Signing up your first 20 B2B paying customers

Hemant Joshi, Co-Founder - Sapience Analytics

Following the Innovation CurveFounders have

to sell

•Are you an entrepreneur or a product developer? – Remember you are building a product business– It may be a cool product, but is it a viable business?

•You have thought about the product, target market, pricing,

and value to customers, more than anyone else– If founder cannot articulate the product value and sell, how do you expect

others to do so?– You are in best position to respond to questions, commit to future changes,

and decide the price to close those first deals

•A good sales person is expensive, so do you really have a

choice?

First mile - why founders must do the selling

•Learn from your initial selling experiences– Product Features (e.g. Sapience dropped Task Management)– Product Positioning (e.g. Sapience as Enterprise Productivity solution)– Business Model and Pricing (e.g. Cloud + On-premise, fixed price initially

and subscription later)

•Benefit from your rapport with first customers– Get first hand experience about how your product is being used– Discover and implement possible integration opportunities with other

products they have– Have them refer you to new prospects– Get their agreement to provide reference, testimonials and case study

Advantages of selling to early Adopters

Thank you