Engineering the sales machine – customer first

In the last post I talked about how every founder needs to lead the sales effort for their company. That includes ensuring that every employee, whatever their title, sees selling as critical to success and as part of their role. Now we’ll turn to customer segmentation, which I believe is the first step in designing your sales machine.

As I explained in the previous post, your sales machine is the entire go-to-market approach that you use to reach, sell to, retain and grow customers, typically delivered by your marketing, sales and customer success teams.

There are, of course, many possible ways to sell your product. You can drive growth through product-led sales, digital marketing, direct sales, partner channels or any combination of these. How you structure your sales machine will depend on your customer base, on the industry and types of companies you serve (if B2B), and on how decision makers buy.

Always start with your customer 

Your business model and go-to-market plan should centre completely on your customer. This may seem obvious, but it is something that few new businesses do well. Many startups fail to get this right and even scaleups don’t revisit the question of who their customer really is as regularly as they should.

If you don’t tightly define your customer, it is difficult to determine how to sell to them. Yet this is the critical first step in building a sales machine that will work.

Start by clearly understanding the problem you solve. Why does that problem matter to your customer so much that they will be prepared to pay for a solution? In his book Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of the ‘job-to-be-done’: the progress a consumer is trying to make in particular circumstances. What is the job your customer is buying your product or service to do?

(As an aside, Christensen’s books – which also include The Innovator’s Dilemma and the Innovator’s Solution – are well worth adding to your Summer reading list).

This Harvard Business Review article provides a useful introduction to jobs-to-be-done and the importance of understanding customer needs (and not just customer data) in driving successful innovation.

Some questions to ask:

• What is your customer trying to achieve? Don’t just think about completing a simple task, but about why they need to complete it.
• What circumstances are driving the customer’s need? This understanding can be more valuable than demographic or product-related data alone.
• How is the job-to-be-done currently tackled? Look for room to innovate where the current solution is inadequate or does not exist.
• Can you tap into an emotional need behind the job?  Whether your customer is a business or a consumer, few needs are 100% functional, if you think about them deeply enough.

Go deeper and really find out the key dimensions on which your customer will buy your product. Take into account the social and emotional factors.

The Aconex job-to-be-done

One of the surprising aspects when we studied our customers at Aconex was that, while they were from every corner of the globe and delivering many different types of construction projects, they had one characteristic in common: each one was experiencing a higher than usual level of perceived risk on their projects.

We saw that many of our new customers selected us for projects that differed markedly from their core business. Sometimes this was the largest project they had ever taken on, or the most remote. Sometimes it was a new project type (mixed use vs residential), a new delivery method (joint venture or PPP), or a program that had an extremely tight time frame (usually with penalties attached).

We came to realise that our customers’ core ‘job-to-be-done’ was to mitigate project risk. Our product was helping people gain control, and more importantly ‘feel’ in control of their project. We set about finding potential customers who had high levels of perceived project risk, and this became key to building demand in our sales process.

The next step: customer segmentation

Once you understand what your customers are trying to achieve, you are in a good position to start grouping them by other factors and to decide where to put your focus. I’ll talk about approaches to segmentation – and some of the pitfalls – in the next post.