Senor

CEO

Untested product sales

I’m struggling with sales of an untested product in a brand new startup. For context its a video-chat enabled collaboration, media sharing and e-signing platform. How do you get past the first barrier and have early adopters? (We mainly target real estate agents)

👑 Sales Strategy

💌 Cold Emailing

📞 Cold Calling

20 comments

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CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Y'all need to test it. For real.

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

Why would I pay for an untested product?

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

If anything, you should be giving it away to get feedback and hopefully generate some word of mouth referrals.

Cold calling real estate agents to say: "Hey I know Keller Williams probably pays for zoom and DocuSign, but how about you pay for something unproven you've never heard of?" Is unlikely to yield results.

Senor

Contributor

CEO

We’ve been doing 6 month free trails, the main pushback is really getting them to use an alternative tool.

UrAssIsSaaS

Arsonist

SaaS Eater

If you cant get them to use it for free this is a huge red flag that the problem your hoping to solve isnt a real problem for agents. Like @braintank said, why should they use you instead of zoom/docusign? Whats the real deep pain point they have with those platforms and how are you better.

If you can figure that out then selling becomes easy. I dont think you have a product yet that actually solves a problem. You're trying to sell vitamins, not painkillers.

Go back to those customers you have tried to trial with, ask them what would motivate them to move away from their current systems, then go build that. Try and sell it, if that works, great, if not, rinse and repeat until you have something that the market actually values.

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

Is it 10x better than what they have now?

Senor

Contributor

CEO

@braintank yes, at least. In terms of functionality its the best thing out there, the ui is not super clean looking and we are fixing that but I’m not convinced thats the problem.

@UrAssIsSaaS thats exactly what we have been doing rinse and repeat. However I only have one dev and every change takes weeks… (budget issues as it is completely bootstrapped)

UrAssIsSaaS

Arsonist

SaaS Eater

Have you ever sold anything before?

Let me rephrase this. Did you build this product out of thin air or are you solving a problem potential customers have told you about.

Senor

Contributor

CEO

We built this from customer feedback on previous products. But since we have not had active users we donthave real user feedback

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

i am not GTM expert but in my mind you get past the first barrier by being SUPER focused on who you are selling to and exactly what problems you are solving for.

Identify what does your platform do that Zoom, docusign does not do.

hopefully there is something solid haha

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

Great points.

Then -- let them use it for 3 months for free in exchange for meeting periodically to provide feedback.

Senor

Contributor

CEO

That’s the exact strategy we are implementing, the real issue has been changing the way they work essentially. We did get a patent for the differences in our solution but since we are a 3 man team all in it has been hard to actually do extended outreach

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

What's the feedback from the agents so far?

Senor

Contributor

CEO

It has been super positive, everyone keep saying its a game changer but not actually using it. I think it’s because they dont have actual buy in or anything in the line

UrAssIsSaaS

Arsonist

SaaS Eater

How long are these feedback conversations? It sounds like they are blowing smoke up your ass. If it was truly a game changer they would be using it. Start probing more around "Why" they think its so great but are not switching. You probe enough and youll get answers.

Im going to go back to my original questions when I was being a smart ass but now im being serious.

Have you ever sold before?

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

"It's a game changer but I'm not using it".

So you're saying... it isn't a game changer?

SADNESSLieutenant

Politicker

Officer of ♥️

Offer a free trial, satisfaction guarantee

Pachacuti

Politicker

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

You can ask about their acceptable level of risk. Are they 'bleeding edge' people and comfortable with being first to market? Or do they need to be serial #1000 with 99.999% of all bugs fleshed out.

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

Sales Rep

Probs should test it

technonaut

Valued Contributor

Solutions Engineering Leader

Social relationships to get the first beta testers will win the day. Get out there and build relationships with small and midsize companies to test with, while building enterprise relationships who could be customer #5

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