Sales on Dan Goldin

Want more sales? Start teaching

Fri, 06 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A trend I’ve been seeing lately is companies boosting their sales by focusing on customer education. The successful companies don’t just focus on the results their product will deliver but also spend time explaining why those results are important and how the product works and how it can be used.

This approach seems obvious to me. Borrowing some terminology from Crossing the Chasm, the early adopters will use your product as long as it solves an existing problem but education will help the remaining, slower adopting customer segments discover that they even have a problem and look to you for a solution. In my opinion, the major benefits of customer education are to reduce acquisition costs and improve retention. Acquisition costs will drop as you start relying more on inbound interest rather than on outbound sales. Retention will increase since customers that sign up willingly will stick around longer than customers who needed to be coaxed into it by a sales rep. These “self serve” customers will also be more likely to blame themselves when encountering problems rather than whoever got them to sign up. In addition, by developing original and useful content you’ll help your SEO score which will drive more potential customers to look at your products. Your trustworthiness will also improve since you’ll be offering free and useful knowledge.

Where are you on the sales matrix?

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Something I’ve been thinking about is the variety of sales approaches. On one extreme, you have pharmaceutical companies sending sales reps to visit doctors offices to try to get them to prescribe their drugs. On the other you have companies such as MixPanel and Dropbox which rely on a self serve approach. And in between you have companies such as NewRelic which offer a self-serve trial and try to upsell you with emails from a sales rep.

Selling to the enterprise? Target the consumer

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A trend I’ve been noticing more and more is enterprise sales being done bottoms up. The typical approach is to offer a free trials or have some sort of freemium product. Each sign up is then treated as an inbound lead that is assigned an account manager. Within two weeks of signing up for New Relic I was contacted by an account manager who helped answer my questions and helped me get New Relic set up for Glossi. Working with him, we were able to get a longer trial period and a discounted price for when we’re ready to upgrade. HubSpot found that inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads. If having a strong SEO and Social Media presence drops acquisition costs that much imagine the drop caused by having a usable product. Although we’re a small, scrappy startup that’s quick to try new products and services, I believe this approach will become the standard way of selling SAAS in the enterprise. It’s much easier to get a person to try something new and if you can turn him into a fan, you’re one step closer to getting the company signed up.