the people I called did not even know what the internet was, much less had any idea of why they'd want a website, so it was a difficult proposition.
All I knew about sales, I knew from a one day course and two weeks experience doing calls for a charity.
My main takeaway from said charity, who had professionalized extracting money from people, was that if you worry about your product, you don't understand; when you do cold calls, it's 99% about emotion and gaining trust. They'd even diagrammed out how you wanted the person on the other end to feel at any stage of the call.
And it worked, scarily well. Despite the fact that I'm an introvert and was painfully shy and lacking in social skills. I winced before making every call. I'd sit there and have to breathe to calm myself before dialling even the first digit.
Way too often when people complain that their product isn't ready to sell, it's because they try to sell it on price and feature bullet lists without building any kind of rapport and trust first. That's hard enough in person, when people have far more to judge you on.
But if you cold call, if the person on the other side does not trust you, you could not even get them to accept cash from you for free.
If you don't get them excited about you, no feature list in the world is going to get them to buy it from you, because all their defences will be set to "full nuclear deterrent".
But if you get them to trust you, they'll often go out of their way to give you all the information you need to successfully sell it to them. Sometimes that mean you go away with a list of changes you need to make to your product because you genuinely wasn't ready. But if you get people to be excited about you, sometimes you can even get them to pay for some of those changes as custom development.