[xgb84j]

Here what has worked for us:

Talk to potential customers and use very open ended questions. Be upfront that you are doing market research about delivery app usage in restaurants. Start with something like "How is using delivery apps going for you?" The opener the question the better. Most people love to complain. So your hope is that they rant about their biggest problem. If they don't ask about other areas until they start ranting.

After you found a problem, ask follow up questions about how the problem is impacting them personally. (People don't care about their company, they care about their salary, promotions, if their boss likes them etc.) This will help you later in selling your product, when you call back the person 3 months from now with a prototype.

When you have a concrete product or prototype that you show off, the best indicator is that people ask if they can buy the product right now. If they don't or you have to ask them if they are interested it's probably not solving an important problem for them.

PS: This works for B2B. B2C is probably different.

[moneywoes]

Can you talk about the dichotomy for B2C? I ask since the small businesses like restaurants seem reminiscent of B2C.

[xgb84j]

Small business already have all the relevant characteristics of selling B2B. They have much more in common with a large multinational company than with a consumer, with regard to the sales techniques we use.

The main difference I see is, that with B2C you need to find a useful product and the rest is marketing. This is my simplistic view as somebody who doesn't do B2C. There is lots of nuance, but I believe you need a similar skillset for most B2C ideas.

B2B has a larger logical component to product design and sales pitch and a much more individualised emotional component.

The logical component is about what to sell to solve a specific problem. If you have different products that each increase a company's revenue by a million dollars, some of those won't sell for 0 dollars and for some you can charge more than a million. Why? Because the company doesn't make any decisions. The people within that company will buy what helps them and a sales representative will pay a million of the companies money to make a million more in revenue, because his numbers go up.

For the restaurants that means they might not pay anything for automation in regards to online delivery, because they don't even recognize how much time they waste. If they don't see a problem or only a temporary problem you won't sell your solution.

The emotional component is also very individual when selling B2B, because people have hidden agendas. They want a tool because their numbers go up and then they get a promotion. They want to start a project to make their boss pat them on the back. The want a tool that saves them time, so they can go home earlier and see their kids.

You see it's all about finding the right angle to solve a problem in B2B. It needs to solve some problem for the business and it must solve a big problem for the person you are selling to that they are emotionally invested in.

With restaurant owners it might mean that saving the owner two hours a week is worth nothing to them because they still need the same number of employees and it's not their two hours but their employee's.