06- How will you find your customers?
Last updated
Last updated
Foreword by Des Traynor, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Office
In the very early days of Intercom, I used to literally email people and ask them to use Intercom. If you look at the first 200 emails I sent from my Intercom email, almost all of them were along the lines of, “Would you like to try Intercom?” For a customer who we really wanted, I’d mock up a screenshot showing how we’d nail a reasonable use case for their product. Anecdotally that helped people understand both what we could do for them and what it would look like in their product. 在Intercom的初期，我曾经通过电子邮件向人们发送电子邮件，并要求他们使用Intercom。如果您看看我从内部通信电子邮件发送的第200封电子邮件，几乎所有的电子邮件都符合“你想尝试Intercom吗？”对于我们真正想要的客户，我会模拟一个屏幕截图我们如何为他们的产品指定合理的用例。有趣的是，帮助人们了解我们可以为他们做什么以及他们的产品看起来像什么。
Emailing every customer certainly doesn’t scale, but when you have zero customers, scaling is not the problem. Getting from zero to 100 is your challenge. And believe me, it’s a grind. I spent day and night sending email after email in a cold, dark, horrid o ce in Dublin. 通过电子邮件发送给每个客户肯定不会扩展，但是当你有零个客户时，缩放不是问题。从零到100是你的挑战。相信我，这是一个磨练。我在都柏林一个寒冷，黑暗，可怕的电视邮箱中，一天又一天地发送电子邮件。B
But it was incredibly rewarding in important ways. Thee replies flooded in and I quickly learned so much about the types of customers who were signing up. Our user onboarding was centered on one action: install a snippet of JavaScript into your product. But it turned out that not every business has a developer sitting idle waiting to tweak JavaScript. Not every business even has a developer. All of this reality hit home during those days and we learned so much about what it takes to help our customers get started. 但重要的是令人难以置信的回报。e回覆了，我很快就了解了正在注册的客户类型。我们的用户入门集中在一个操作上：在您的产品中安装一个JavaScript片段。但事实证明，并不是每个企业都有开发人员闲着等待调整JavaScript。并不是每个企业都有开发者。所有这些现实在这些日子里都回到了家中，我们学到了如何帮助客户开始使用它。
It wasn’t just sending emails either. I remember getting up at 5 a.m. to give a webinar to nine people in the Southern Hemisphere. e webinar was a fusion of thought leadership mixed with product examples from Intercom. You question what the hell you’re doing at the time, but out of that webinar we got nine customers. And those nine customers probably got us 90 and then 900. Wherever a customer was interested in using our product we’d show up. We’ve never a orded ourselves the luxury of being fussy. 它不只是发送电子邮件。我记得早上五点起床，为南半球的九个人举行网络研讨会。e网络研讨会融合了思科领导力，与Intercom的产品实例相结合。你问你当时在做什么，但是在这个网络研讨会上，我们有九个客户。而这九个客户可能会收到我们90和900.无论客户有兴趣使用我们的产品，我们都会出现。我们从来没有把自己的奢侈品变成现实。
These days things are quite diffenent. When we launched our product Educate, it only took the team four weeks before they were celebrating hitting $1MM in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). The grumpy old man in me wants to tell them these stories so they realize that it doesn’t always happen that quick. 这几天的事情是相当不同的。当我们推出我们的产品Educate时，只有在他们庆祝在ARR（年度经常性收入）中达到1亿美元之前，才花了四周的时间。我脾气暴躁的老人想告诉他们这些故事，所以他们意识到并不总是那么快。
In the good old days, starting a software business in any industry was really hard. Getting your foot in the door required not just a great idea but a massive upfront investment in building that product, never mind getting it in front of customers.
在过去的好日子里，任何一个行业开始软件业务真的很难。把你的脚放在门上不仅仅是一个好主意，而是大量的前期投资来建造这个产品，不要把它放在客户面前。
Today it’s easier than ever to launch a software business. Everyone is building web and mobile apps. App stores have levelled the playing eld and now anyone can publish an app on the same terms as a big company.
今天，启动软件业务比以往任何时候都容易。每个人都在构建网络和移动应用。应用商店已经调整了玩家的地位，现在任何人都可以按照与大公司相同的条件发布应用。
But when you ask most of these businesses what they’re doing to actually acquire customers, you hear the usual suspects: cold emailing, social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, the latest growth hacking miracle, etc. With few exceptions, it isn’t working. Nobody is listening because there is so much noise.
