16 years ago I graduated in informatics. After 2 years as a developer I went over to the dark side: Sales. Today I’m co-founder of eMenKa (www.eMenKa.be) . A company I and two co-founders started from scratch. No office, no customers, no employees - but we did have a plan and a lot of enthusiasm. 5 years later we are a team of 35 .NET developers and we have over 100 customers in Belgium and Holland. In addition to our consultancy activities we build a software solution for fleet management, eFenKa. (www.eFenKa.be) It’s a web application that stores all the info about your company cars: vehicles, drivers, insurance, fuel cards, leasing companies, fuel companies, accidents, and more. eFenKa is always up-to-date with new regulations and the constantly changing law concerning the company cars.
Next to my day job in eMenKa, I am co-organizer of Bizcamp Belgium (http://bizcamp.be) and I mentor startups at Westartup, Startup Weekend Brussels and MIC Boostcamp.
Being around startups is fantastic. I meet a lot of young, and not so young, but always motivated people. Some projects are technical guys with an idea, then there are also some business types with an idea which involved tech, and there are non-tech startups. The mix is very interesting because although they are different, they are also very much alike in some ways.
As a mentor I look at the startup from my own perspective: sales.
The way I see it: Everything is sales. Selling a product or a service, selling your idea to investors, selling the vacancy to a job applicant, selling to your wife than you’re going to be late tonight… That’s all sales, all based on the same principles.
What are you selling? Who’s problem are you going to solve? Who has the money?
If the person with the problem has the money, you are lucky, but mostly that’s not the case – so you need to set your sales strategy accordingly.
I always try to look for the win-win.
The win-win is when you help someone. Helping someone by selling them your product or service. Helping is a lot easier than selling, a lot easier than asking money for something.
To find how you can help instead of sell, you have to trade places with the person you’re selling to. What’s in it for them?
There are different sides to a story, to a product, to a service. Try to look at it from all sides.
The technical guy sees the perfectly engineered product, but forgets the user.
The user likes the service, but doesn’t use it because it is too complicated.
The financial guy calculates the costs to establish the price, but forget how much the client is willing to pay.
Trading places is trying to think as the other side would. To know how the other side thinks you have to talk to them, and more importantly listen to them.
How do they evaluate your proposition? Your proposition is not only your product or your service, or the price, or the logo, or the brand… It is everything together. Different people will value various aspects of your offering differently. The more you talk to them, the better you will understand their point of view . The better you understand, the better you can help them.
And helping is easier than selling.
If I had to give one piece of advice, this would be it: talk to people. Everyone has insight, valuable insight. You can learn from anyone. Talk to potential customers, to competitors, to family, to experts, to young people, old people. The more you talk and LISTEN, the better you are going to perform.
Listen; there is so much learning out there up for grabs.
Tjorven Denorme
@TjorvenD
Copyright © Microsoft® Innovation Center Belgium