The Biggest Way Visionaries Confuse Founders about Building a Sales Process
2024/07/23 1 Comment
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.
robocosmist 
Why American women are too smart to become robotics engineers
2012/09/03 by Robert Morris 2 Comments
The lack of women in robotics is quite palpable. I’m not going to quote statistics about the lack of women in robotics because the readers of this blog have been in robotics engineering shops and have eyes—it is that bad. This is a loss for all of us. Not only do the women in robotics often have a disproportionate impact, but also the missing women are indicative of a deeper cultural problem that hurts both male and female participants in our industry.
Another Knowledge Industry Grapples With A Similar Challenge
While I was at Deloitte, the firm was endlessly bragging about its Women’s Initiate, they called WIN. Before the turn of the millennium, the partners realized that they had a problem. At all the ‘working’ ranks of the firm, Deloitte was doing a great job hiring and retaining talented people of both genders. However, when it came to senior managers and partner level positions, the women all disappeared.
What Deloitte discovered when they looked into this problem was not discrimination. The problem was that all the top women that the firm wanted to promote were leaving, even though they were being offered the same deal as the men. Becoming a partner or principal at Deloitte today is arduous, but before WIN it was grueling and brutal. Basically, becoming principal at Deloitte requires a huge commitment to have consulting be one’s life, but before WIN there was pretty much one way this commitment could look. Women knew what was required and were more than capable, but they were saying, ‘Screw this, I don’t want to put up with your abuse just to sit at the top of the pyramid and perpetuate it, I want a family (or an impact in the world, or a life).’ So they were leaving the firm.
Deloitte took a hard look at the firm and decided that the path to becoming partner was counterproductively rigid. They launched WIN and made the workplace much more humane for everyone. The firm started retaining more talented women and they have thousands of women principals today. But more interestingly, they also started retaining more of the talented men who had been leaving too, but ‘just weren’t cut out for consulting.’ Deloitte fervently believes—and their impressive growth in the last decade testifies—that they created a much more effective organization.
What had showed up as a women’s problem was actually a firm-wide culture problem. It turned out that many more men were willing to compromise their performance and risk losing their marriages, families, and personal lives over the firm’s culture problem. There was nothing ‘wrong’ with the women, nothing they needed to be taught or given to help them get ahead. They were just not willing to put up with such an unnecessarily inhumane system, while many men were willing to live with it. As a result, the firm got sub-optimal performance.
The question that Deloitte should have been asking was not, ‘What’s wrong with our women that they’re not making partner?’ Or even, ‘What’s wrong with our men that they don’t help the women make partner,’ it was really, ‘What’s wrong with our men that they’re willing to make partner under sweatshop working conditions?’ I fear that we’re at a similar impasse with respect to the engineering fields.
The Deeper Cultural Problem In Robotics Engineering
Isn’t it odd that we don’t need to make a special effort to interest women in law, accounting, medicine, or the like? These fields have similar intellectual requirements and levels of drudgery to engineering. Yet despite comparatively massive efforts to interest women in engineering, they are not entering the field in anything like the numbers we would expect. And why are American students—including men—not enrolling in engineering fields at the rate that foreign students do?
There is strong social signaling in undergraduate schools that discourages most women and many men from even attempting the study of engineering. Perhaps they realize that getting an engineering degree can be a long, unrewarding slog when compared to the experience that most undergraduates have. Perhaps, they have a sense this narrow technical view is carried on beyond undergraduate. I do not believe that being willing put up with this kind of experience is necessary, and is perhaps counterproductive, to being a great robotics engineer.
Engineering courses are used to screen out anyone who is not willing to devote long hours studying tough courses that do not reward students just for their interest in the subject. Those who are considering law, business, or medicine as an alternative career may not want to risk their GPAs even trying engineering courses. No one would bother becoming a robotics engineer unless she had an innate sense that she had a special calling in robotics. This sense of calling is common among the engineering superstars, both male and female. Though the current method of engineering education may be adequate for the superstars, this method of education likely alienates many people who could make great contributions to engineering.
We now realize that training medical residents more than 80 hours a week is not productive—engineering isn’t different. Silicon Valley is starting to see sunlight, humane schedules, leadership opportunities, and pleasant workplaces that promote social interaction as the minimum conditions for engineering productivity. Colleges such as Olin which have experimented with new (read more people centered) ways of teaching engineering have seen many women enroll. These are all signs that there is another way to do engineering. We are starting to see that engineering can be altered to treat engineers and students like social beings, without sacrificing technical rigor.
By attracting people to engineering who are sensitive to the way that others treat them, we will also attract people who are sensitive to their colleagues, customers, and business partners. Without these engineers who understand their impact on others, engineering will forever be solving the wrong problem. Engineering education and culture are far too important to all our futures to be left only to left-brained males. If we let engineering be a secret club that no woman without an extreme commitment would want to join, we will fail to harness engineering’s full potential to improve our society.
Avenues for further investigation:
How can robotics companies accelerate the production of an inclusive engineer culture?
What benefits and employee flexibilities have measureable results on engineering output?
How concentrated among the ‘usual suspects’ schools is robotics engineering hiring?
Does hiring outside of the engineering department’s immediate network improve or degrade performance of the engineering organization?
Do robotics engineering organizations with more women tend to do better? (Hypothesis: There is positive correlation, but not to be confused with causation.)
Filed under Commentary Tagged with business, culture, deloitte, education, engineering, HR, human resources, management, OB, organizational behavior, robotics, science, STEM, women