30. Learn the difference between people who might buy your product and people who are just commenting. Pay obsessive attention to the former. Ignore the latter.
How do you do the first part?
How do you do the first part?
You use a sales technique called "qualifying", and when you figure it out, you do it all the time, and not just with potential customers, but also with potential investors, candidates, and even reporters.
(This is part of the art of sales that many founders today refuse to learn.)
To qualify a prospect (potential customer), at the end of every interaction, you should determine from them what has to happen from here for them to pull the trigger. You do this by asking questions, and testing the answers -- have them lay out their process for making the decision, have them identify the steps that have been reached and the steps that have not, have them identify other people in their organization who can block the purchase, and so on. And you do this over and over again until you get the sale.
If the prospect can't lay out the logical sequence of steps from here to close, then you need to qualify them out and stop spending time with them, because they're not going to buy.
Two interesting corollaries:
* Yes, there are a LOT of people in a LOT of companies (as well as a lot of potential investors, potential recruits, etc.) who will spend a lot of time with you even though they can't ultimately pull the trigger. A lot of people like to windowshop, and a lot of people have nothing better to do.
* Like a lot of sales techniques, this sounds to engineers like it might be hard (will the potential customer tolerate all those questions?) But any serious potential customer will have a very easy time answering the questions, and will respect their potential vendor for being professional in the sales process.
(a) Very cheap products -- the problem with very cheap products is that you can't afford to spend very much money selling or marketing them unless you are selling them in gigantic volume.
We see this a lot in raw startup land (including YC). Company X has a product Y and it's selling for price $Z. But product Y actually costs $A to sell (a single instance to a customer) -- fully loaded -- including cost of marketing, cost of sales, cost of implementation, etc. When Z < A, you're in real trouble as you try to scale. (This is called "selling dollar bills for 90 cents"... or 50 cents, or 5 cents.)
The answer, of course, is to raise price until Z > A. If you can't do that, they you have a bigger problem (people aren't finding value in your product).
The number of product founders these days who will engage seriously on this point is shockingly low. They would do much better in their businesses and in their fundraising if they did.
(b) Ad-supported products. If you are direct selling your ads, then you're in the same boat as any company selling product -- one of the ironic twists of the big ad-supported Internet companies is that they're actually enterprise sales companies at their heart (selling ads to businesses). For example, the salesforces at Google and Facebook have more in common with the salesforces at Oracle and Cisco than you'd think.
If you outsource ad sales to an ad network, you can sidestep this... but then the ad network needs to actually perform for you, which generally they don't, at least as a sole source of revenue.
During an interview last week with Entertainment Tonight, Winfrey was asked if she had personally experienced racism. She responded with an anecdote about a clerk at a shop in Switzerland who had recently refused to show her an expensive bag, even though she repeated her request multiple times.
"That one will cost too much, you won't be able to afford that," Winfrey claimed the clerk told her.
That shop assistant, identified only as Ariadna N., spoke to Blick on Sunday, and denied Winfrey's version of events. Ariadna said she showed Winfrey the Jennifer Aniston range of bags, explained that they come in different sizes and materials and pointed out a less expensive alternative when Winfrey expressed interest in the 35,000 franc (more than $37,000) purse at the top of the display.
"Believe me, normally people are excited when I come to their stores," Winfrey said. "It's very unusual when I'm not practically dragged into a boutique. Dozens of people will be pressing their noses against the windows to get a look at me shopping."
...
"The woman at the shop said that it was the Jennifer Aniston bag that Tom Ford had created especially for Jennifer," Winfrey told Blick. "It crossed my mind that maybe I should give Jennifer or Tom a call. I know both of them very well."
The best thing to do, if you can, is go on the road with a really good salesperson. I really encourage technical people (including founders) in companies to do this, it's highly educational about how the "real world" operates and how big businesses get built.