Marketing Courage – Have What It Really Needs
Sure you have a great product idea and the courage to build it, but do you really have a realistic picture of what it will take to bring it to market? Because we work with a lot of start-ups (and also with larger companies trying to blow up products), we will often be in the thick of it when the difficult marketing decisions are made. This article summarizes a phenomenon we see too often.
Being in Silicon Valley there are many technical and production visionaries. I talk to people every day who are betting on their homes, their short-term livelihood, their quality of life, and sometimes even their families (though they may not realize it at the time) about developing a product they believe in.
Building a product needs courage.
Even if you’re a boot rope or you’ve hit it big in a previous job, you still pay a great price at a convenient cost and ego if you crash and burn. I applaud the engineers and contractors who have the courage to build products and take this risk. It’s not a trivial decision to move forward – I know, because I helped build a few companies from scratch and was there at the development point.
If you are involved with one of these companies, whether as an employee or an investor, figuring out the answer to the next question early on can save you an incredible amount of worry, worry and anxiety later on. That question is, “Will this company have the Market Courage when the rubber hits the road?”
What do I mean by this? Well,
often customers will bring us when they are 3-6 months away from launching a product to help them plan how they will reach customers and sell. Or they will bring us soon after the product is released and they can’t figure out why sales haven’t started to take off.
These companies will have spent tens or hundreds of thousands (sometimes even millions) of dollars, and months or years developing their product. They have a huge lower cost that has been made to reach a market. They will ask us to create a marketing plan to reach their target market as costly as possible so that they can generate qualified leads and make sales. Their attitude is usually that “we’ll be so smart about Marketing (as we’ve been with development) that we’ll get things done without having to spend a lot, and then we can fund future efforts from the initial sales.” But when the rubber hits the road and the company has to invest significant time, resources and money to get sales and revenue, often the courage they had to build the product becomes a denial of what it really needs to build a viable business.
One company we worked with spent $ 3M on purchasing management
and bringing a new product to market, with the hope of turning the company around and generating $ 8- $ 10M in sales. When we offered a ridiculously low $ 50k marketing budget (with some VERY creative leverage market ideas) they took 8 weeks of internal debate to finally decide that they weren’t confident enough about the product and market to spend the money.
We worked with another company that had already spent $ 800k to develop their initial product. They insisted that they didn’t need to spend any money to launch, market or advertise it and that the only thing they had to focus on was their website. They had an interior design engineer and created the website, and ended up making a first impression on their potential customers who would never have a chance to sell anything. We suggested at least upgrading the website and implementing some search engine optimization and Awards campaign so that they have a chance to get some qualified traffic, but they chose to wait and see. Last time we checked that their website had a very low Google rating of 1 out of 10, and I’m sure their revenue wasn’t even close to their forecast.
What is the lesson here?
Start your 스포츠토토사이트 and marketing planning very early – as before you make the commitment to build the product. Realize what it will cost you, and engage an experienced marketing person to help you create a stack estimate. Take that estimate and double it as your work figure.
Sure, you may be able to come up with the next completely viral product that doesn’t need marketing, but these are few and far between. When you decide to invest, join or start a company that will build the next great thing, ask yourself “When we built the product, spent more funding than we dreamed we would do, and are. Ready to really try to run the revenue engine, right? will we have the Marketing Courage to make it happen? ”. If the honest answer is no, don’t do it.