Category Archives: Selling

When Customers Attack

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Not all of your customers will love you. 320px-LemonsharkIn fact, many of them won’t even like you. In my career building products and services, I have been referred to as: idiot, moron, incompetent, joker … and many, many more offensive terms involving profanity which I won’t reproduce here.

It is hard building something new and sending it into the world. As a maker, you feel that your work is a reflection of yourself and the way people respond to your product is how they respond to you. If they love your product you feel validated, but if they hate it you feel like a failure. You have to rise above that in business. You should not fear angry customers.

You should fear customer apathy.

The most dangerous thing for you and your business is customers who don’t care. They look at your product and move along. They never engage, they never care, they never think about it again.

You want customers to be angry, because that means that at least they care. Someone who is angry is someone who cared and was disappointed. Maybe the customer thinks your product is too hard to use, too expensive, not powerful enough, etc. Whatever the reason, they wanted your product to be better than it is. They wanted to love you.

Many of the best customers I’ve ever had, the ones that become evangelists for my products and brand, started off hating my products. It is by working hard to reverse their disappointment and make them happy that they become happier than someone who is satisfied at the beginning. An unhappy customer is a chance for true customer success.

So, how do you turn an angry customer into a friend? There is no one answer but here are a few things that will help:

  • Active listening. Respond quickly and clearly, demonstrating that you understand why they are angry. Many people get angry just because they feel ignored. Eschew automated email responses for personal phone calls or in person meetings.
  • Customer empowerment. As I mentioned – angry customers care. People who care have great ideas! Empower them by asking them how they would improve the product. What would they like to see done differently? Take that feedback and show them that you are listening through product improvements. Close the loop and ask what they think after the improvements are made.
  • Stay calm. If someone is screaming at you, it’s easy to get angry yourself. Always remain calm and treat them with respect. Your calm and respectful presentation will calm them down and have them treat you with respect in return.

It is not always possible to turn an angry customer into a friend. Sometimes customers are angry for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your product and are just using you as a punching bag. Even so, you need to treat every angry customer as an opportunity since you can never know that ahead of time.

We all want all of our customers to love us and be perfectly happy. That will never happen, so focus on the skills necessary to turn around bad relationships. You may find some of your best customers that way.

My new company, Outlier, is hiring our first few employees! If you are interested in joining an early stage company and working on the cutting edge of data intelligence, coffee is on me. Drop us a line here. 

 

Image made available by Albert Kok via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareALike License.

Cheating is Allowed

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One of the things I struggle tracingwith as an artist is a constant inferiority complex. While I am a pretty good illustrator, whenever I spend time on any art sites I see the amazing work done by others and feel like I am a complete novice. I’ve spent 20 years learning and perfecting my technique but these others make me feel like I’ve only just gotten started. How did they find an easy button where I still struggle?

If you are a founder of a company, you understand that feeling well. You see your friends and colleagues raise large rounds of funding or get lucrative acquisition offers and you are still struggling to get those first few meetings. Where is the easy button they found?

Often, when you feel this way, you are making some bad assumptions. For example, when I first see a beautiful illustration of a person’s face I always assume that the artist draws the same way I do – from memory or imagination. In reality, many artists trace photos. In fact, there is evidence that even the great Renaissance painters were tracing their subjects with the use of mirrors. Tracing is infinitely easier than drawing free hand, and the result is always significantly better.

However, by assuming they were approaching the problem a certain way I assumed they were simply better than me. In reality, they just found another approach to the problem which is easier and has much better results!

Some artists consider tracing to be cheating, but in reality no one cares. No one looks at a given piece of art and says “Well, they didn’t do this the hard way…”. The same is true for your company! Your goal is to build a successful business, not to build a business the hardest way possible.

What are some short cuts you can take as a founder?

  • Sell to your friends. Every enterprise software company’s first 10 customers are friends of the founder. In fact, many of those customers might buy the product only because they are friends! That is perfectly fine as long as you quickly move on to non-friend customers, since all they gave you was a head start.
  • Leverage existing networks. Every YCombinator enterprise software company launches with 50+ customers – how do they do it? Most of them are other YC companies who want to help out a fellow founder. You can do this as well, by plugging into the network of your investors and advisors.
  • Hire your old team. Many experienced founders initially hire people from the teams at their prior job. Considering how hard it is to hire in the technology market, having the advantage of a trusted relationship and existing work style is a great way to build your initial team. It’s both less risky and easier to close someone who knows you already.

