$ales & Lead$: Product Market Fit & The Law of Diffusion of Innovation

Today's $ales & Lead$ is just as much for you as it is for me. Today I am writing about the stuff that is on my mind as I begin the task of scaling a national sales team.  Needless to say, I have hired 4 new Business Brokers in the last week and I have interviews lined up for the foreseeable future.

With all that said, this is the first time I have built a national, distributed sales team, but it's not my first time scaling hundreds of people.  And what I am writing about today is a lesson on, "if I knew then what I know now", and how I am doing it differently.

As we have discussed in last week's Monthly Pain To Profit$ newsletters, "🚀Built to Scale" there are 4 major roadblocks to overcome if we are going to build and scale well:

Time, Talent, Process & Systems, Horizontal Scale, Vertical Scale 

But in order for this to get off the runway, we have to get crystal clear on:

This might seem like a novel idea, but in my experience, the mass market will not adopt a new product, until someone else has done it first. Therefore, our #1 goal as we build our pipeline is to focus on Business owners whose values & beliefs align with our own, and whose business profile best aligns with our offering.  

The 'Law of Diffusion Innovation

Why? Because these early adopters are perfectly comfortable making decisions based on what they believe about the world, they do not need others to validate their decision, and your product or service can truly help them.    As we gain traction, we gain trust with the market, and as we gain trust, we are able to use that social proof to attract the next segment of the market.  

The 'Law of Diffusion' model shows that at a macro level, people can be classified according to their willingness to adopt newness and innovation. If you are familiar with the product lifecycle curve you will see that the two are based on the same founding principles.

Product-Market-Fit

The best products typically SLAP you in the face!  As you grow frustrated with the current solutions, you go looking for a better solution, and that's when you realize that it doesn't exist. The current marketplace for buying and selling lower middle market, and mid-street businesses is fragmented, slow, inefficient, and riddled with bad actors. It's a literal black hole! So after 2 years of banging my head against the wall,  I decided to try to fix it.  

Here is what everyone gets wrong about scaling a sales team:  

Even when we think we are clear, we can go deeper.  The problem is most of us are a mile wide and an inch deep.  We need to be an inch wide and a mile deep.  

Not to say that you can't have multiple products that meet clients where they are at, but you can't have one product that you force down the throat of every customer.  

In reality, this has very literally about the niche industry you cater to, as it does with the profile of the person who you serve.  For example, if I say my customer is a Small Business, I'm implying every company under 100 employees is my customer; which is literally 5.9 million businesses.  

But if I go deep, my avatar would look more like: small businesses that have exited the start-up phase of their business, doing at least $1,000,000 in topline revenue up to $50M, with 5 or more employees in the service industry, who have a recurring revenue model, that has been in business for at least 3 years, doing a minimum of $200,000 in seller discretionary earnings, are at or near retirement age and are ready to sell their business within the next 12 months. Now that's a lot more clarity as to who I spend my precious time with; Time is Money!

Otherwise, we will face the following outcomes:

• #1. Wasted Time Energy & Effort. If you are not narrowly focused on your Ideal Avatar at the outset, you are going to waste a lot of cycles with unqualified people and build a really weak pipeline.

• #2.Time, Cost, Quality. You can only have two of the three.  For example, I can only go faster ( lower Time) if I am willing to Pay a Higher Cost to obtain Higher quality.   But If I don't want to pay the Higher price, I can go fast, But I have to sacrifice for lower quality.

• #3. Your product doesn't work.   It's not that your product doesn't work, it's just that it wasn't the right fit for that client.  You sent them to the eye doctor when they actually have an earache.  Of course, they are not gonna be happy.

• #4.Bad reviews.  I cannot tell you how many times we sold clients that were broadly in our category, but not narrowly in our ideal audience.  And every time this happen, it ended in a bad review  

• #5.Refunds. Refunds are cut multiple ways because you lose the revenue, you pay the process fees again, and you have to claw back the commission from your team.  Talk about demoralizing and a major hit to the psyche of your sales team.

So as you head into the next week I encourage you to go deep on your avatar and read the following books.

📚 Read or Listen To These Books

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