Ep.12: Identifying Early Adopters and Their Pain Points feat. Sean Murphy

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In this episode, our special guest Sean Murphy, of SKMurphy, sits down with Scott to discuss the concept of diagnosing new ideas in a startup, discovering early adopters, and much more. Key areas we cover are:

• Why it’s important to diagnose ideas of discovery for entrepreneurs and startups, as well as having models of the kind of impact your enterprise software has on a prospect’s business operations.
• Tips for CEOs in preparing questioning strategies, including powerful responses to use when not able to answer some questions.
• Understanding how a prospect’s worries about the risk of working with your startup and methods for reducing said risk to overcome this objection.
• How to find early adopters at organizations that have a pain and are willing to accept partial solutions, and getting customer feedback in a positive way.

We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!

Podcast Notes

03:42 – How to describe the idea of diagnosing a discovery for startups and entrepreneurs, why it’s important when it comes to sales.

07:40 – Having a model of what the impact of your enterprise software is going to be on a person’s operations.

10:00 – Tips for a Startup CEO in preparing for a questioning strategy.

15:00 – “I don’t know,” is a powerful response.

17:00 – Creating more communication nodes between you as a startup and the target company.

20:58 – The purchase decision and what the customer is really worried about.

22:43 – How to reduce risk as salesperson or as a startup CEO for people to work with you as a startup.

25:44 – Challenges working with startups.

28:18 – The right way to get customer feedback and use it in a positive way.

31:37 – The early market problems.        

35:15 – Zone of proximal development.

40:14 – Ways you can tell you’re working with a successful change agent, early adopter.

44:11 – As a startup, how to find early adopters, innovators at organizations that have the pain and are willing to accept partial solutions.

46:00 – Where to find early adopters.

48:37 – The number where you finally say “All right, I need to switch my hypothesis.”