Selling your product

Just like it sounds, validating your business includes validating that you can sell your product. The nuance here however isn’t about whether you have great sales skills, but is there a predictable and repeatable way in which your product gets sold. Up to now, your efforts have been building towards this with having the right collateral, playing with marketing messages, having a commercial product that early adopters have bought and are using and getting feedback from those early adopters that drive new marketing and sales messaging.

Remember that from the outset, we established that a product isn’t the asset you’ve created but rather the ‘thing’ that you are able to sell and market. Products are the execution of an idea, not the idea itself. What you need to do at this stage is start showing that all your learnings and achievements start to create consistency in that your product as you’ve packaged and marketed gets bought by the same personas who have expressed the same need predictably. While this may sound obvious and nothing new, there are many companies that have sales but don’t know who is buying and why their product is selling.

Your ‘product’ is context sensitive. Its directed at specific problems or opportunities, its priced in a specific way that assures buyers of cost/benefit positive outcomes and is built to be used consistently across users. Validating that you can sell your product is validating that you can execute your business!