Startups: Tools Are Bought, Transformations Are Sold
One thing that I wish I had learned earlier in my entrepreneurial career is this:
Tools are bought, transformations are sold.
Here's a clip of a talk I gave at the SaaStr conference that elaborates on this.
First, let's talk about the difference? What do I mean by tools, and what do I mean by transformations?
Tools
Sometimes, the product you are selling is in a category that is well understood. Customers know the category, they know what other products are in that category, and they may previously have used another tool in the category. They don’t have to learn a ton to understand what the tool does. They don’t have to go through an existential crisis to adopt the tool -- it solves a specific problem, and can be implemented without having to rethink how they do things.
Examples of tools are a to-do list app, or a time tracking system. I’m not saying that these products can’t be sophisticated or differentiated, what I am saying is that customers have a pretty good sense for what the product is going to do for them and why they might need it.
Transformations
Sometimes, the product you are selling is transformational. Adopting it requires customers to rethink all or parts of their business. Often it requires rethinking their career. It requires transformational change.
Example: The early “inbound marketing platform” HubSpot was selling in our early years. The premise of our product was: “The way you’ve been doing marketing is fundamentally broken and doesn’t work as well anymore. You’re going to have to do it very, very differently. Our product can help.” Convincing professional marketers that all the things they had spent their careers doing (and getting good at) was less relevant now (like buying lists, putting up a booth at a tradeshow, etc.) was not an easy thing to do. We were asking for a transformative change in their thinking.
Change is hard. Convincing someone else to change is even harder.
Tools Are Bought, Transformations Are Sold
If you’re selling a tool, you might be able to put a great website up, explain what your product does, perhaps contrast it to other tools in the market, tell customers the price and provide a way for them to buy it. Easy-breezy.
If you’re selling a transformation, a website is not going to be enough. If you’re asking someone to make a massive change to how they do things, you’re going to likely have to sell. First, you’ll have to sell them on the reason why change is necessary. Without making that sale, you’re not going to be able to sell them on your particular product.
So, if you've got a transformational product, you're likely going to need sales people to sell it. Not ones that have aggressive sales tactics and worry about how quickly they can close -- but ones that know that the prospective customer has to be sold on the change first before you can even start to have a conversation about the product.