These short cuts won’t build your business for you, but they do give you a head start in a time when you desperately need the help.

The next time you feel like things are really hard perhaps it is worth rethinking your approach to try and find a short cut. Or, maybe it’s just really hard.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Smoobs via the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Selling Your Company

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It happens to every founder at some point. Fsbo_tabletYou realize building your business is harder than you expected. You’ve been working for a few years without finding breakaway growth. The team is tired and losing some of their passion, overwhelmed by the work that needs to be done. You need to start a new round of fundraising soon and are not sure you want to invest another 3-4 years into building this company. All of a sudden, you find yourself thinking of selling.

Selling your company always seems like an attractive option. Instead of working harder you can get out now for a few millions dollars, pay back your investors and pocket a little extra for the few years of hard work. You read about it happening everyday in Techcrunch so why not you? You have a great team and an awesome product, some large company would surely pay for that.

Unfortunately, that is not how it works.

Companies are bought, not sold (as everyone will tell you). Selling your company when things are not going well requires a number of forces to converge in your favor at the same time:

  • An acquirer must have the need for your team, product or customers at a price you will accept.
  • Your team must be willing to work for the larger company for a few years.
  • Your investors must be willing to sell for a price that is likely a loss for them.

It is surprisingly rare that these three factors converge at the same time. When acquirers come knocking, you and your team might be fresh off a round of financing and flush with your dream of riches. When you and your team decide to sell there may be no acquirers ready to move. And even if your team and an acquirer are on board your investors might not be willing to give up.

That being said, selling while under distress can be done. It takes a lot of work on your part, as a founder, as you need to do a number of things at once:

  1. Focus on maximizing the value (and hence attractiveness) of your business by emphasizing the things acquirers will value. That includes your customers, product, team, etc.
  2. Spend a lot of time networking to find any and all potentially interested acquirers. You need two or more to get a decent deal in negotiations and these will usually come from existing partners who know your business well.
  3. Convince your team to continue to work hard during the search for an acquirer, despite all the uncertainty and unknowns. This can be the hardest part, especially if they are already feeling burned out.

It is a hard balance and few companies successfully navigate it. I have seen teams fall apart right before a deal is closed because of fear and uncertainty. I have seen great teams with great products look high and low never to find any interested acquirers. Even if you find an acquirer, most distressed companies are treated as “acqui-hires” which means the team gets a token bonus in addition to a job offer. A small reward for years of hard work.

The only real chance you have for being rewarded for all your hard work is to build a business that grows. If that looks impossible, maximize the strategic value you can provide through your product, team and customers while pursuing relationships with potential acquirers. In other words, the normal things you do as a founder.

So, time to get back to it.

Image made available By Prokopenya Viktor (my own picture collection) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Not All Customers Are Created Equal

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You have finished the first version of your product. Congratulations! Now it’s time to start selling to customers and generating all important revenue. At this stage you are probably eager for any and all customers that are interested in your product.

Before you start selling, it is important to understand what kinds of customers you want to pursue. While any paying customer can be considered a good customer, you don’t yet have the resources to sell everyone on everything that you do. Focus is critical and to focus, you need to segment your potential customers.

A simple way to segment your customers is as follows:

Customer Segments

In this simplistic customer segmentation, we have three types of customers: Big, Medium and Small. Note that while the potential revenue for a Big customer is much higher than Small customers, there are many more Small customers than Big customers. The labels Big, Medium and Small will have different meaning depending on your business. Big might refer to the size of the company (large enterprise) or complexity of the customer needs (custom solutions). The important factor in this segmentation is the inverse relationship between potential customer value and number of potential customers.

While you might be able to pursue Small, Medium or Big customers, you are probably not capable of pursuing all at the same time. The sales strategy for each segment will be different:

  • Big Customers require large amounts of time in sales and account management by dedicated salespeople. The sales cycle (total time to close the sale) may be measured in quarters.
  • Small Customers require self service products and strong marketing. Since revenue per customer is low you cannot afford to have a salesperson talk to all of them. So, you need to rely on customers finding you and signing up entirely on their own.
  • Medium Customers require a combination of an outbound sales force and strong marketing to reach them cost effectively.

