[option_greek]

>Sales Mistake #1 - Building Before you Start Selling

What if the customer wants to see a demo ? Is it better to inform them from the very start that this is a conversation about the product that is non existent ? Isn't it better to have a MVP in place.

Almost all the sales guides/people tell this. But this is also something I can't get my head around.

[Fergi]

(Jeff from PipelineDB / author here)

Good questions!

I would definitely suggest being straightforward and honest with the potential customers you're talking to. And ideally, it would be better to have a MVP you can demo than nothing, but the main point here is that talking to potential customers before building anything is a better strategy than building a product and then talking to customers.

If you talk to a bunch of potential customers about a product idea and discover that there is demand for the product, then building a MVP that you can demo would be a logical next step. And if the MVP is something you can build quickly, then it probably makes sense to do this sooner than later.

The trap to avoid here is building products in a vacuum, based on assumptions about what people want and will pay for. Doing the customer development (pre-sales) work to prove, or disprove, customer demand for a product before building the product is wise.

[mlthoughts2018]

> “If you talk to a bunch of potential customers about a product idea and discover that there is demand for the product, then building a MVP that you can demo would be a logical next step. And if the MVP is something you can build quickly, then it probably makes sense to do this sooner than later.”

Sales to Engineering Managers:

Alright team, we’ve talked with a lot of customers and realized there is a huge demand for this thing called a perpetual motion machine. Let’s try to get a prototype built for the client on-site next week, ok?

Engineering Managers to Engineers:

Alright everyone, we scoped out this perpetual motion machine into 3 Jira tickets. The first ticket is 3 unitless Fibonacci numbers of work, to create the base machine we’re talking about here. The next ticket is another 3 units to have someone mock-up the motion part, not sure exactly what they want here but maybe just put an RC car underneath of the machine from the first ticket? Finally we saw “perpetual” in the request from sales and that really sounded like a time sink so we pushed back. We’re going to time box this one and call it a 2-pointer. We’re thinking don’t spend more than a few hours on the perpetual part. Let’s do it everyone!

Engineers to recruiters:

The job just isn’t allowing me to fulfill the technical goals I want to pursue.

Recruiters to engineers:

I’ve got a hot new start-up you’d be great for. They only pay 60% of market rates but they totally need someone who can build out their entirely unvetted vision of what products to sell!

[yread]

You should have really spent the time it took you to type in this over-the-top response to read the article with a bit more sympathy instead. It's not necessary to solve unsolvable technical challenges to make something that helps people.

[mlthoughts2018]

How do you know they are solvable if you pick what problems to solve before consulting engineers about feasibility or cost?

[slededit]

Go back and re-read the title, it's literally advice for Software Engineers.

[mlthoughts2018]

Why do you think my comments did not already account for that? The article claims that software engineers make the mistake of building before they sell, and advises an aggressive form of selling before building instead.

But that advice directly means to skip engineering due diligence (which very often requires building before you sell). It doesn’t matter if the person implementing the advice would be an engineer or a sales person or anyone else.

Your comment comes off as if it is supposed to glibly (and I think also rudely) undermine what I wrote, but in fact I think you didn’t understand what I wrote, and you seem to suggest that it would be impossible for an engineer (using the article’s advice) to fail to consult an engineering estimate of technical feasibility prior to selling something.

[avinium]

I want to hear from people who have actually done this. I suspect they all have well-known track records and are selling to people who trust them to deliver.

I still haven’t met anyone personally (myself included) who managed to presell software with nothing but a presentation.

I think the more common route is “find the first customer and build v1 for them as a consultant at a steep discount”.

[stingraycharles]

What we did was making a landing page somewhere, "sign up for limited beta access", and gauge interest that way. We collected a few email addresses, but it was mostly for validation of the idea, that there was a genuine audience.

[Fergi]

I think this is a smart strategy, and is essentially using marketing in the same way that this post suggests using sales, to gauge customer interest in a potential product. The extent to which manual sales outreach or the kind of marketing technique described here should be used likely depends on the kind of product in question. B2B products with higher contract prices and a smaller number of total potential customers will likely require a sales strategy, where B2C products with lots of users and lower contract values may be better served with this kind of marketing tactic.

Great point, though! This is an important topic to consider with marketing and sales strategy development. Thanks for the comment.

[slow_donkey]

I'm not fully qualified to answer but from my experience in building our product, sales isn't necessarily about pitching - if you're actively listening to potential users you're able to better understand what to even build. The article actually does a great job of explaining this imo.

[sdrothrock]

Sales people can sell things they don't have on hand, and doing the selling first can help verify that the proposed product is in fact, a good fit for the market (or that the market even exists).

[trevyn]

The fantasy product in their mind is often a more compelling product than the actual product. See: Kickstarter.

[softwarefounder]

Your 100% right.

Especially in mid to large B2B plays.

[pjmlp]

Most of the time that MVP can be done with some kind of wireframe tooling.

Customers just want to have a better picture how it is supposed to work, instead of looking at powerpoints.