When You are Spec’ing Your First Pilot Deployments, Think Like a Seller

When you're setting up your first customer pilots, and establishing your success measures, try thinking like a seller.

"If I could prove to you that this product could do XY and Z," (slaps hood) "would you drive this baby away?"

(please, don't ever talk like this)

An early-stage customer pilot can help a start-up test UI, features, and validate or challenge assumptions on product / market fit. But it’s also when you should start getting into a seller's mindset -- because that makes you think about your customer's buying mindset, and what they're looking for in the pilot.

You probably have a decent sense of what your customer pilot success metrics should generally be. Maybe the pilot will demonstrate how your solution can save time. Fantastic!

But do you know what "saving time" really looks like, from the customer's perspective? If you dive into that with your pilot customer, you might find out it means that Jerry in Ops will spend 2 hours a day processing invoices, instead of 4.

Think about how a seller would use that metric. "If I told you that this pilot will demonstrate how we could save Jerry 2 hours a day, would you buy it?" (And again, no, please don't talk like that).

By making your success metrics as specific as measurably possible, it will ensure the pilot’s results are measured using the customer’s own criteria, and not something clever that you've invented (i.e. "success = saving 2 hours of Jerry's time each day" as opposed to "100% Workflow Timeline Optimization").

And yes, it sets you up to ask for the sale if the pilot is successful, since you've already established what the customer thinks awesome looks like.

Your pilot success metrics should also be something that everybody within the customer organization can grasp and share with each other, even if you aren’t there in the room to explain it. ("Two HOURS! Have you SEEN how happy Jerry is?")

This will get you into the habit of doing something you're going to be doing over and over, which is positioning your product as a valuable promise to solve tangible customer problems. These promises may take the form of a case study, ads, a free trial, an audit, or just a really convincing pitch, but it will be value-based language that brings you and the customer into a conversation that concludes with a request to close.

"Start your free trial and see how you can save 2 hours a day in invoice processing," ultimately leads to "Congratulations! I told you we’d save Jerry two hours a day. Now let's review pricing"

Take a look at the success metrics you've set up for your pilot, and imagine (IN YOUR HEAD, ONLY) slapping the hood and asking the customer what it would take to drive this baby away.