Your target customer segment will dictate your sales strategy and hence your business strategy for the near term. It is important that you choose your segment wisely since it is easy to fall into some common traps:

  • The Over-Reach: You focus on Fortune 500 customers because you want brand name reference customers for your company, but you only have 6-9 months of runway. That’s not long enough to both complete the sale to companies of that size and raise additional funding, since the sales cycle for large enterprises can be 12-18 months.
  • Going Too Big: You focus on consumers but you have a complex product that they can’t understand without someone explaining it to them. You spend a lot on marketing in hopes of reaching tens of millions of consumers but can’t convert any of them, burning through all your capital.
  • Too Much TLC: You focus on a small customer segment with the goal of providing perfect customer service and spend a lot of time with each customer. Unfortunately, the segment isn’t large enough to support your business model and your deep customer service prevents you from growing your customer base fast enough.

Remember that the example customer segmentation here is simplistic and you should decide on the appropriate segmentation for your potential customers. Whatever you choose, make sure the segmentation reflects the market data you have available and not just your gut instinct. There is nothing worse than choosing to pursue Big customers, only to find out they don’t exist.

It may feel like you are giving up a big opportunity when you segment potential customers and only focus on some of them. That is only true in the short term, while your resources are limited. If you are successful with your first few customer segments, you can eventually grow to tackling all potential customers.

 

 

 

Negotiation Made Easy

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A significant amount of your time is spent selling when starting a company. Assuming you are good at selling your company/product/vision, you will often get to the point where you need to close the deal. In between the selling and signing the contract is a chasm that many inexperienced entrepreneurs struggle to cross: negotiation.

Negotiation is simply the act of agreeing on terms for a deal. If you have never done it before you may envision it like a TV show with adversarial parties sitting across a table trying to crush the other party. That is rarely the case. Most negotiations are between two parties who really want to reach a mutually beneficial deal and just need to establish the terms of the deal. That does not mean people will not try to take advantage of you, but let us assume a basic negotiation where both parties have good intentions.

The actual act of negotiation is simple. One party makes an offer and the other party either accepts the offer, makes a counter offer or ends the negotiation. This continues until the parties reach an agreement or part ways.

But how do you know what offers to make, and whether the offer you get from the other party is a good offer? To answer that you need to understand some basics of negotiation and a simple process will help.

Step 1: You Win or Lose Before You Start

It’s a general misconception that whether you get good terms for a deal is based on whether you are a good negotiator. That is almost never true. Good negotiators know that the person who gets better terms is the person who has a better BATNA.

BATNA stands for Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement and represents the worst case scenario for both parties if no agreement is reached. Whoever has the best outcome if there is no agreement has the advantage in the negotiation because they have less incentive to close the deal and can more easily walk away.

For example, let us say you are selling an apartment and someone moving to this city would like to buy it. If there are only a few apartments for sale and the buyer needs to move in the near future you have the advantage as the seller. You could choose not to sell the apartment and wait for another buyer (your BATNA) while the buyer would have to desperately find another of the few apartments for sale quickly (their BATNA). On the other hand, if there are many apartments for sale and the buyer is buying the property to rent it out then the buyer has the advantage. You might not be able to sell your apartment since there are so many for sale and the buyer can simply wait for a better deal elsewhere. In both cases, the BATNA determines which party has the power in the negotiation based on their incentive to close the deal.

The lesson here is to make sure you optimize your BATNA before even starting a negotiation. Consider some common deals you might close and how to position your BATNA for success:

  • If you are raising money, make sure you have plenty of runway (9-12 months at least) so that you are not under pressure to close quickly. Also be sure to line up as many potential investors as possible so you have your choice (and fallback).
  • If you are selling your product, always have a healthy pipeline of customers and never bet everything on selling to one particular customer. Try to avoid having one customer make up more than 50% of your revenue.
  • If you are hiring employees, start the hiring process long before you will need the person since it will take time to find the right candidate. Always interview multiple people for the position even if you think you have found the right fit, just in case you can’t close the deal.

Step 2: Get Into The Zone

While both parties have a BATNA (worst case), they also have a preference for the terms of the deal if it closes (best case). For example, if you are buying a house there is a price you would prefer to pay (practically speaking) and the seller has a price they would like you to pay. The combination of your BATNA and your preferences forms what is called the Zone Of Possible Agreement or ZOPA.

