A Few Notes on Effective Sales & Growth Strategy

Growth is critical for the survival of businesses, whether a start-up or an established company, in any industry. Finding the right growth strategy is more critical now given with increased competition, globalization of value-chains, and easy access of information. Yet so many times we become obsessed with our technology or product, that we miss the big picture. For a business to grow, someone has to be willing to open his wallet and buy the product. Sale cycle can vary from industry to industry, but it’s critical to start with the correct first step – How to turn a prospective customer into an interested customer in the first meeting?

A common error is to focus on details of your product / offering, while missing why it’s important to the customer. The product can be the next best thing since the slice of bread, but it doesn’t mean much if the value to the customer is not clearly articulated. You have to be in your customer’s shoes, and translate the ‘features’ of your product to the ‘value’ to the customers. The value to the customer will likely fall into one of these three categories –

1.     How will it help the customer to produce more? In other words, how will your technology / product help your customer to increase his revenue. You might come up with a new chip that is 5x cheaper, a material that will reduce clogs in the extruder, or a new search engine. Your offering will not mean much until it’s clear how it will increase your customer’s top line. In this example it might mean penetration into market segment that’s cost conscious, increased run time & through-put from the extruder, or new customers from targeted ads.

2.     How will it help the customer to produce at a lower cost? These are the solutions that will help customer become more productive. With the advent of various enterprise and IT solutions, the resultant savings at the customer need to be understood your product to be a success. It’s one thing to develop an enterprise-wide solution to manage supply chain, but more important to understand customer’s savings due to better demand forecast, fewer missed deliveries, or better AR conversion rate.

3.     How will the new features of my product enable my customers to command higher price? This is where improved properties of your product translate into new properties in your customer’s product and someone is willing to pay a premium for that. It can be a new electrolyte that’s stable at higher voltage in a li-ion battery to a new film combination that can increase the brightness of a laptop by 2%, but the value of these differentiated features in the value-chain needs to be understood. In addition to leading to a successful sales process, this exercise will be useful to effectively price your product based on its value.

Not matter what stage your product is in – from idea to almost commercial, understanding and translating its value to the customer, will be a critical for the success of that product and growth of your business.