How To Get Your First Customers

So you have an idea for a startup. Great! But how do you test whether there is a real need for it in the market? You need to ensure there are customers that find your product useful. That is where sales come into play.

No matter your background, it’s very important that you as the founder can sell your product. You need to validate the demand and understand what success looks like in the sales process before ever hiring an outside sales team. These first few customers you speak to will provide great feedback that will steer your product in the right direction.

An overview on how the sales process works

1. Get a list of potential customers.

2. Message them where they hang out the most. Ask yourself, which channel is the best to get in touch with them.

3. Schedule meetings. Speak with your customers to better understand their needs and demo the product. Here, it is very important to ask them a lot of questions to qualify them as early adopters.

4. Disclose the price to them and close the sale.

5. Onboard them and ensure they are using the product. Continue communicating with your customers to improve the product and generate ideas for new features.

Who should I target as my first customers?

1. Go after your easiest customers first.

After you built a funnel and are booking meetings with potential customers, focus on the customers you are most likely to close. Often, you can tell by your qualifying questions whether or not the prospect is likely to close. If they are moving very slowly, it is okay to let it go and focus your attention on more likely customers.

2. Take advantage of your existing network.

Start with people in your network to close early sales. These are the people most likely to be early champions of the product and kickstart your organic growth.

3. Sell to small companies.

Large companies often have larger sales cycles with a lot of built-in bureaucracy. However, startups are more nimble and willing to implement a new product quickly.

95% of people are not early adopters. Most people are just not going to care when you reach out to them. That is okay. Send more outbound messages and look for trends to discover who the early adopters are.

So how do you reach out to customers to elicit a response?

1. Keep it relatively short, around 6-8 sentences.

2. Don’t get super technical, use clear language.

3. Address the problem at hand.

4. Don’t use HTML formatting. Keep the email simple.

5. Say that you are the founder. Explain to them that you created the company and are uniquely qualified to solve this issue.

6. Have a link to your website. The website should clearly explain what your product is and how they can use it.

7. Have a call to action.

Track everything

Make sure that you are tracking each step in the process. Work backwards to understand how many people you need to reach out to to close a sale. For example, to close 2 customers you may need to reach out to 500 people.

Use a CRM to track these metrics for you automatically. It is very important to understand these metrics and accumulate an ample amount of data early on.

Outbound sales is a numbers game. Don’t expect to close 50% of all leads because it is just not going to happen. Increase your outbound sales, A/B test, and see where the biggest drop-off is in the sales cycle.

Should you charge your first customers?

The short answer is, yes. If they don’t pay you anything, they aren’t really customers. You need to make sure that there is a real need in the market for your product, and that this product is worth paying for.

If you discover that the potential customers are not willing to pay, move on to the next one. You need to focus your attention on the early adopters that are willing to give you money for the value you are providing them.

Strategies

B2C

• A free trial

  • 1 to 2-week free trial.

  • Ask for their credit card information upfront.

B2B

• Money-back guarantee.

  • Self-explanatory, if they are not happy with the service they are able to get their money back.

• Opt-out of Annual Contract

  • Allow the customer to opt out of the annual contract and instead only pay through the current month

To find the optimal price, continue increasing it until the customers start to complain. Maximize your revenue per customer while not increasing churn.

Tools to Use

Below are a few tools to use in the sales process. There are so many to choose from, but these are our favorites.

Apollo.ai

Close.com

Hunter.io

Pipedrive.com

Startwave.io

We hope you found this article useful. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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