Author: abhiyerra

> Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. – Peter Drucker

We have been approaching marketing, sales, and product disjointedly. One of us is doing product and services and one of us is doing sales and marketing. We are not working as a unit to attack a common goal. Our core solutions are Cybersecurity, DevOps, DataOps, FinOps, IT Modernization & Management, and Workflows & AI. While having these as our solutions is great we do not have a clear attack strategy. We are disjointed in terms of how we are attacking the market as we are taking a shotgun approach.

While we have built products to support our solutions they are not advertised or promoted even though they are open source, solve problems cheaply, or could be great mechanisms for getting inbound leads. This seems to be a huge waste as we have a lot of resources that could benefit from wider exposure. We need to change this so that the entire company can work as a unit, even those providing services to help generate additional sales. What we should do is a comprehensive deployment of marketing and sales that involves distribution along with the product or capability we are gathering.

Since our solutions are applicable to such a broad market we need to subdivide the market into the smallest niches, the leafs of the tree, and build products or launch capabilities speaking to to those specific markets. Once released we should coordinate content, ads, social media, email, and distribution on third party channels all at once as to get a big targetted attack as opposed to doing a cluster bomb approach. Targetted attacks also have a higher ROI as opposed to a cluster bomb approach.

The steps for this should be the following:

1. Figure out a tiny subniche in the larger industries we are targeting. Say we talk specifically to the Secretary of Labor and their underlings in states with less than 5 million people.
2. Collect the data of the people we want to reach.
3. Build a niche product including calculator, API, datasets, etc. that would help them day to day. Some of the things we build we will collect payments for and others we will give away to collect leads to follow up.
4. Build a marketing site on opszero.com/ that talks to the needs of that group.
5. Setup ads focused on outreach to that group with Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and possibly Twitter and Reddit Ads.
6. Setup AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace offerings of the same product to get larger distribution and inbounds.
7. Setup a sales email outreach for that group.
8. Update the core proposals, contracts, legal that we send when we are closing the contracts.
9. Collect and close the sales.

From the moment a potential customer contacts us, we treat them as a valued customer, regardless of whether they have given us any money. This approach aligns with our primary work principle: Customer First. Our success depends on being the best alternative available to the customer. Given the numerous options at their disposal, it is crucial that we provide exceptional service from the moment they engage with us.

When a prospective customer reaches out, we commit to doing everything possible to help them succeed and to act in their best interest. We earn their business by diligently answering questions, consistently following up to stay top of mind, offering guidance throughout their decision-making process (even if it leads them to choose another provider), and working to build trust. Our business model relies on trust, which must be earned rather than simply granted. To entrust us with something as sensitive as their cloud infrastructure, customers need to know that we are their partners from the very beginning.

We may not always secure a customer, and frankly, we do not aim to convert every prospect. However, by conscientiously sharing our expertise, we also improve ourselves by gaining valuable information to enhance our own [capabilities](https://abhiyerra.com/notes/capability-based-growth/).

Keep the following guidelines in mind:

1. Follow up continuously. Touch base after meetings and a few days later with open-ended questions. Maintain regular communication so the prospect has us top of mind. Simple messages, such as “Just following up to see if you have any additional questions?” can be effective. We should never let more than half a week pass without communication.
2. If a prospect needs more time, offer assistance with their decision-making process. Much of our work is specialized and carries long-term consequences, so we must find ways to guide potential customers in their decisions. Whether it involves connecting them with our existing clients or conducting research on competitors and comparing pros and cons, we help. This process ultimately benefits us by revealing areas for improvement.

**Our high-touch customer service begins the moment a prospect contacts us.**

We use our capabilities in one market and enter a new market with the same expertise. We tailor the marketing and sales to the particulars of the new sector, but our beachhead is to sell what we have already built for an existing vertical. The process is as follows:

1. If we enter a new industry, we may not clearly understand how things work. Trying to develop a new business model causes context-switching problems and a loss of momentum and focus. Selling products and services we can already deliver but to a new vertical gets us in the door. 

2. Once we are in the door, we use that as a learning opportunity to understand the vertical’s needs and build our mental models for how the industry works. The best way to learn about an industry is directly from the customers. What are their needs? What are their pain points? What are the tools they are already using?

3. Once we understand the customer, we can build products specific to their needs. This includes developing partner relationships, distribution channels, and tuck-in acquisitions. By building after understanding, we reduce the waste in building new solutions.

4. The last step is to repeat this process to a new vertical.

This approach ensures that the focus is delivering value to the customer from the start as opposed to meandering around.

Every time a new feature or product was proposed, Jeff Bezos decreed that the narrative should take the shape of a mock press release. The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward. Bezos didn’t believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it.

