Bringing the first sale & evolving your start-up.

” How to develop the good story that will resonate with customers?
Getting that first customer to bite is a major challenge. How should startups approach the issue of getting their first purchaser, investor or corporate partner? The short answer is to know themselves and their market, and how to tell that story.

Clarifying what a startup is doing, why it is doing it and whom it is doing it for is key to avoiding the steep failure rate that is the fate of the large majority of startups. Developing an accurate story that will resonate with customers â€” whether they are buyers, investors or potential partners — is essential.

Your data will tell you a lot

What is the value proposition involved in your product or service? While founders likely feel that they know that, they need to test and expand their knowledge with data relating to prospective customers’ actual needs. A lot of tools, including analytics, event tracking and sales and support programs, have made gathering data easier. 

Tailor your offer & the message

Startups will need to craft different messages for different sectors, entities and investors. Online tools can help startups clarify this information based on their data, providing them with ideas on how to present messages in the most effective manner to specific audiences.

All of this preliminary work will help your startup with whatever goal it is trying to accomplish. It might be direct sales, applications for partnerships or fundraising. A startup’s clarity of mission — what problems it is trying to solve and for whom — will help it reach out to the market more effectively and bring it closer to closing its first “sale.”

Don’t discount, but do throw in freebies

Discounting your product or service devalues the product for the customer you’re selling to, giving them tacit permission to misuse and waste it. This can turn a good customer into a mediocre or poor customer. Furthermore, try removing the discount from a price once it’s promised.

Instead, your first few customers should be on a pilot program that has different, not discounted, pricing. The pricing is different because it allows for something in return. It doesn’t matter what that something is as long as it aligns with your business goals. 

Make sure the pilot program and the different pricing have a defined and communicated end date.

You could be offering free unlimited support, free shipping, two for the price of one. As long as it doesn’t devalue the product or service itself, it doesn’t matter what you give away.

Make sure you learn from each of the signals from each new customer prospect at each stage of the sale. Because as you scale, the challenge will be to wring more and more profitability out of each subsequent sale — big, small, and in between.

Market your product before it’s ready.

Some businesses wait until their product is perfect before they do any marketing or awareness campaigning. That can be a costly mistake. Many businesses expect to sell their product as soon as it’s ready. But if no one knows about it, then demand will start at zero until you undergo a marketing campaign to build brand awareness for potential customers.

It’s better to do preemptive awareness campaigning, even if it’s minimal, to let potential customers know your product is coming. You can sell the benefit before the product has arrived. This way, when the product is ready, so are customers!

Advertising doesn’t have to be expensive!

We know the hardships of starting out – and thankfully there’s plenty of ways to let people know your business exists without spending too much while doing so.

Before you go out there to tell everyone about your product or service, consider offering a discount code or throwing in something extra to entice people more to check out what it is that you are offering.

Every action you take online has the potential to drive traffic back to your store. Add your store URL to your personal online profiles, such as your Twitter bio or your Disqus profile for blog comments (remember: don’t spam audiences with low-quality promotional messages. Instead, look to provide value and make authentic connections).

Many entrepreneurs get their first few sales from their personal connections, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So share your store on your personal Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts to announce it to your entire network. While any sales you get this way aren’t going to be as satisfying as when you earn a complete stranger’s trust as a customer, this is a good way to solicit early feedback.

You should consider creating a business page for your brand on Instagram and Facebook, this way you will look professional and you can start promoting your products or services with relevant hashtags and descriptions.

There’s plenty of free tools that will help you create graphics for your posts, one of them is Canva.com

Being Search-Friendly

Your customers can’t buy from you if they can’t find you! Make sure you’re making yourself available in a few different ways.

Google Maps If you have a physical store, do not brush off putting the location on Google Maps. Despite what you might think, a decent chunk of customers prefer to shop at physical locations, and a lot do a mixture of both online and in-person shopping. By putting your location on the map, you’ll encourage visitors and start building up reviews.

Search Engine Optimization SEO doesn’t have to mean cramming as many keywords into every sentence as possible, and knowing the best practices is vital to properly set up your online store. You should figure out what your target keywords are (make them relevant and clear), and read up on how to best implement them into your site, from the URL to the image file name.

Mobile-Friendly Despite something like 99% of the US population owning phones, a shocking number of eCommerce websites (and websites in general) do not have a responsive, mobile-friendly design. Get ahead of the game and open yourself up to mobile shoppers and desktop shoppers alike by making sure that both of them love the experience of browsing your wares.

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of tools and methods of marketing your business which are free or affordable and will let you land those first sales quicker than ever.