Sell & Support

[Adrian Packer]

How do we take our salespeople on the journey with us? If they're going to be out there advocating for a new product, they need to be trained, they need to be aware of the features, the benefits... and there's another risk that we need to consider. If they're selling a new product, they're probably not selling an old product that they're particularly familiar with or they might have some affinity to. So, not considering the change management aspects within your sales and customer services can give you a false evaluation of the success of your Innovation processes.

When your new product or service is out there, and new clients are engaging with it... when they have an issue, they're going to call your existing customer support people. And often times, these are the people that aren't engage fully in the innovation processes, so they're left actually wondering how to answer some of these questions, there may not be the product information available to them, there may not be the traceability about which particular version of the product they're dealing with. And all of these challenges from the customers perspective will impact on the perception of the product right? and it's really nothing to do with the product, it's to do with the customer services that are wrapped around it. So, unless we're engaging our customer services team, upskilling them appropriately, we can... poorly evaluate a product that's been launched.

[Timothy Allan]

I suppose how you do sales has to evolve like... and it is, some of it is cultural, like in New Zealand I don't think, whilst there are professional people that sell, it's not like in the US. I mean sales is like a hardcore profession, inside sales, outside sales. It's really different and so every... the way you've, sort of, got to climatise yourself, the way different cultures sell, and then we, kind of, try and adopt as much as we can from their best practice. And so, we try and update the way that we work globally, so it can essentially, you know, if you can cherry pick something that works extremely well, there's no reason we can't apply that in New Zealand.

I suppose at a headline level, we've had this concept of a 360 degree customer experience as the marketing program. You're not just marketing before you sell a bike, you know, once you've sold a bike, and then someone's got a bike, they're actually helping you market the product - how you deal with them ,then triggers whether or not they would refer you to another customer, which is the best, you know, connection you can have with another customer. And so, you know you're looking at all these other brands have colours, you know, KTM is orange, Honda is red, Yamaha is blue, Kawasaki is green, and nobody had black and white. So, that's why I mean we've got a very nice... almost like... accidental bonus that it's also the colour New Zealand is recognised for, but the principal reason was that there was no other company that used black and white as a signature, and so you've tried to craft the way that you communicate to people over a pretty lengthy period of time, and we try to be as consistent as possible which is about, you know, telling the stories. Because one thing, you know, is really true is that the people that buy the product always do like... they're actually quite interesting people, and they're doing interesting things. So, you know it becomes part of how you market the product naturally.

Probably about two years ago, we started to put in place a digital learning management system which means you can digitally train and certify somebody to like a level two technical stage, which would be if you're a mechanic that means that you can fully repair most functional systems on the bike. We have three levels in our training with third being really the distribution level, so they're the people that support the dealers. So, you know all of our guys would be probably level three or above, and then we have digitised all that training material. So, what it means is that you could train a 100 people in North America without being there, or somebody going to visit them, and you can certify them. And so, you know, modern tools and so those are real enablers for us, and it means that, you know, because it doesn't matter whether we're supporting an enterprise client directly in an installation, you still got to train the people there. You have to educate people, so it becomes a much more intentional act. You were probably going to do it anyway, well we were, we just accelerated it and got a lot more intentional about it, because we can't be there to help you, you've got to be self-sufficient.

[Bridgit Hawkins]

I think sales is the hardest, hardest part of developing a business. One of the hardest lessons that we learnt, and really are still learning even after all this time, is... is not just the sale, it's the support. It's tempting to sell the product wherever, you find somebody who wants to buy, but if you can't support them, and sometimes even with the software business, that support needs to be on the ground. So, unless you can commit to support, sometimes, you need to say 'actually, I'm not going to make that sale', because although in the moment I'm going to get the money, it's actually not going to build value in the business.

[Claire Foggo]

Pricing was definitely trial and error for us, so with our um early adopter customers we... gave them like a really good rate as sort of a foundation customer rate and- and then we really just had to try different levels of pricing until people said no. And that would that was how we worked out you know what the market was prepared to pay but- and which really was a lot more than we ever expected.

[Sam Burton]

I think a few years ago we were taking a very much... a shotgun approach to how we put our collection together. By focusing in on individual market, right down to the level of neighborhoods in particular cities, such as Hamburg. We've flown over to Hamburg a couple of times and spent some time in the UK as well doing some very pointed one-on-one customer research projects. Um so going into the mom's homes and asking them questions about how they actually buy shoes, how they use them, um... And what type of product they need you know from season to season, and yeah we found that it was really different to New Zealand. The seasons are much more extreme over there, so they need the big fluffy winter boots, as a result we developed an entirely new range of waterproof winter boots just for Hamburg which went really really well. And that's then expanded across different markets and trickled out. We've also been working a lot closer with our end customers which then feeds that machine as well. So we've got this really amazing process running right now in the business where we're not being so much dictated by our distributors, as we used to a few years ago. When I first started, I remember the distributors coming and saying "yep that shoe's great, but we want it in blue" um "just give it to us". And because we didn't have those really strong stories and that really strong understanding of what the end-customer wants, we pretty much just had to give it to them. So, after going through that whole process of really understanding those end-customers, um feeding that back into the business, we can approach it with a lot more confidence and we're starting to see that in the sales and the data coming through now.

