The Biggest Way Visionaries Confuse Founders about Building a Sales Process

Visionaries are awesome! They make start-ups succeed and can be a start-up’s secret superpower, especially when the start-up delights (or gets promoted) their visionary adopters. The title of the post is not to say that you shouldn’t find visionaries–if you run a start-up you absolutely should–it is to warn you about where to start thinking about the customers that come next.

Visionaries are wired different. They want to be on the bleeding edge and they are willing to take the risk on an unproven product in order to be on the cutting edge of their field. Even early adopters, let alone mainstream customers, want to have high confidence that your product is going to work for them. Visionaries often don’t require approvals, they have the power to take action in their domain unilaterally–whether that’s because they are the owner/operator or because they are trusted implicitly. Usually visionaries meet the founder directly and make purchase decisions nearly unilaterally. They are usually also able to implicitly or explicitly translate your features into prospective value.

Visionaries	Early Adopters + Early Mainstream
Understand benefits from features alone	Need benefits, value, and ROI to be explicit
Buy unilaterally or nearly so	Require approval and persuasion from at least an executive sponsor if not more stakeholders
Buy on the promise of the product	Require demonstration and guarantees
Interested in technical details and underlying innovations	Want social proof and case studies
Want to be on the cutting edge	Want their actual problem solved

Most start-ups need some visionaries their corner–some committed customers that are willing to put up with a product that is at best in development after providing a minimum quanta of value — and more realistically doesn’t work all the time. These customers provide the use and feedback and market validation that are often a start-up’s superpower in terms of creating the narrative that this company is going somewhere attracting the employees, investment, and follow-on customers that create a viable and growing business.

After you have a few of the visionaries in your corner, you’re going to want to get some early adopters. They are going to be quite different to sell to than visionaries, even though from a fundamental product needs perspective, they can often be quite close — though with a much higher product maturity expectation.

The second sales season at TerrAvion we could not figure out why some organizations closed and some did not that apparently looked very similar and had the same enthusiasm from the head of viticulture (our target champion). We were tripped up by learning that the sales process of early adopters looks like a mainstream sales process in the sense that early adopters often have stakeholders in a way that visionaries do not. We discovered that at early adopter prospects, our champion — the person that drives our deal, had to explain their spend to an executive sponsor. This was a big learning because all our visionary prospects the champion just said yes apparently without consulting anyone else after we explained our innovation. Further, even if the prospective champions at early adopters were quite effective at re-articulating our product benefit back to us, they were ineffective at articulating this their boss in greater than 90% of cases. We learned by looking backwards that where we had approached the executive sponsor first, made our case to them, and gotten a warm intro to our champion–essentially all of our deals closed.

This is not to say that all sales should use a top down sales motion. Your market may–and probably will–vary, but you should expect that the process for early adopters is different and involves more stakeholders than visionary sales and that while visionaries can help you build your product and get reference for success, they probably don’t help you learn to sell to other prospects. They may actually train you on bad habits of talking about features, selling in fluid conversation instead of through a process with structured documentation shared with the client, and not paying attention to all the necessary stakeholders. You should expect to have to map stakeholders and executive sponsorship in the deal. You should expect to draft “customized” materials for your client to help them make a decision with stakeholder involvement. You should expect to have to provide references and social proof. You should expect to demonstrate value in the sales process, not just promise of value.

The takeaway advice here is that you should definitely cultivate your visionaries–and even turn them into evangelists if you can. That said, as you depart from them as sales targets, you should plan to re-evaluate your sales motion. Most B2B start-ups that I’ve been at have somewhere on the order of 2-10 visionary clients — after that you start to need to follow a disciplined sales process. It is okay to not to have it all in place as you start trying things, but don’t over index on the sales learnings from the visionary customers. Good luck and let me know if I can help!

Also, if this was helpful, check back soon for a post on how to build that structured sales process.

The first time the champion asks about price, it isn’t about price

In most enterprise deals I’ve been a part of there are two conversations about price. One can easily slow or lose the sale by failing to distinguish the conversations.

The first time you are likely to get asked about price is relatively early on in the deal, usually after the deal champion has gotten excited and interested about the deal. It often sounds like, “So how much is this going to cost?” And usually there is a degree of rapport with the champion that was just established so that you as the seller want to be direct. The problem is that the champion isn’t actually asking you what the price is.

The champion is usually really asking is: “Are you a qualified vendor and which procurement process do I need to use?” They aren’t actually looking for a price, though that’s great if you want to give it to them. If you tell them <$100 they might just put it on the credit card right then and there; and if you tell them more than the divisional budget, they are going to walk. Ideally if you can guide them to understand that you’ll be in their budget, and whether they have to use their light or heavy approval approval process, they are likely to be accepting of doing the work to procure your solution at some semblance of a reasonable price for you as the vendor.

If you can answer the question by giving the champion enough information to put you in the right process you don’t actually have to answer the question of “how much does this cost.” In fact, a vague answer here can help advance a good deal and help the buyer by pivoting to the scoping conversation and the levers to pull to create maximum value for the buyer. If you can get the buyer to have that conversation you have an excellent shot at getting a perfectly scoped deal in front of the executive sponsor and procurement.

The second time (although it may come up a few times in a fashion similar to the first time) that you will discuss price, it is about price. Hopefully, the second time is after you have executive sign-off that the solution you are presenting is correctly scoped, needed now, you are the preferred vendor, the ROI of your solution over alternatives including doing nothing is quantifiable with proprietary data of the buyer, and in the budget that you’ve learned. If you’ve gotten to this point with the buyer, it is as good a position as you’ll ever be in to present lucrative pricing as a win / win partnership and solid investment for the buyer–ideally because it is true. And if you have to discount, ideally it is because it actually is in your interest as the seller.

Good luck bringing your innovation to the world!