#BiteSize is a video series where leading experts answer some of the most pressing questions entrepreneurs have while building or marketing their startups.
In the latest episode of #BiteSize, Guy Kawasaki gives his best tips on sales for startup founders.
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online, graphics-design service, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and executive fellow at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is the author of The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and ten other books.
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Transcript of the Video
My best tip for sales is obvious which is – it’s much easier to sell great stuff than it is crap. So, if you want to do well in sales, make great stuff!
That sounds like, “Duh! Of course you’re going to try and make great stuff.” But, you’d be amazed at how many people are trying to sell crap and they believe that all their sales techniques and their SEO and they black magic can work.
But fundamentally – great stuff. When Apple makes great stuff, it does well. When it doesn’t make great stuff, it doesn’t do well. It’s kind of that simple. So that’s tip number 1. And if you do that, everything else doesn’t matter.
Now, let’s suppose you do that, then I think you should enable people to test drive your product. You’re basically saying to them – “I think you’re smart, I’m not going to bludgeon you into becoming a customer. You decide.” I think that you give them a very slippery slope so it’s not hard to convert to your product, so it’s not hard to begin to use it, there’s not a lot of manual labor, there’s not a lot of translation and all this kind of stuff.
You read other data formats, you authenticate with Facebook, Google+, Twitter sign in, you don’t ask for credit card as the first step – all this kind of stuff.
So great stuff, make it easy and enable people to test drive your product or service.