I'm bootstrapping a software startup, and before going too far in doing development work, I'd like to see if anyone is even interested in my offerings. The big problem is that I have almost zero sales experience. My background is purely in Engineering. Are there any books, talks, activities you guys recommend to get good at getting to know the customer's needs and how to talk about how my product will help them? My biggest source of hesitation/discomfort is lack of experience, otherwise I'm not a shy person.
Mahan Khalsa - “Let’s get real or let’s not play” is a great place to start. It’s less about learning “selling” and more about how learning to communicate, inquire, and understand your customers needs - and how that leads to more sales.
Finding a customer to talk to unless you have a really strong network is a much harder problem. I’d spend my time setting up cold emails, getting people on the phone or in person instead. Most of your sales pitches will fail (probably even if you spent a year reading about sales) so you’ll get a ton of practice just putting yourself out there. If you think you’re ready to sell you’ve waited too long. Your potential customers will tell you what they want not generic books.
If you’re b2c your friends and family is a good place to start if you are b2b it’s hard as hell. Even the YC partners at least publicly have said something like “I don’t know what to say we just have them use the internal YC network”. Let me just say it’s much much harder than you think it will be unless you get really lucky. For b2b, I haven’t found any shortcuts other than cold calling/emailing/messaging people with a very low respond rate.
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