The new way of thinking about innovation is not limited to a great product/service idea says Blake Masters, co-author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Related Podcast and Transcription: A Path For Future Innovation
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: One of the things I really liked about your book is that, and I’m a sales and marketing guy so you’re going to see where this comes from really easily, but is you truly believe that product just does not sell itself or that that’s a dangerous, maybe a dangerous path to take even if you just created the best widget and you think sales and marketing has some value, correct?
Blake: Tremendous, tremendous value and, everyone knows the product is important, and I think in the wake of the .com crash, at the end of ’99, 2000. People in Silicon Valley really retreated to thinking about product, so ’99, smart non-engineers were doing business development and sales and there is a sense in which today smart non-engineers are sort of judged as they go into sales product or working on a product scheme is somehow more of the moment in Silicon Valley today. I think the product is definitely important. I mean it’s very hard to sell something that’s bad, but it is possible, and it’s certainly, a lot easier to sell something that’s good. What engineers try to do in Silicon Valley is, they fall victim to what we call the field of dreams conceit.
If we build it, this will sell itself. If we build it, the customers will come. That’s almost always false and what we suggest in the book is sales and marketing are underrated precisely because they’re so hard to see and the skill set that makes one good at these things is very opaque in contrast to engineering or product. You look at a product, you can see what it does. You can see how it integrates to your life. If you look at a computer program or that code, either works or it doesn’t. Things are very transparent on the surface. Sales is really quite hidden. A lot of the sales people running around in Silicon Valley don’t call themselves salesman anymore. So, we do have an allergy to sort of obvious sales pitches. No one wants to get sold and go to a used car lot and the dealer comes out to talk to you as a sort of an architect of shadiness.
It’s really important to remember sales is happening all the time. You can’t move your product to a wide audience without some sort of sales strategy. And, the best way to fail in business is probably to, focus all your time and energy on creating a great product without spending a corresponding amount of energy, focused on ‘how do we get it out to people’. Because, I think this is a huge correction in the wrong direction of the over-correction. Startups, especially, need to think really long and hard about their sales strategies because you can build a really good business with just sort of a decent product if you figured out how to sell it to people.
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