Monday, September 20, 2010

You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince

You will have to talk to many, many customers before you get a first sale, or even a next sale. At one of my start-ups we found that it required 3000 leads to get 300 decent potential customers to get 30 face-to-face meetings to get 3 contracts.

Don't worry about talking to too many prospects at once, even if they all book it is a high class problem to try and expand to meet demand and you can always sub-contract part of the work or share it with a competitor (I call this co-opetition). Many customers you think are in a hurry for your product or service will either re-prioritize internally, hit a snag or spend ages negotiating your contract. In the worst case you can easily slow down negotiations with your more 'corporate' clients until you can resource-up.

Keep kissing frogs!