The brutal truth about marketing your software product
successfulsoftware.net
successfulsoftware.net
That right there tells me you'll fail running your own business.
I'm not a sales person, but I respect them (well, the good ones) enormously. Not liking sales people means not understanding how important they are to your business, and probably means you subconsciously believe that people will flock to your door if you build the perfect mousetrap.
The perfect mousetrap myth is very seductive to introverts, and it's probably the cause of most startup failures. Without a good salesperson pushing your product, you could be peddling a cure for cancer and still fail miserably.
I'd recommend anyone who hates salespeople actually does their job for a month. You'll quickly come to realise they have this thick skin that you don't; that when they get someone swear at them for cold calling, they just pick up the phone and do it again. You meanwhile, will feel awful for the rest of the day, and do everything possible to avoid the phone for the rest the day.
By the end of the month you'll realise that just as your introversion makes you a great developer, whatever they have that lets them do this is incredibly valuable - you'll respect them. And like them.
And your business now stands a chance.
Yes, a good salesperson is a massive asset. No, "effective" does not imply "good," though your requirements on that point may vary. No, "respect" does not require or imply "like," and no, this is not such a black and white issue.
I think my point still stands though. If you have a secret contempt for salespeople, don't start a business.
Take the previous paragraph and replace "sales people" with "programmers". You can see that the same applies. It has nothing to do with introversion/extroversion.
On that matter, the usual stereotype of the ultra extroverted salesman that is incredibly successful is pure bollocks. Being extroverted doesn't build you a thick skin to be manhandled over the phone, experience and repetition does. As well, being introverted doesn't mean that if you have a bad conversation, you'll crawl back under the sheets for the rest of the day. You're either misunderstanding extroversion/introversion or you're misunderstanding sales, or maybe both.
I'm currently a programmer and entrepreneur and in the past I've worked as a salesman without formal training. I've had phone sales jobs (phone plans), street sales jobs (random knick-knacks) and store sales jobs (men clothes). Only recently, after coming to the same realizations than OP, I've decided to formally understand Sales as a profession, to help me promote my services and software.
I've been studying it for a few months and am convinced that most people misunderstand what selling is. We often like to imagine slick, silver-tongued, extroverted people, with poor ethics. This is only a partial truth. After all, sales is one of the few professions where money is directly tied to performance. It shouldn't come as a surprise that poor ethics be prevalent, it's the easy way out. But it does in no way constitute a requirement to be a good salesman. Most successful salesmen I've observed are unequivocal about ethics, they discourage dabbling in shady practices.
I've also noted that a good number could in fact pass for introverts. My understanding so far is that even extroverts need to tap into their inner introvert at some point, if they ever want to become good sales people. Being extroverted might help in approaching people in random social contexts, but introversion helps to align oneself with the needs of potential clients, because it helps in observing and listening to what your prospect is trying to tell you. Whether introvert or extrovert, anyone can learn to act accordingly when the situation demands it.
All this to say that selling is a skill and can get very methodical and technical. Like any skill, anyone can learn it.
I would take issue that you can train anyone to be a great salesperson. Having done a stint in sales and seen many good and bad salespeople in action, I believe (no evidence, sorry!) that some people just have "it", and many do not. Just the same way that some programmers have "it", and most don't.
Yes, you can train most people to become a competent salesperson/programmer. But those people will be forever eclipsed by the occasional few who seem to effortlessly fill their quotas in the first week of the month, or knock out extraordinary apps in an afternoon. But then we're getting way off topic here.
There are a lot of people who I very intensely dislike for whom I have a great deal of respect at how they do their jobs.
Isn't this exactly what the author of the article recommends?
Why be so harsh with him?
A lot of sales people are utter jerks praying on stupid person: my mom is getting old and a bit losing it and recently she bought some totally unnecessary and shitty tool after seeing an "infomercial" on TV.
Do I need to love these sales people in that infomercial?
Certainly not. There are great products out there aimed at smart people which you can sale too by taking care of them and their needs and without trying to mindtrick them.
For example JetBrains managed to sell me a license of IntelliJ 12 at 75% off on Doomsday back in december.
Did they need to have a cold skin after many people insulted them for shoddy sale practices? Did they need to spam my email?
I don't think so. So your overgeneralization as if there was one type of sales person is wrong.
There's not just one way of selling things and salesperson are certainly not part of every succesful online business. There are many microISVs who have a perfectly nicely running business who don't have the singlest skill needed to be an used car salesman...
That said, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of studying materials from Chet Holmes (RIP), the author of The Ultimate Sales Machine. I got hold of a set of videos he did in conjunction with Anthony Robbins, where he talks about marketing and sales at great length. We[1] are currently working to implement his "Dream 100 / Best Buyer" strategy[2] now. How well it will work remains to be seen, of course, but the idea strikes me as pretty solid.
This marketing stuff turns out to be pretty fascinating. I've also learned a ton about market research in the past year or so, and am thinking about doing a talk on "Market Research for Startups" sometime soon, here in the RTP area.
[2]: http://www.resourcenation.com/article/marketing-tiny-shoestr...
Another point is that everybody wants to learn what works, but few people ever put it to practice. The only person I have ever helped that has actually paid attention is Dan Shipper. And it was mostly helping him with the Firefly landing page.
And yes, you are right. A great product does not sell itself.
Excellent post.
I have two advices:
1. Don’t quit your job. Why do so many people fall for the glamourous “all in” scenario? I work three days a week as a freelancer, and the rest I spend on working on my products (http://weekplan.net and http://taskarmy.com). Things might not move as quickly as if I was full time, but I don’t risk to jeopardize my family’s wellbeing and I can keep doing that forever.
