The value of an accelerator program like JFDI Accelerate comes from its mentors. Their advice counts because they’ve been on the front line themselves. A serial entrepreneur, Jon Sugihara has co-founded 5 startups and has sold his companies both in the US and Asia, writes David Ongchoco
Jon Sugihara takes the stage at JFDI’s 2015A Demo Day
RedMart Chief Product Officer Jon Sugihara gave a workshop on sales and growth for early-stage companies for the startups on the JFDI 2015A Accelerate program. In a session fuelled by experience, Jon shared his growth equation that any company could follow when trying to increase their sales.
RedMart Chief Product Officer Jon Sugihara gave a workshop on sales and growth for early-stage companies for the startups on the JFDI 2015A Accelerate program. In a session fuelled by experience, Jon shared his growth equation that any company could follow when trying to increase their sales.
1. Narrow your focus
When you first start a company, the problem most founders run into is that when they first pitch, and when people ask them who their customers are, their persona is usually extremely broad. You have limited resources both in terms of your time and money.
The problem you’re going to run into is that if you try to chase everything, you’re going to do a sloppy job in everything. Jon made it clear, “Narrow your focus, and find a persona you want to target.”
2. Create your persona
So how then do you create the right persona to target ask your customer? A lot of people come to Jon saying that everyone is their customer but you can’t really acquire all the users in the world.
Jon gave the example of Twitter as an app that may seem like it’s targeting everyone but in fact, they have a specific persona they’re going after: People who want to create and consume content. This is the reason why Twitter didn’t market to mothers. They started out by targeting bloggers and thought leaders since they were already in the business of creating content.
3. Find the easy money
At the start, you should test each possible persona that you’ve narrowed down to see which one is the easiest to sell to. Create one persona then go after them immediately for a set period of time to test if they’re the right persona. Create your pitch deck, test on Facebook ads, find your acquisition channels and see which one is the most cost efficient.
For B2B businesses, you want to start calling people and start meeting your clients to see if they’re going to bite and if they’re easy money. Then you want to check the market size and see if it’s big enough to be worth going after.
4. Iterate and fail personas quickly
Jon emphasized the importance of going lean and quickly testing and iterating. He gave the example of real estate sales, “If after 3 meetings you haven’t gotten a sale, you should re-evaluate your message and think about why you’re not getting a sale.”
He said, “Test your messaging. In the B2B world, you’re creating a deck and you’re going to sell it. Each time you understand a new pain point, constantly improve and change your pitch deck.”
5. Milk it
When you figure out what the ideal persona is, you just milk it. For instance, you figure out that your main persona is Food and Beverage stores. Then you should create a list of all the businesses in Singapore and just milk it.
Jon adviced, “Spend 100% of your time pursuing this persona. Screw all other personas once you’ve found the persona that works, in terms of business sales and user acquisition. Look for the cheapest cost of acquisition then milk it.”
6. Identify your funnel
Jon emphasized the importance of creating a funnel and working backwards to measure each step you need to take to achieve your goals. For instance, for a B2B startup, you have a monthly sales goal but what exactly does that mean? You have to create a funnel, identify what your sales goal is then think about how many contract you’ll need to achieve this goal.
He continued, “You should then think about how many sales people you will need to get that number of contracts. Once you know how many contracts you need, you should then find out how many calls and meetings your sales people will need to make each day to secure that number of contracts.”
This makes it very easy to measure your progress and track your employees’ efforts as well. Once you know the conversation rate, you can check if your sales people are hitting their conversion rates each month.
7. Test often
You will constantly learn what better ways to get people through the funnel. Jon shared, “Focus on the easy part of the funnel first. Which one can I easily do something about first? Play through your landing pages, iterate those and see which one does the best for you.”
He added, “If you tell me you have two ads, and you don’t know why it’s not working, you should be testing your ad content on a daily basis until you think that part of the funnel is okay.”
Pick the funnel, identify different tests, and work on it for a couple of days. Go with a single message for the whole week then see how it does.
8. Talk less, ask more
It is a common mistake to spend your whole sales pitch talking about your product and why your customer should buy it. Jon shared, “The key to sales is not talking but asking questions. By flipping it around and asking a lot of questions, you start learning about the pain points of the businesses you’re talking to. You’re able to find the pain point and flip that pain point into a solution that your customer needs.”
David Ongchoco is a content marketing intern for JFDI Asia. He currently studies at the University of Pennsylvania and runs an international nonprofit called YouthHack, which has a goal of helping students learn more about startups, technology and entrepreneurship. He also contributes for top publications like the Huffington Post, Technical.ly Philly and the Philippine Daily Inquirer.