The Company and the Situation:
I met the CEO of this company from Montreal during the FounderX 2016 event for graduates of the Founder Institute in the Silicon Valley in the September/October time frame. She has just graduated and is sharing how she plans to get into revenue six (6) months later (at the end of Q1 2017). Why? Because her software platform was not yet complete and would be only in Q1 2017. But!… they had identified 600 prospects and knew exactly what to focus on.
Listening to her beautiful business narrative, I knew she was solving a real problem that people are experiencing in the market, so I asked her if she wanted to get into revenue in the next 90 Days (before Christmas). She responded with a resounding YES!
The Approach:
- Forget about the 600 identified prospects. Pick only ten (10) whom you know well enough to request a meeting without fully explaining the offer until you meet face to face.
- Meet each one of them and ask if they have suffered from the core problem wherein your primary offer provides a solution.
- To those who have the fund initiative to solve the issue, ask them if they would allow you and pay you to solve it.
- Proceed to solve the problem manually (since the new software platform was not yet ready) and provide a solution to your customer to their satisfaction.
- Get paid.
The Result and Benefits:
To the CEOs credit, she followed this 5 Step process and got three of her prospects to allow her to solve their problem.
- It gave her a tremendous opportunity to identify several subtle and crude issues that she did not know existed with her customers.
- She got to include it in the software as it was developing.
- She got tremendous first-hand experience understanding her customers even better.
- She started getting a reputation as a problem solver in this core niche of hers.
- She got to talk about her success which accelerated her growth when she did get her software platform up and running.
Most importantly, she boosted her confidence level further. It’s because she now understands deeper what problems they’re encountering and what solution they want. She ended up pivoting because of this experience and started closing a ton of deals.
She has subsequently gone on to win several awards for startups, she has spoken all over Canada and the world. She has been funded a couple of times and is now one of the Top 100 fastest-growing companies in Montreal, Canada.
I still mentor her and her sales team regularly, helping them overcome challenges and help them focus on the deals that matter.