2. Outsource. Why try to do it all? Work on your business not in your business. I currently have an accountant, a bookkeeper, a web developer, a virtual assistant, a writer and an adwords expert working with me. They are not all working full time, I only pay them when I need them. I strongly suggest you train your outsourcing skills today to learn what can be outsourced, how to express what you need, and where to find the right talent. Get a virtual assistant today starting at $6/hour: http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-outsourcing
Also, when you are re-selling somebody else's product, where is your passion? what ability do you have to differentiate?
Would you be more passionate about reselling Raspberry Pis than reselling iPhone accessories?
1. You get to iterate on what they say they like/hate in your beta much better/faster...which allows you to make a product that has a really, really solid market fit.
2. You gain credibility and trust in your chosen community and can launch your product with enough initial sales to be profitable more or less right off the bat (talking smaller SaaS stuff here)
I like the suggestions in the post, but I would almost say that you should strip it down to one channel of traffic to your market, build your credibility, use that channel to develop a badass product that people will shell out cash for, and then worry about the remarketing, cross selling, etc after you're off and rolling.
WHAT YOU WANT
What you really want is to learn how to research, develop and market a product 'that sells'. To learn this, I suggest you do two things that might surprise you.
DO THIS First, write a 2 minute infomercial script for your product. Practice being the presenter. This is a surprisingly informative exercise. Make sure to address any questions or objections people would have about the product, support or refunds in your script.
THEN DO THIS Second, write out a one page direct response magazine advertisement for your product. Anticipate any and all questions, objections and concerns in your ad. For examples, see old-school direct response ads by Joe Sugarman for products such as the Pocket CV from the 70's.
IT"S THE PROCESS By going through the process of writing a 2 minute infomercial script, and also writing a 1 page direct response magazine advertisement you will be forced to understand and echo features, benefits and emotional benefits and also anticipate and answer questions and objections. These are the two most valuable selling skills whether in person, online or in print.
SELLING IN PRINT Being able to sell in print is really valuable, because your ads and advertising can scale to billions of pages.
There's a lot to know about selling, marketing and developing products that sell. I've been studying it for 10 years, and it's going to take a lifetime of learning to do my best work.
I would be glad to share some things I have learned with you. Reach out and let's connect - dan [at] tinylever [dot] com.
I found that their advice consisted of two things:
1) Find a niche using Google Adwords.
2) Rank #1 with SEO.
And that's about it. It's incredibly vague and frustrating, especially when most niches are oversaturated these days. I reached out to Rob about this, and he replied "yeah, it's hard to find an untapped niche". The entire premise of building a product in his materials is based around finding a nice that's underserved and that you can rank easily in Google for. Anytime someone tells me to solve marketing issues with "just use SEO", they're immediately discredited in my mind.
That being said, the rest of the book was solid. The problem I have is that there is very little actionable information on selling a product outside of Magic SEO-land, which everyone knows is a myth.
And Rob's book is a small part of the universe of startup marketing. Mixergy has plenty of stories of businesses starting without SEO as their primary driver. One amazing case study is Sam Ovens, who was so successful at marketing first before building anything that he not only extracted money from the people he had interviewed, he took the same virtual product (not yet built) and extracted cash from new customers who hadn't been helping him design it. Then he built it. And his niche is hardly unique; there are obviously many more areas like that to mine. How did he choose a niche? He didn't do keyword research. He studied the employment ads and looked into business categories that were hiring a lot, to see if he could help them automate with software:
http://thefoundation.io/sam-ovens-case/
Has anyone offered to pay for your niche product before you build it? That would be a nice filter to see if you are building something people want.
The cruel reality is that building the product should occupy about 15% of your effort. The sales and marketing, including idea extraction, market research, etc., will be 85% of the work. There is an ocean of marketing tactics and information out there, and it is a lot more detailed than your two step summary above. Sometimes marketing gurus want to reach a broad audience, and they package up a ton of their best information into a regular book. Perry Marshall did it with his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords (much, much more than an Adwords book). And you can buy the Kindle version for the low, low price of only $3.99, which is an incredible price/performance.
Selling another software app as an affiliate is completely different to selling your own application and I would argue much harder to actually make any decent money from. Any effort you expend is building the brand of the other company. You can't split test their landing page. You lose a lot of traffic to people that directly type in the url.
If you can rebrand some awesome software where you own the domain, brand etc and you sell and get 100%, this is not a terrible business model, but the problem is that any half decent software wouldn't want to do this as they would prefer to sell it themselves.
I guess they are saying to be an affiliate as practice. I don't really agree however. I think you can practice on your real business.
"You lose a lot of traffic to people that directly type in the url." This is why you buy your own domain and only pay for traffic that goes to your domain. If needed (ex. the merchant starts giving you drama, the offer doesn't convert) - you replace it with a redirect.
You use other people's offers to test traffic sources, email sequences, landers. Then once you get it right you build your own products. People have been doing it for years.
That was my interpretation as well. It's not entirely bad advice since it is an existing product and you don't have to build one on your own in order to learn how to build a marketing machine.
"I think you can practice on your real business."
I'm inclined to agree with you however. This statement is doubly true if you take on client work while you build up a product company.
Maybe a better lesson to take out of this is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Establish several possible sources of income and be ready to push the pedal to the metal when one them starts getting more traction than the other ones.
Even buying and reselling iPhones on eBay can teach you a lot of the basics - and you want those basics in place when you're starting to actually set up something ambitious.
That's nicely said.