Should we rely more on cold canvas and clever marketing tactics instead of trusting open communication and honest relationships to be our primary sales engine?
Our inventor business is mostly driven by solving problems with great products. But it takes money to develop, and inventions are hard to sell before they're finished.
Before a good idea has a chance to become a commercially viable solution for a customer, we need to find out who they are, where they are in their pains. Even when we succeed, it's incredibly rare that someone has the maturity for a development project, the money to carry it out and the realisation that they don't have the skills themselves. Sometimes we hit that sweet spot, but it's extremely rare. More often it's random meetings or fragments of a good idea that end up leading to the big project.
So we have both a complex sale and a complex product. Customers, decision makers and sales processes are rarely the same, which makes it incredibly difficult to work out the right sales process and put it into a formula.
That's why we've also chosen a strategy where we go out and tell people who we are. We try to share big and small things about both new products and our daily life. On this blog, on social channels and at events. And we try to be as honest and authentic as possible.
While a good marketer could probably find a different recipe, the model has worked for us. By reminding the world that we exist and have some special competences, we have been tapped on the shoulder several times by exciting new partners when they were ready.
In fact, some of the best customers in the part of our business we call commissioned work have found us through networking and visibility - including the City of Copenhagen and CBS. Sales we couldn't possibly have realised or had a general battle strategy for.
