embarrassed-flashissue

Here’s an exert from the an interview in Forbes, with Matthew Bellows (MB), the CEO of Yesware an online email sales tool. His sentiments are good.

Startup” method that’s so popular now? How do you know if your product is ready?”

MB: Great question. No, seriously, there is a big emphasis in the startup literature about “ship early and often” and “if you aren’t embarrassed by your product, you waited too long to ship” I agree with both of those sentiments actually, but they pertain more to product development than they do to sales. Ship early, and be embarrassed, but before you build a sales function, make sure your product supports a scalable sales effort. I wrote about this in an article called “You’re Not Ready for a Sales Hire.”

The way to know that your B2B product is ready for a dedicated sales effort is by inbound interest. Seriously. You should have customers emailing you, calling you, sending you meeting invites, because they want to talk about how to buy your product. Before that happens, don’t spend a dime on marketing or selling. Focus exclusively on improving the product experience. Once you start getting inbound interest, then you can start to sell.

via Forbes.com

We’re getting read for “embarrassment” with our new iteration of Flashissue 🙂 We’ll be building a suite of email marketing tools for Gmail. Take a peek here.

 

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