You can visualize the ZOPA as follows:

Negotiation

As you can see, both the buyer and the seller have a range of acceptable prices between their BATNA and their preference. The ZOPA is the overlap in these ranges, the difference between their BATNAs. Note that while this diagram uses Cost as the dimension of negotiation, it could easily be anything including the length of contract, legal terms or location.

If a deal gets closed, it will be in the ZOPA. Ideally, assuming both parties are interested in a mutually beneficial agreement, you would pick the midpoint of the ZOPA and that would be the terms of the deal. 

How then do you know where the ZOPA lies? Very few partners will tell you their BATNA, even if they have the best intentions. They have no incentive to reveal their true BATNA and if they can convince you their BATNA is higher/lower than it really is then they can convince you the ZOPA is smaller and get favorable terms.

And in that tension is where negotiation exists.

Step 3. Choose Your Strategy

When you are negotiating you know your BATNA and your preference but not for the other party. Hence, you know one end of the ZOPA but not the other end. There are a number of strategies you can employ to determine the scope of the ZOPA and/or reach a deal on favorable terms.

Here are some examples:

  1. High Initial Offer. To try and determine the BATNA of the other party, you can start with an arbitrarily high (or low) offer. Anchoring the negotiation will force the other party to start higher (or lower) than they might have otherwise and hopefully expose their BATNA quickly. This is why cars are priced so highly on the lot of a dealership, even though no one pays those prices. Dealerships want to determine your capacity to pay and motivation to buy.
  2. This or That. The initial offer does not need to be a single offer and instead could be two different offers with different kinds of terms. For example, you might make two offers of a loan where one has a high interest rate while the other has a pre-payment penalty. The other party, in indicating their preference for one of the options, will help you understand the ZOPA and guide the negotiations in a positive direction.
  3. Iteration. Since neither party knows enough about the other, you can make offers back and forth in an iterative fashion and slowly converge on a result in the middle. Each offer moves toward the other party’s previous offer by some small amount. This slow process of back and forth allows you both to understand the other party’s range and ensure you end up somewhere in the middle of the ZOPA. Most international diplomacy involves this kind of strategy since the parties disclose so little of their internal plans.
  4. Take it or Leave it. In this method, you make an offer to the other party that they can either accept or not but that will be the end (no counter offers). Since you don’t know the other party’s BATNA, you make a guess and give them an offer based on that guess. This is most common when one party knows it has the superior BATNA and can force the deal to be more favorable to them.

Whatever strategy you choose, it is important to consider the impact of the initial offer especially if you are making the initial offer. Whatever the initial offer you make, you will rarely get better terms and in almost all cases you will get worst terms. Hence, you need to make sure that your initial offer is not your BATNA or you will not be able to iterate with your partner.

For example, when negotiating your salary for a new job you should realize that when you are asked for your current salary they are asking you to make an initial offer. You should not ask for a million dollars, but you should tell them what you think you are worth and not the least amount you are willing to accept.

The best negotiators are the ones who can convince you that their BATNA is much different than it really is and in doing so get favorable terms on a friendly basis.

Step 4. Plan For The Long Term

Unlike selling your house, deals that you close when building your business will likely impact your business for the long term. You want to build a positive relationship with your customers, employees and investors that will span many deals and many years. Hence, you need to optimize for long term relationships and not just short term deal terms. This means choosing a strategy that will maximize both the terms of the deal and future deal potential.

With this in mind, it is often not a good idea to pursue aggressive strategies and hard nose negotiation where you win a given deal but decrease the likelihood of future deals. At the same time, friendly but prolonged negotiations can give partners the impression that you are hard to deal with and have a similar negative effect on future deals. Being practical and productive in negotiations will establish your reputation and open doors in the future.

For example, when hiring people for a start up company it can be a good idea to pursue the This or That strategy where you give the employee a choice between a low salary and high equity or high salary and low equity. This gives the employee a chance to show their preference and reduces the amount of negotiation necessary to reach a favorable term.

Conclusion: Negotiations Are Not Basic

While the discussion here involves a single dimension of negotiation where each party has a single BATNA, preference and ZOPA, that rarely occurs. In most negotiations there will be many different dimensions such as cost and time, each with their own ZOPA. You will need to give in on some terms to get better outcomes on other terms. Always keep track of the terms that are most important to you and never drop below your BATNA or else you may find yourself in deals that are not worth doing.

To learn more about negotiation I suggest reading Getting to YES, now included on the Reading List.