Regaining sales traction when revenue has stalled or declined can be extremely difficult. A global pandemic, increasing competitive pressure, a new entrant, or changing customer needs are some of the threats that can impact your business.
Identify the unmet need
To reignite your sales engine, you must FIRST identify the unmet need or underserved needs of your target customers and the market. I have developed a repeatable framework to reignite sales growth. It is based around #productmarketfit, of which I am a big fan, but I have expanded based on my experience and successes. Once you have reignited, the target customers are buying, using, and recommending your product to others at a rate at which you can sustain your growth and profitability. Once you have achieved that level, then you can start to scale your business.
When I joined as CEO of a high-tech software company, I needed good hard data to help determine strategy. So I developed this 7-step framework to help develop and find our reignition strategy.
Reignition Framework
We had a product hypothesis and we needed to get our target customer’s feedback. I required all executives to get out of the office and visit customers. No more assumptions, let’s hear it straight from our customers. We needed to obsess over these customer interactions…we needed to hear what they liked and did not like about our product, also what they liked and did not like about the competitive product, and finally what is missing. This helped us determine the unmet needs and underserved areas.
Building an MVP (minimum viable product)
Once we identified the unmet need, we quickly built an MVP (minimum viable product) and then invested in creating compelling demos that quickly showed our differentiation and product strength.
We enforced a stringent 30-day evaluation. We needed to build a compelling product that customers would purchase at the end of those 30 days. If our target customers would not give back the product after 30 days, we knew we were getting closer to reignition. And lastly, we continued to refine, iterate, fail quickly, and innovate until we had reignition.
How do you know when you have achieved reignition? Word of mouth is the most important factor to me. If your customers talk about your products and recommend it to others, then they effectively become your product’s sales force. The second most important metric to me was the number of customers that purchased at the end of the 30-day evaluation. Other important metrics are NPS (Net Promoter Score), the amount of media coverage, and quantitative metrics such as growth rate, churn rate and market share.
Scaling the business
Once we achieved PM fit for our niche market, I began to scale the business. I added headcount and identified new emerging markets with new unmet needs for expansion. We focused our product roadmap on the extremely important features our target customers were not getting from the competition. We created strategic partnerships to expand the ecosystem and continued to deliver, collect feedback, innovate and iterate to scale and grow the business.
The benefits of reignition can be game-changing. Create market leadership, build a sustainable sales engine, become a magnet for top talent and boost the morale of your employees.