Workshop - Selling for the Lean Startup: How to Find Customers and Talk to Them

To test an MVP, you need customers. And Customer Development means you need to know the a few basic sales skills. This workshop focuses on understanding the customer pain (Customer Discovery) and then showing them you can solve it (Customer Validation).

Part of Customer Development is sales. This workshop is about understanding the customer's pain (Customer Discovery) and then showing those customers you can solve it (Customer Validation).

In this 3 hour activity-based workshop (hands on, not just a lecture) led by Scott Sambucci (who also co-hosted a workshop at the Lean Startup Conference (http://leanstartup.co/)), you'll first learn an effective method for finding potential customers (salespeople call this "prospecting"), then learn what to say and how to say it to your potential customers (a.k.a "making sales calls"). These first customers enable you to validate your product idea and build your business model.

By employing a few simple principles and developing a structure for your Customer Discovery calls, you'll accelerate your learning. Work smarter, not harder.

We'll start by learning:

How to research referrals before you call them; How to identify new potential customers; How to maximize your time at conferences & industry events. Then, we'll build a plan for your sales calls so you can:

Convert your potential customers into paying customers; Reduce sales call anxiety; Focus on your product development and learning. Prep work: To help you get the most out of the work, bring with you (if available):

2-3 referrals or companies that you think are targets for your product under development A few ideas of how you plan to locate more prospective customers. Are you setting up a web lead form? Will you do outbound calling? Do you plan to work through your personal network and referrals only? This workshop will be lead by Scott Sambucci. After expenses, extra proceeds go to building out LeanStartupCircle.com (http://leanstartupcircle.com) for the community. For the curious, all our books and records are open to volunteers on request.

About Scott Sambucci, SalesQualia Founder & Chief Sales Geek

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/2/4/a/6/event_183729382.jpegScott founded SalesQualia after building the sales organizations with two Silicon Valley technology companies. With more than 15 years of sales, business development, and leadership experience, SalesQualia is dedicated to improving sales performance. Whether you’re new to sales, a startup founder looking for those elusive first customers, or an experienced sales manager, SalesQualia will help you sell more stuff with our live workshops, sales coaching, software, blog posts, and coaching videos. You can reach Scott on Twitter: @scottsambucci (http://twitter.com/scottsambucci) & @salesqualia (http://twitter.com/salesqualia) or by email: scott@salesqualia.com .