Backstory: The biggest prospect we had ever demoed told me he saw no value in what we did.
Mistake #1: I tried to sell to everybody.
I had sales call with retailers, manufacturers, food and beverage, even pharma.
Whoever wanted a demo got a demo.
Then a large greeting card company came in.
They were doing over $50M a year online.
It would have been our largest client by far.
I did a one-hour demo.
At the end, the prospect told me he saw absolutely no value in what we do.
I was devastated.
Here's what I missed:
It's not that they couldn't use us.
They just had:
Different customers.
Different needs.
Needed different features.
Different buying flow.
Different operations and use case.
I knew how to make the software work.
But I couldn't tie it to a result he cared about, because I had never lived his problem.
Everything I said was a hope that it would solve his problem.
He wasn't a bad prospect. He was the wrong customer.
Solution: I defined our customer in one sentence.
VP of Ecommerce or Director of Digital, for a fashion retailers with 80–150 stores, running Aptos as their ERP, Magento as their website, shipping with UPS, USPS, and FedEx, who want to ship from multiple warehouses as well as use the stores as distribution channels and looking to implement an omni-channel experience.
Why that customer?
Because I had spent five years as director of digital at exactly that kind of retailer.
We implemented the exact solution I was now selling.
I knew their legacy tech, their store ops, and their real problems.
I could explain the problem better than they could.
The results:
3 large customers who fit that ICP
Over $2.1M in revenue from those 3 customers alone, in 6 years
Premium pricing, consistent results
A product built for their needs and use cases, not everyone's
I was walking downtown Philadelphia on Walnut Street, and I just realized we had customer next to customer, one door after another.
It was a smaller market, but a rich one, and in it we were the obvious choice.
The same software sells for very different prices depending on who it's for:
CRM for everybody: $99/month
CRM for mid-market companies: $499/month
CRM for mid-market B2B SaaS companies: $999/month
CRM for mid-market B2B SaaS in security, compliance, and legal: $2,999/month
Same code, different customer.
So write your customer in one sentence: who is he/she exactly, and the one problem you solve for them.
Then run it through four questions:
Do I like them? If not, it's a grind.
Can I help them? If not, you're scamming.
Will they happily pay? If not, it's charity.
Can I reach them? If not, they're ghosts.
One person. One problem. One promise. One process.
Narrow down your niche until you can count your competitors on one hand.
Not zero, though. Zero means nobody has proven there's demand.
Secret Sauce: Know your customer. Clarify and define your ICP.
Best,
Virgil
PS: Mistake #2: I kept building features and hoped the next one would fix it.