但是，当您询问大多数企业实际收购客户时，您会听到通常的嫌疑人：冷电子邮件，社交媒体营销，SEO，内容营销，电子邮件营销，最新增长黑客奇迹等。除了少数例外，它不工作。没有人在听，因为有这么多的噪音。
That’s because getting your first customers to actually pay for your product is one of the hardest things a startup will ever have to do. Succeeding validates your product’s right to exist and shows that you might be on the right track after all.
这是因为让您的第一个客户实际支付您的产品是创业公司将要做的最难的事情之一。成功验证您的产品的存在权，并显示您可能在正确的轨道上。
It took us just over a year to get 100 people to pay for Intercom. is sounds like a long time, but when we launched, our product was free for everyone, and we actually didn’t start charging for a year. Hence we always planned to wait a long time for customers to start paying us.
我们花了一年多的时间让100人付钱给Intercom。听起来很长一段时间，但是当我们推出时，我们的产品对所有人都是免费的，我们实际上没有开始收费一年。因此，我们总是计划等待很长时间才能开始向客户付款。
In terms of how we found them, we didn’t; they found us. We planted many seeds in the lead up to our launch. For a long time, we’d been writing articles about how to run a SaaS business, how to scale a SaaS business, how to grow your audience, pick your features, delight your customers. It was the sort of content that would speci cally appeal to folks working in SaaS companies. We’d built our own social proof. If you’re sending cold emails and LinkedIn messages to people without that, don’t be surprised when you get a nasty response.
关于我们如何找到他们，我们没有;他们找到了我们。我们在推出之前种下了很多种子。长期以来，我们一直在撰写关于如何运行SaaS业务的文章，如何扩展SaaS业务，如何扩大受众群体，选择您的功能，让客户感到高兴。正是这种内容特别吸引了在SaaS公司工作的人。我们建立了我们自己的社会证明。如果您没有发送冷电子邮件和LinkedIn邮件给人们，当您得到令人讨厌的回复时，不要惊讶。
Our content meant that when we launched our product with a blog post in 2011, we already had a captive audience and we got an immediate burst of signups.
我们的内容意味着，当我们在2011年推出我们的博客文章时，我们已经有一个俘虏的受众，我们立即获得了一些注册。
Then the Intercom app was upvoted to #1 on Hacker News, which got us many more signups. We also wrote a very popular guest post for Smashing Magazine on topics related to Intercom, which expanded our audience even further. If you look at Intercom’s first 100 paying customers, most came from one of these channels.
然后，Intercom应用程序被升级到了Hacker News的第一个，这让我们得到了更多的注册。我们还为“Smashing”杂志撰写了一个非常受欢迎的“对话”相关主题的客座话题，进一步扩大了我们的观众。如果您看看Intercom的第100位付费客户，大多数来自其中一个渠道。
That’s not to say “Traction = blog post + Hacker News + feature in TechCrunch.” It’s not that easy. And besides, it’s Product Hunt these days. Any company can get a one-day bump on TechCrunch and then quickly nd itself in the “trough of sorrow”, as Uber’s Andrew Chen calls it.
这不是说TechTrunch中的“Traction = blog post + Hacker News +”功能不是那么简单。此外，这些天是产品狩猎。任何一家公司都可以在TechCrunch上获得一天的损失，然后像Uber的Andrew Chen所说的那样，快速发现自己处于“悲伤之谷”。
You need to nd meaningful traction. And to do that in B2B SaaS, you need to push forward the ideas that are embodied in your software.
你需要找到有意义的吸引力。而要在B2B SaaS中做到这一点，您需要推动您软件中体现的想法。
Let’s say you are trying to pitch a new email app. New customers don’t care much about the pixels, shadows or the typography of the product. Most of these products look the same: fancy sidebars and swipe actions. What customers really care about is the thinking behind the product: how you think about email and how those ideas are re ected in your product. If those ideas resonate with your audience they’ll de nitely
假设您正在尝试推出新的电子邮件应用。新客户不关心产品的像素，阴影或排版。大多数产品看起来都一样：花哨的侧边栏和滑动动作。客户真正关心的是产品背后的思考：您对电子邮件的看法以及产品中的想法。如果这些想法与您的观众产生共鸣，他们将无限制 give your product a try.
给你的产品一试。 A great example of this is the famous internal memo, “We don’t sell saddles here,” that Slack CEO Stewart Butter eld published before the company launched. It clearly articulated the vision behind the product and how they thought about their competitors. As a result when the product was publicly available, people were queuing up to try it.
一个很好的例子是着名的内部备忘录“我们不卖这里的鞍座”，Slack的首席执行官斯图尔特黄油公司在公司发布之前发布。它清楚地阐明了产品的愿景，以及他们对竞争对手的看法。因此，当产品公开发布时，人们排队等待尝试。
By all means, launch on Product Hunt, and if you do a good job there you’ll get a few thousand people interested. But they’re window shoppers, jumping from store to store. Easy come, easy go. To attract a meaningful audience of like-minded people you have to share the ideas at the core of your product as early as you can. at’s what attracts the people who are interested in the ideas and purpose underpinning your product.