Everything Store, Biz Stone

We use the Amazon’s Working Backwards method. Working Backwards starts with a customer-centric Press Release and FAQ. Our addition is a a Landing Page and a low-fidelity MVP. Once the PR/FAQ is written we work backwards to define the tasks we need to accomplish to complete the product.

This document is not a set-and-forget. We will continuously update this document as we build the product. The goal is to first write the document before building the product to create clarity

The PR/FAQ process has the benefit of uncovering the following characteristics in a business:

1. Simple. to Operate: A product should be simple to operate and once built should be easy to scale.
2. Job to Be Done. Focus a product on performing a single task well for a single customer segment. Products don’t need to be everything to everyone. If a product can be built for different customer segments make them into separate products.

Press Release

Every product starts as a press release. A press release is a mission statement written from a customer standpoint. It forces the problem to be explained and addresses the goal of the mission from the point of view of the **Customer First**. We use this to then solve the rest of the problems of delivering to the customer, but a press release defines the first step of why the customer needs the product we are building and why we are the best people to build the product.

The template for a press release looks like the following:

[Title]

[Product and who the customer is]

[City, State]–[Intended Launch Date]– [Intro paragraph]

[Problem]

[Solution]

[Quote by leader in your company]

[How the product/service works]

[Quote by a customer of the product/service]

To learn more, go to [URL].

FAQ

A set of questions that are answered from a customer standpoint. The ones in \* are ones we should answer. Some of these can just be copied directly onto the public website.

Product

• What is ?
• What is the problem?
• Who has the problem?
• What are the costs associated with the problem?
• How do people currently solve this problem, and how do those solutions fall down?
• What has changed enabling a new solution?
• How does the new solution work?
• How do you know it’s better? (Quantitative, Qualitative)

Total Addressable Market

* How many consumers have this need or problem?
* How big is the need?
* For how many consumers is this problem big enough that they are willing to spend money to do something about it?
* If so, how much money would they be willing to spend?
* How many of these consumers have the characteristics/capabilities/constraints necessary to make us of the product?
* Who are the existing competitors?
* Who are example companies from similar industries?

Economics and P&L

* What are the per-unit economics of the service? That is, what is the expected gross profit and contribution profit per unit?
* What is the rationale for the price point you have chosen for the product?
* How much will we have to invest up front to build this product in terms of people, technology, inventory, warehouse space, and so on?

Feasibility

* Is it within our area of competence? How would we be able to deliver additional value?\*
* What are the challenging product engineering problems we will need to solve?
* What are the challenging customer UI problems we will need to solve?
* What are the third-party dependencies we will need to solve?\*
* How will we manage the risk of the up-front investment required?\*
* Who is running this? Are they the right people for this project?

Product Page

Our products are built around a single “Job to Be Done” for a specific niche. To fulfill this we keep our landing pages to a single page. Write the landing page along with the Press Release as it creates a public page that can be shown to potential customers and get their feedback. The product page should be created and emails collected using Google Ads before anything code is written. This helps gauge interest for the app while we are building the product.

* Hero
* A clear pitch to the customer
* A smaller secondary pitch
* A click through action
* Features
* List three benefits to using the product
* Create a clear customer for the product
* Customer Logos
* List customer logos for people using the product
* Testimonials
* Write a few blurbs from the customer or potential case studies
* Benefits
* List three benefits to using the product. How will it improve the customer’s life?
* Pricing
* Have three pricing tiers
* FAQ
* Add what is listed in the External FAQ below

Brand Check

* [California SOS](https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/search/business)
* US Trademark
* Google search for .com and similars

We have a six week cadence where we spend four weeks of intense work, and two weeks of course correction and planning. Every December we take time to reflect and relax and make detailed plans for execution.

| Task | Marketing & Sales | Product & Engineering |
| — | — | — |
| Marketing | Launch all the work that we have built in the previous iteration as a series of content and promotions across multiple websites. Setup outreach that needs to be performed. Update AWS Marketplace | Upgrades and Maintenance, Building the iteration plan|
| Build | Close sales based on the marketing that we perform. | – Sales and customer onboarding |
| Plan | Update the sales collateral based on the work completed for the previous four weeks, Collect Testimonials, Update Outerach Docs,Import into the | Plan for the next four weeks of work. Update documentation. Plan some big rocks for the following four weeks. |

The goal of the iteration cycle is to have a high and low period where we can optimize and organize our energy and ensure we are prioritizing things. By setting up things into iterations we can focus on the most important tasks and delay things we want to work on so we can focus our energy to work on the right things.

### Planning Notes

* Focus on inputs not outputs. We can’t control how many customers will join us but we can control how many products we release and out reaches we do. So instead of saying 5 new customers instead say outreach to 100 companies. We can control the inputs, not the output.