Resonate with your prospective clients

So, how do you resonate with your target market in conjunction with developing your tech solution? 

You want to turn that technological jargon overload…

Into real-world benefits. Not bullsh*t, benefits.

Technical speak can confuse and alienate potential clients that are more concerned with how your product will solve their problems.

It ensures you are speaking to your target market as a whole, not just the prospective clients that are experienced in the technology itself.

In reality, if technical-side prospects need more technical information, they will know what they want and ask for it… you need to get there first.

If the pathway to the technical stakeholder is through a business-focused management role, you will lose them before you get the chance to pitch your solution.

DO NOT assume your target audience will understand your technology. It might seem simple to you, it may even be simple once your prospects understand it…

But they have other things going on in their lives that are more important than using all their brainpower to educate themselves on WTF you are talking about. Especially when they can go elsewhere.

In the early days of tech, the products had more power to sell themselves because the audience was more often an engineer or technician… but even then corporate buyers may take a year to go through the sales cycle.

Excited engineers who enjoy having a chat about new tech, don’t necessarily have buy-in from their internal stakeholders. They have business cases to submit, financials to justify, and the politics of challenging status quo.

So it is beyond important, imperative, to translate technical capabilities into clear, relatable value for your addressable market.

When you can effectively communicate the benefits of your solution in ways that make sense and resonate with your target market, you have the foundation for robust go-to-market strategies that will drive the adoption of your tech.

You can then disseminate this clarity across these three core areas that are often limitations in tech startups.

Aligning revenue and technical teams

Sales and marketing alignment is a ubiquitous issue. While they have the same overall purpose, their goals can be in competition at times, if they aren’t aligned both sides will be less effective.

In saying this, when it comes to tech startups, the real challenge is alignment between these revenue focused teams, and your technical teams… because when you are developing and evolving, you need strong inter-departmental collaboration so things don’t come to a screeching halt every time a new challenge or unexpected issue arises.

This is crucial for implementations that lead to client satisfaction.

The great thing is, quality value-driven benefits are most effectively developed by engaging both revenue-side and technical-side teams. It’s not a “let’s do this for the fun of it” as much as “I need you all to be engaged for this to really work for us all”.

This means you can align your teams and build inter-departmental cohesion by turning your core revenue messaging into a truly strategic project, owned by yourself, but with core responsibilities across your management team for the required inputs for ongoing iterations of quality messaging as your solution evolves.

When you have buy-in and engagement across the business for the success of revenue generation, you have a more collaborative environment that helps everyone feel part of the success of getting the solution to market.

As well as delivering the solution for maximum client satisfaction. That is pivotal for retaining clients. And is just darn cool for technical teams to be properly engaged with the business, not just the tech specs.

Client Education

It is difficult to ensure there are robust educational resources for clients without a clear shared understanding of the value they are expecting from your technology.

While it sounds obvious, client education is difficult, we don’t want to learn things we are not interested in and many times the user is not the person signing off on the business case. This becomes even more apparent as the complexity increases.

Without easily used educational resources, you will have issues with clients adopting your product following implementation which can quickly cause friction, complaints, and at the worst they will cancel their contract and find something they can get their people to use.

Strategic Partnerships

When your benefits are clear, you can more readily engage with other businesses that can drive growth by expanding market reach.

By partnering with indirect competitors, those that have the same target market but are not directly competing against your solution, you have opportunities to package project solutions through to referring business and beyond, depending on your tech.

Marketing sounds so easy…

So why is it so hard for tech startups to get it right?

A bit of “we can do it all” and a bit of that dang Dunning-Kruger effect.

While being confident in your ability to drive your tech solution forwards is pivotal to your business being viable, this confidence often bleeds into go-to-market activities, where the cognitive bias that is the Dunning-Kruger effect manifests itself as your team feeling more knowledgeable about their expertise in the area of marketing… because how hard can it be… mixed with a bit of fun.

The real challenge enters the picture when overconfidence leads to poor decision-making, not because your team lacks the intelligence, simply because just like technical projects, marketing projects have hidden nuances that take experience to catch or take into consideration.

And inexperience can lead to issues down the line, even if you get the up-front planning sorted to a suitable level.

That’s where outsourcing your go-to-market strategy and getting support across the execution phases, even if your team is doing the core of the execution, means reduced risk of unexpected misses, and avoiding over-analysis of sales and marketing activities that take your focus away from what you and your team do best, develop and implement sustainable technology.

I say hidden because unlike coding software or integrating hardware, you are unlikely to know what has gone wrong until it is too late… or you may never know. That is the risk of go-to-market.

It is like having a product roadmap – you can get it looking and sounding great, executing on it may not be so smooth. The difference being that your technical experience means you know the limitations, the timeline realities, how to mitigate the risks, and what to do when things go a little haywire to get it all back on-track.

Circling back around to “we can do everything internally”…

If you are developing a technical solution, while also trying to deliver effective go-to-market planning and activities, you and your team can quickly become unfocused.

Worse still, your management team can get lost going around in circles with go-to-market planning and tasks that they are not confident in, but may not realise until it is too late.

Focusing on your core is essential – focusing on solving the problems your target market have is literally how you will generate revenue when you get to giving them a demo and proving the value they will receive.

One of the reasons for this is simply decision fatigue, where the quality of decisions in your business deteriorates because mental exhaustion is real. This can result in procrastination, through to a tendency to avoid making decisions altogether… and that is when the blame game commences and everything stagnates.

So keep your energy focused on pushing through the challenges of product development, where your strength is at its peak, and avoid burnout. Burnout sucks the productivity out of your business.

The best way to side-step the burnout and politics of go-to-market delivery is to outsource. Outsourcing is more than just hiring an external resource, rather you will have someone the management team can use as an advisor, and who can tell them how it is when they need to hear it…

Because an external advisor or consultant does not have to worry about the politics of working with each manager down the line, they are focused on helping you to successfully get your solution into the market and adopted.

And you are not swayed by whichever manager sells their ideas best.

You can also be involved as much or as little as your time and desire to learn in this area allows.

Importantly, having a specialist that is proficient in go-to-market strategies will help you and your management team see through the fog and focus on the most value-adding activities for where you are at.

Then, when you are ready to hire a marketer, you can focus on team-fit and someone who can grow with your business… because your go-to-market infrastructure will be in-place for them to take the reigns of.

Let me know what go-to-market challenges you are having and let’s get your tech adopted: matthew.pola@resin8content.com

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