无论如何，在“产品搜寻”（Launch Hunt）上发布，如果你做得很好，那么你会得到几千人的兴趣。但他们是窗口购物者，从商店跳到商店。来得便当去得快。为了吸引志同道合的有意义的观众，您必须尽可能早地分享您的产品核心的想法。在什么吸引人们对支持您的产品的想法和目的感兴趣的人。
“All of our early customers were hand-held by the founders. This gave us a very explicit understanding of what we needed to build and helped not only bring in those customers but created a tight feedback loop where we were able to deliver improvements in the right way and on time.”
“我们所有的早期客户都是由创始人手持的。这给了我们非常明确的理解，我们需要建立和帮助不仅带来这些客户，而且创造了一个严格的反馈循环，我们能够以正确的方式及时提供改进。
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of strategies for acquiring new customers, but word of mouth is probably the most powerful way of getting them. Put it this way, you’re probably much more likely to try an app that a friend tells you about over co ee than one you see in a Google search ad.
收购新客户的策略有数以百计，甚至数千种，但口碑可能是获得新客户最有力的方式。以这种方式，您可能更有可能尝试一个朋友告诉您的应用程序，而不是您在Google搜索广告中看到的应用程序。
Word of mouth is your first tra c source. It’s hard to put a price on its value. And it’s only useful when the same words come out of lots of diffenent mouths.
口碑是你的第一个传播源。很难对其价值付出代价。只有当相同的词语出现在许多不同的口中时才有用。
You might have heard the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s a famous story about a group who argue over what they’ve encountered, because they are each only exposed to a small piece of it. ose at the tail think it’s a rope, those at the trunk think it’s a snake. In situations like this the elephant would struggle to get word of mouth. ere’s too many con icting ideas about what it actually is.
你可能听说过盲人和大象的故事。这是一个关于一个团体的故事，他们争论自己遇到的是什么，因为他们每个人都只接触到一小部分。尾巴认为这是一根绳子，在树干上认为这是一条蛇。在这样的情况下，大象会努力得到口碑。对于它实际上是什么意思太多了。
This elephant, of course, is your product. As your product grows, the number of things it can and will be used for grows too. Let’s say you have a time tracking app. Some people might say it’s for tracking billable hours, while others will say it’s for tracking vacations. Some will say it’s a project management tool, while others call it a task list.
这只大象当然是你的产品。随着您的产品的增长，它可以和将被用于增长的事情的数量。假设你有一个时间跟踪应用程序有些人可能会说这是跟踪收费的时间，而其他人会说这是追踪假期。有些人会说这是一个项目管理工具，而其他人称之为任务列表。When people think very diffenent things about your product, it’s important to have great messaging. It helps people explain your product to other prospective customers.
当人们对您的产品感到非常不同的事情时，重要的是要有很好的信息。它帮助人们向其他潜在客户解释您的产品。 Great messaging that encourages word of mouth is simple, compelling, specific, differentiated and defensible:
Simple. It’s easily understood by current and prospective customers. 简单。现在和潜在客户很容易理解。
Compelling. It describes something that is interesting or desirable to them. 引人注目。它描述了对他们有趣或可取的东西。
Speci c. It captures what your product does, not an overly abstract statement of it. 具体它捕获您的产品的功能，而不是过于抽象的声明。
diffenentiated. It includes something that makes it unique among peers. 违反了它包括使其在同行之间独一无二的东西。
Defensible. It isn’t easy for competitors to adopt or copy. 防卫。竞争对手采用或复制并不容易。
Without clear messaging about what your product does, you leave room for people to make up their own mind and their own messaging. And that’s how you end up with ve people all failing to describe an elephant, or in your case, try your product.
没有关于您的产品做什么的明确消息，您可以为人们留下自己的想法和自己的信息。这就是你如何最终与所有没有描述大象，或在你的情况下尝试你的产品的人。
“If you don’t have your story and messaging right, no amount of money spent on tactics like paid acquisition will work. You’ll bring people to your product only to find a message that doesn’t resonate. Getting your story straight is crucial to convincing them your product is going to meet their needs.” 如果你没有你的故事和消息传递权，没有多少钱用于像付费收购这样的手段。您只能将人们带到您的产品，以发现不会产生共鸣的信息。让你的故事很直观，至关重要的是说服他们，你的产品将会满足他们的需求。 – MATT (FIRST MARKETING HIRE)
You may be thinking, “Wait a minute. I started my own company because I’m passionate about X, not to become a salesman.” is couldn’t be further from the truth. As soon as you start your own company, sales needs to be part of the conversation.