For after sales support, generally if there's a problem with the shoes, we'll just return it. We want to maintain um a really high level of service because we care about our customers so much that we want to make them feel wanted. It's actually much more efficient within the business to be able to handle it like that. If we spend a lot of time deliberating on whether something should be returned or not it just ends up costing us time and money, so by doing that it actually frees up our customer service to be answering other questions, you know, and actually helping them in better ways.

[Angie Judge]

I think the hardest obstacle when you're bringing a new product to market, especially when it's a new technology, is ultimately you have to get somebody to change. And in our line of work that involves getting people and teams to change how they make decisions. And for us that means that we have to wrap our product with all sorts of other things, it's not just about the software as a service, it's about the success that we wrap that software as a service with. And it's not just about for us advertising in the market, it's about how thought leadership wraps that advertising is part of our marketing strategy, because ultimately we have to, through insight, inspire those people to do things differently.

[Philip Fierlinger]

For me, a massive lesson when we started zero was um hiring salespeople almost from... day one, and I was surprised by that because I thought that we're an online company, and that really- that's our channel to market. So, to get those first customers on board, you know some of them were early adopters and they weren't too hard to get across the line, but the majority of them really needed to- needed a lot of handholding, needed to be convinced, and as a designer, and as a as a product manager, product owner, seeing that feedback from sales is just so incredibly valuable and so important to informing the, you know, what you're hearing from the market, what the market is wanting and needing. And being able to pinpoint customer types that you work for or decide that they're not- you're not going to... address that market, that is not the right market. Their needs, their requirements don't fit with the product and the market that we are addressing.

[Sam Gribben]

Because we're B2C, a lot of our... whole sales process is very automated. It's about generating a lot of leads and having a very effective funnel to convert them, and seeing lead generation marketing and customer success as part of the same continuum. Still keeping the kind of personal human customer service that we offer, and also really really a lot of user research, a lot of uh testing with people to see what is working for them, what's not, and how to keep people really engaged.

[Aroha Armstrong]

One of the things we do very poorly... across the board is pitch. We undersell our businesses, that Kiwi humility comes in, we undersell what it is that we offer, we undersell our value, and we undersell our products and our capability.

[Angie Judge]

We are still the only big data analytics company who specialise in visitor attractions in the world, and our unique sales proposition is about predicting and analyzing visitor behavior. As soon as you have a human touch involved in your sales process, you really need to be charging at least 3,000 a year per subscription to make that model work. And the more, sort of, complex and involved you get in that sales and success, the more you have to charge. And so, part of our business strategy was to go up to the top of the market and work our way down, because it's a lot easier to do that than try and go the other way up once you're, sort of, seen in the market as being a more... a cheaper product.

[Peter Montgomery]

For me, what I tend to like to do is build locally, and I'm talking locally Australia and New Zealand, I validate down here and then I reach out and start working with a larger partner internationally to scale. Because I just can't, in terms of customer acquisition costs, time, speed, and the type of products I do, which is- say different from a SaaS business or, you know I've got hardware and software operating in in unison, means it's much easier to accelerate my business with larger multinational partners and that's what my game plan generally.

[Ross Pearce]

There's a rule of thumb about developing a product that says If you've worked out how much it's going to actually cost you to develop the physical product, let's say it's going to cost a million dollars, then you need to budget for another million dollars to launch that into the market, and people don't get that. They'll budget for the product development, but they won't budget for the market launch part of the of the process, which again is probably why a lot of businesses fail with their product innovation. Because not allowing, or funding, that really important market launch part of the process. So, you really need to start looking at product development as from an end-to-end from... that initial idea through to what success looked like and how much it's going to cost to get there all the way through, not just on developing the product and doing the R&D.

In the digital world that we live in, you've got to be authentic, you can't hide behind a brand story, it's got to be real because it only takes one customer to bring you down if they're dissatisfied, and the impact on the brand can be significant. So, I think this is an important distinction from where we have been in the past... that in fact, the brand essence has to be fundamentally... the core purpose of the business, and they have to be transparent. And I have this belief that a business needs to have a clear cause because a cause is an empathetic purpose, and it connects people, it connects suppliers, it connects customers, it connects the business itself... without having to explain it. But that becomes a brand essence and that's a truth which needs to be communicated.

One of the challenges if you're manufacturing product from New Zealand is actually servicing product. Product always needs some form of service, there'll be always something that goes is wrong that needs to be sorted physically, and some of the technologies which are available now especially through the cloud and making your product smart with sensors so that you can actually provide 24/7 service, in a sense, remotely, are great opportunities for New Zealand. And I think some of the companies I've spoken to, they used to have to send service personnel around the planet, um practically every week, and by using some of these technologies, they have seriously reduced the amount of travel on cost and providing service to the customer base. Also, through that process are gathering a lot more data about the product usage, which is coming back into helping them build a better solution and a better way of engaging with the customers and understanding where the real needs may lay from that mass of data that they're getting back.