Last week, I talked about the importance of entrepreneurial execution. I said, "A big part of execution is the sales and marketing which converts an idea into value."
Then, during the week, I read an interesting article. And, instead of trying to paraphrase, I figured you should hear from the source.
The author was a gentleman named Harry Red. The article was titled, "Why Even Space Startups Insist Sales Are More Important Than Technology." And it had a subtitle of, "It doesn't matter how great your product is -- if you can't sell it, you'll never be able to make it."
Here is the article, in its entirety:
When
entrepreneurs get a new idea, they tend to wonder about how they can
build it and what technology they'll need. They dive in, work like
crazy and finally end up with a solution.
Bad
move. If you can't sell your solution, your technical work amounts to
precisely nothing.
Space
technology startups know this well. Working on ambitious ideas in an
industry most people consider outlandish, you'd think they have their
hands full with technology only.
But
guess what? Successful space companies assign a special priority to
sales. They know every dollar and minute spent on tech must
ultimately justify itself.
To save
you a mountain of time, here are some space industry secrets to get
the information you need without doubling down on product
development.
1. Test
for market need by pre-selling.
Take
Jane Poynter, founder and CEO of World View Enterprises -- a space
company which aims to use special high-altitude balloons as both a
new kind of satellite and as a vehicle to take passengers on a trip
almost 20 miles up into the sky. In an interview, Poynter told me:
“The
moment we started talking about World View and the kinds of things we
were going to do, our phone rang off the hook.”
Early
on, Poynter experienced strong enthusiasm from her potential
customers. People wanted to use their technology for all kinds of
things. Hence, she saw a market need and redoubled her efforts to
serve it. She sold the value proposition underneath the technology
before developing it.
If your
vision is so ambitious that people just won't believe you can do it,
then don't panic. You just need to make your voice more authoritative
so the right people can't ignore you.
For
instance, Astrobotic Technology -- a space logistics company aiming
to deliver payloads to the moon -- built significant authority over
nine years by assembling a credible team of space scientists and
engineers. And thus, it managed to pre-sell its logistics services to
big clients. Suddenly, it no longer sounds crazy.
As
Astrobotic CEO John Thornton told me: "The ultimate way to test
for market need is by selling and collecting checks.”
You need
to do the same. Describe what value your product or service will
deliver for your customers and see if you can get them to buy it
before it's built. Score even a few pre-sales and your voice will
already weigh more -- and thus your vision will seem more attainable.
And once
you start building, you're still not off the hook.
2. See
if somebody already solved your technology problem.
Even
when you do have a genuine technology problem, chances are somebody
out there already had a crack at it.
Alistair
Brett, a World Bank science commercialization expert and partner at
innovation consultancy firm Rainforest Strategies, pointed out how
science-based companies tend to reinvent the wheel. They face a
specific technical problem, but can't find a solution outside the
company, so they just roll their own.
“In a
substantial number of cases, the problem has been solved by somebody
who is not directly working in that field of research or
development," Brett said in an interview.
He gave
an example of a company that struggled to create a chemical adhesive.
The solution was eventually found by an electrical engineer --
someone from an outside industry. An expert on a different kind of
stickiness.
Bottom
line? When you face a technical problem as an entrepreneur and go out
to find an existing solution, a brief search won’t do. Instead,
make a special search effort, because the solution might lie hidden
outside your industry. See if you can find an expert on a similar
problem and learn how they solved it.
Outside
experts can help you stumble upon innovations. But watch out: an
innovation by itself isn't the point. You have to go sell it.
For
instance, when I spoke with Chad Anderson, managing director of Space
Angels Network, a large community of investors and entrepreneurs in
the private space industry, he told me:
“Engineers
and scientists often discount the difficulty of getting an innovation
out into the market. For the innovations that stick, it all comes
down to the CEO and the team. It's a sales job.”
See the
point? For an innovation to stick, you must be its salesperson.
Successful space companies learned this lesson early on.
But, you
don't need to have a space company to take value from their efforts.
3. Take
a down-to-Earth example.
Let's
say you want to solve information technology (IT) problems for small
law firms.
First
step? Consider talking to larger law firms, because law firms with
in-house IT departments have wisdom for you. They can tell you what
kind of problems lawyers have with IT, what technology they need to
solve them, how much time this takes away from clients and so on.
Instead of starting the puzzle from scratch, you extract wisdom from
those who've been there before. Simple.
Then,
you go talk to smaller law firms and put your new insights to the
test.
Do they
have the same problems? Can you pre-sell your value proposition?
Better yet, will these law firms pay you right now so you can deliver
a killer solution to their problems once you have everything in
place?
Start
this way and you save yourself from grinding through much of the
initial learning curve.
Remember:
It's always a sales job, even if you aim for the sky.