你可能在想，“等一下我开始了自己的公司，因为我热爱X，不要成为一名推销员，“是不能从真相中走出来的。一旦你开始自己的公司，销售就需要成为谈话的一部分。
But when is the right time to bring in a dedicated sales team? We brought in sales relatively late. In fact, we acquired nearly 2,000 paying customers relying purely on content and word of mouth alone. is isn’t unique to Intercom; the role of marketing at SaaS companies is expanding, and is now responsible for phases further down the funnel.
但是什么时候能够引入专门的销售团队呢？我们带来销售比较晚事实上，我们纯粹仅依靠内容和口碑收购了近2000名付费客户。Intercom不是唯一的; SaaS公司市场营销的作用正在扩大，现在正在逐步向下扩展。
Here’s how we segmented the market in the early days of our sales operations. Bear in mind that our sweet spot was selling to other SaaS companies and startups, so you’ll need to adapt this for your own unique circumstances. 以下是我们在销售业务初期分割市场的方式。请记住，我们的优点是销售给其他SaaS公司和初创公司，因此您需要根据自己的特殊情况进行调整。
The company consists of founders and engineers 该公司由创始人和工程师组成
They act like consumers because they are spending their own money 他们像消费者一样行事，因为他们花了自己的钱
Money is tight so they do everything on the cheap and build it themselves 很紧，所以他们做的一切都很便宜，自己建造
Sell to them like a consumer app: no sales people and make it all self-service 卖给他们像一个消费者的应用程序：没有销售人员，并使其全部自助服务
Devote money you would have spent on sales to marketing. High-quality content lets you reach a much wider audience than 50 cold calls a day, and you’ll know the people coming in are at least slightly interested in your product 把你花在销售上的钱投入营销。高质量的内容可让您吸引更广泛的受众群体，而不是每天50次冷呼叫，您将了解进入的人对您的产品至少有一点兴趣
The focus is still on product and engineering 重点仍然在产品和工程上
They have started to get traction. They might have raised funding, and so are starting to spend other people’s money 他们已经开始有吸引力，它们可能已经募到资金，所以开始花费别人的钱
At this size organizations need tools and they tend to get a lot done with a few of them 在这种规模下，组织需要工具，他们倾向于用其中的一些做很多工作
It’s a great time to get in and grow with a company; they are willing to spend real money on tools 这是一个与公司合作成长的好时机。他们愿意把真正的钱花在工具上
You can introduce sales now but most companies at this size prefer self-service because the individuals making decisions are used to doing everything themselves 您现在可以介绍销售，但大多数这种规模的公司都喜欢自助服务，因为做决定的人习惯于自己做一切
Another management layer is introduced and not everyone reports to the CEO 引入了另一个管理层，并不是每个人都向CEO报告
As the number of employees grows, so do budgets, process and managers 随着员工人数的增长，预算，流程和管理人员也在增加
You can add a sales team to your company to focus on this size of firm; it’s justi ed by the amount of money they have to spend 您可以向您的公司添加一个销售团队，专注于这个公司的大小;这是由他们花费的金额来衡量的
From a sales perspective, this is often described as the best time to start and grow with a company. It’s right before hyper-growth starts 从销售角度来看，这通常被描述为与公司一起成长的最佳时机。这是正常的增长开始之前
Matching sales to your customer type is invaluable as you grow, when you may be dealing with customers of di ering sizes and determining what size companies you should be targeting. Even if you aren’t directly involved in the sales process, it can provide a useful look in the mirror if you are working at a startup that’s on this kind of growth curve.
销售额与您的客户类型匹配是非常宝贵的，随着您的发展，当您可能正在处理客户的大小和确定您应该瞄准什么规模的公司。即使您没有直接参与销售流程，如果您在这种增长曲线上的创业公司工作，也可以在镜子中提供有用的外观。
Don’t think that you’ll find a single magical channel that will deliver thousands of users overnight. Exploring many diffenent channels and sources is the only way to nd what strategy works best for you. In fact, Airbnb only became the company it is today by going door to door in New York City, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings. It certainly wasn’t from sending cold LinkedIn messages.
不要以为你会发现一个单一的神奇渠道，可以在一夜之间交付数千个用户。探索许多不同的渠道和渠道是唯一的方法来找出最适合您的策略。事实上，Airbnb只是在纽约市走上门路而成为今天的公司，招募新用户并帮助现有的用户改善他们的上市。它肯定不是发送冷的LinkedIn消息。