Tips for Managing Sales Before Product-Market Fit

 

Introduction

Sales are the lifeblood of any organization. But, when you’re just starting out and your business is still searching for product-market fit, it can be challenging to drive sales and grow your company. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the challenges that small businesses face before they reach product-market fit, as well as tips for managing sales in a business with limited growth potential before reaching that point. Read on to learn more.

 

What is product-market fit?

Product-market fit is the point at which your product is meeting a demand in the marketplace and you have found a group of customers who will purchase your product. When you have product-market fit, you’ll be able to drive sales without having to do a lot of marketing or investor relations. It’s also an important milestone from a hiring perspective because it will make it easier to find sales reps who can help you scale the business. Product-market fit means that there is a need for your product, and customers are willing to pay for it.

 

Why is it so hard to find product-market fit?

Finding product-market fit for a new business is challenging for a few reasons. First, you’re probably not sure who your customers are, which makes it hard to find out if they want to buy your product or if they’re willing to pay for it. Second, if you haven’t launched your product yet, you’re not getting real feedback from customers. It’s challenging to know if you’re building something that people want to buy. Finally, even if you do have a good idea of who your customers are and what they want, it’s difficult to find a group of people who are willing to pay for your product before it’s even launched, or at least refined and ready for mass adoption.

 

Hire slowly and carefully with the resources you have

As you ramp up sales, it’ll be important to hire more sales reps quickly, but you don’t want to rush the recruiting process. Before you jump into the hiring process, take a step back and make sure that you’re building a solid foundation for your sales team. You’ll want to make sure that you have a strong product, a clear sales plan, and ample resources for training. If you don’t have these pieces in place yet, you won’t be ready to scale your sales team. Once you have a firm foundation in place, it will be much easier to hire quickly and effectively.

 

Create a solid foundation before investing in growth

As you’re building out your sales team and trying to drive sales, you’ll want to make sure that you have a strong foundation before spending money on marketing or bringing on new sales reps. You’ll want to make sure that you have a product or service that people want to buy, and that you’re actually getting customers. You also need to make sure that your team is up to speed on the product and sales process, and you have a clear plan for scaling as quickly as possible. While you want to scale as quickly as possible, you don’t want to spend money on marketing or hiring new sales reps until you have a firm foundation in place first.

 

Sales before product-market fit is the opposite of sales at scale

Prior to achieving product-market fit, you will want to use your sales effort to ensure that you get direct, unfiltered customer feedback. This is crucial, as you will want to feed this information into the product development process to ensure you achieve that fit more quickly. 

In turn, it also means that the sales process is slower and more customized to each of your sales leads. This is on purpose, given how crucial that customer feedback is for your product-market fit efforts. Once you reach product-market fit, then you can focus on building a sales system that is standardized and that all your sales reps must follow, to achieve scale more quickly. Including as much automation as possible, of course.

 

Take advantage of user feedback by implementing a Feedback Loop

As you’re trying to sell your product, you may find that some potential customers are hesitant to try it out. You may even find that some users are hesitant to buy your product. This is why you should implement a feedback loop where you can ask customers for feedback on your product and your sales process. Then, you can use this feedback to make adjustments to your product and sales process.

This can make it easier to drive sales, and it can also help you understand what customers want from your product, which can be challenging when you’re trying to sell something before it’s even launched. By implementing a feedback loop, you can take advantage of the fact that you don’t have product-market fit yet. You can determine what customers want from your product, which can help you make adjustments before you launch your product. This can make it easier to drive sales without having to rely on marketing or lead generation.

 

Create a sales pipeline and close more deals

While you’re trying to find product-market fit and drive sales, you may feel like you’re spinning your wheels. To make the most of this time, you’ll want to create a sales pipeline that shows you where leads are in the sales process, which can help you close more deals. This can be as simple as creating sales stages and grouping leads according to where they are in the sales cycle. You can also use software to make this process easier and more efficient. You should also make sure that you’re being targeted in your sales efforts.

You don’t want to be selling to anyone and everyone because this won’t help you reach product-market fit any quicker. Instead, you want to be laser-focused on the people who you believe will buy your product so that you can drive more sales.

 

Take advantage of marketing leads by following up quickly

While you’re working to close sales from leads, you may also find that you’re getting marketing leads. You may get leads from content marketing efforts or guest blogging, or you may get leads from attendance at events. These marketing leads may be warm leads who have shown some interest in your product, but they may not be ready to buy right away. You should take advantage of these marketing leads by following up quickly and giving these leads a reason to buy from you now instead of later. This can help you drive more sales and get more leads in your sales funnel.

 

Find ways to reduce costs and increase revenue

As you’re trying to close more deals and drive more sales, you may find that the costs of doing business are higher than you’d like. This may be due to things like rising rates for your product or service, or it could be due to inefficiencies in your business model that you can correct. To help reduce costs and keep your business profitable, you can implement strategies like finding cheaper suppliers, becoming more efficient in your operations, or finding ways to drive more leads to your business.

You can also look for ways to increase revenue by finding new customers or increasing the average value of your sales. You can do this by adding new products or services to your sales offerings, finding new sales channels, or improving your sales process to get more out of each sale.

 

Keep the cash flowing

As you’re trying to scale your sales, you may find that you’re facing cash flow issues. You may be bringing in more revenue than you did when you were just driving leads and closing deals, but you may not be bringing in enough to cover operating expenses. When you’re experiencing cash flow issues, you can look for ways to reduce costs, like cutting unnecessary expenses and vendor rates.

You can also look for ways to increase revenue, like finding more sales opportunities or increasing the average value of sales. To keep the cash flowing and prevent your business from going under, you may need to turn to investors for more funding. Before turning to investors, you can try to find other sources of funding, like peer-to-peer lending or crowdfunding campaigns.

 

When product-market fit is imminent, scale like crazy

Finally, when you’re getting close to product-market fit, you’ll want to scale your sales as quickly as possible. This is the time to be aggressive and push as many customers through your sales funnel as you can because you won’t be able to scale like this once product-market fit is reached. If you’ve been tracking your leads in the sales funnel, you’ll be able to see where the bottleneck is. Whether there are too few leads, you’re not converting enough leads, or there are too few sales in your funnel, you’ll be able to identify the problem and work to correct it.

 

Conclusion

Once you’ve found product-market fit and you’re able to drive sales without having to do a lot of marketing, it will be easier to scale your business. This means that it’s important to find product-market fit as quickly as possible and do whatever you can to drive sales until you reach that point. When you’re at the point where you know product-market fit is imminent, it’s important to keep the cash flowing, scale like crazy,