Do Engineers Go Grocery Shopping

There’s an issue I come across again and again among small businesses started by engineers.

They have great systems for managing workflow, creating product and communicating among the engineers and they have no sales process. They don’t see that what works well when building product would work equally well when selling it.

Convenient not Essential

The primary reason small businesses fail is insufficient customer demand. This is most common in years two to five after founding. There are two triggers for this and it’s important not to confuse them with root cause.

1. You exhaust your network and sales growth slows.

2. Your initial success draws a response from an incumbent.

The root cause is that the product or service is not essential to the target customer’s workflow. Most likely this is because you don’t understand that workflow and where your product will fit.

You have three options:

1. Change your message.

2. Change your offer.

3. Change customer.

The Grocery Store Rule

Picture where the goods are placed in your favourite grocery store. At the checkout are the impulse purchases that are nice-to-have, such as chewing gum.

Further back are the meal ingredients, ready packaged but requiring thought to piece together. At the back is the delicatessen counter with its server assistance.

Supermarkets know that the more convenient and less essential a product is then the easier it must be to buy.

3 Questions to Reposition your Product or Service 

Say you’re selling something to help people do their job. It may be an app, data or analytics. Is it essential?

There is one rule: the more convenient and less essential your tool the easier it must be to adopt.

If you have a better way for marketers to organise a database you free them to do more productive work, but you’re not winning them more business. Change your message to position yourself by:

1. Asking what they would work on if they had more time.

2. Asking what benefit that would bring and how they would feel.

3. Asking what the benefit is worth if you deliver it to them.

Tweak Your Offer

If you sell data that helps investors make decisions are you promising better investment returns? If you imply this you threaten people’s jobs. Consider changes to your offer that make it fit with customers’ workflow, interact with existing technology rather than selling standalone applications, and don’t transfer data and expect users to know how to extract value from it.

Find New Customers

I worked with a business that sold services to researchers. It offers outsourced processes that improve efficiency. The researchers felt threatened and the firm churned through a few sales people trying to find the right one.

Eventually the company figured out that the customer was the legal department which had lots of tasks they hated doing. There is no threat from efficiency to qualified lawyers. The change in customer lead to the company selling for nine figures a few years later.

Bear this in mind if you sell artificial intelligence solutions. Unless your pitch is purely as a cost saving you need users to want your product. Use the three questions above.

Breakdown Silos to create a Sales Process

A sales process is a seamless communication between marketing, sales and product, regardless of how many people are in each role.

I regularly meet engineers adept at creating smooth dialogue between designers, developers and testers who don’t appreciate how they should interact with other parts of the business. They have key skills to offer others but too frequently are walled off in silos.

I'm Simon Maughan and I write The PROFIT Elevator as a guide for smaller businesses to accelerate growth.

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