Revealed: Customer Self-Selling; How to startup, Pt. 2

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Customer self-selling, product-led growth, bottom-up sales, and more recently growth plus sales.

How to startup and avoid mistakes or distractions 

Your vision is clear, create a single framework for an enterprise technology buyer test drive. Let’s start with the top three mistakes made, top three distractions and feelings, and top three steps to startup 

Top three mistakes 

  1. Making the technology available for download, this works if you are Twilio. 
  2. Creating an evaluation guide, this works if you don’t support AWS. 
  3. Trial logins to technology, this works with an unlimited cloud budget. 

All three of these will result in negligible product-led growth and sales. The reasons are simple: a) technology is too complex b) AWS requires specialized knowledge before working with your specialized technology, and c) trial logins to technology leave cloud integrations unmanaged and costs skyrocket. 

Top three distractions 

  1. Anxiety because customer self-selling isn’t selling on day one (1) 
  2. Uncomfortable because of target use-case and buyer persona disagreements 
  3. Avoidance because trainers and support engineers become business developers 

I believe these are the top three. Be mindful that product-led sales will create distractions and new feelings among your team. Think differently and evolve while you create a buyer test drive to support customer self-selling. 

Three steps to start 

  1. Understand where you fit, and be transparent with where you don’t fit. 
  2. Develop quick wins in existing communities via training and education. 
  3. Create a test drive for evaluators and buyers to realize value on their own. 

 Creating a test drive is an exciting step and will be followed by despair. It’s exciting because your team is made up of sales engineers, support engineers, and training engineers. Each has a view on how you can create a test drive. The sales engineer knows how to set up demos, the support technicians know how to re-create issues, and the trainers know how to use hands-on-labs or video to deliver show-do-review training. 

Their passion and experience will encourage you to develop a test drive platform. Creating a test drive platform should NOT be your team's core focus. Your team will be disappointed because they have the skills to individually build a test drive but will likely make the three mistakes. The test drive should be focused on the team collaborating to ensure fit and education in your community marketing. 

Call to Action 

For the best customer experience, create a test drive of your technology based on their past successes of sales engineering, supporting, and training. Use a lab platform to create a test drive of your technology. You’ll avoid distractions and risks by partnering with a lab platform to enable the best customer experience and team collaboration. 

Venture Capital and Fund managers will increase investment success by improving executive functions with product-led sales. Executives improve manager and team comfort and cravings by providing an on-demand lab platform that enables individual passion for demos, support, and training. From Venture Capital partners to SaaS leaders, start by reimagining your sales, support, training, and marketing into a virtual team function focused on a test drive. 

Location: Austin, TX, USA
I provide expert consulting services in market research, program management, cybersecurity, data center management, Generative AI, and backup and recovery systems.

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