Chapter 7Strong Product Marketing: Skills of the Good
By the time Zack fired all but one of his sales guys, his product demo was set, he offered free proof of concepts, and he was willing to negotiate heavily on price. Yet sales weren't coming. He couldn't figure out why.
Zack was CEO of StartX (real company, names changed) which had developed new tech while at a PhD program that won a major technology competition and got endorsed by a chief information security officer (CISO) at a well-respected Fortune 50 company. Those endorsements and his team's sterling technical pedigrees got them enough VC funding to start a company.
As is common at this stage, Zack was leading almost everything—sales, product, marketing, and people—but had never done any of it before. He assumed if he wanted the product to sell, he should hire sales guys.
But it didn't work as planned. The sales guys booked meetings with people they already knew and kept asking for more leads from a nonexistent marketing team. Zack had to be at every sales pitch because his team didn't know the product well enough. He finally stopped trying to sell the product at every meeting and instead took the time to ask, “What are your top priority problems?”
It's how he learned the problem their product solved not only didn't make the top five priorities for execs; in some cases, it didn't even make the top 10.
The team realized they had misjudged the desirability and value of their product. They regrouped to pivot and solve ...
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