The Tuesday Roundup
This Thursday, I’m hosting a free webinar on Selling. I’m sharing a sales framework that can help leaders and early-stage sales teams create opportunities for higher sales conversions. You’ll get a chance to ask questions, and all attendees will receive a template to guide them on using the framework. Register here.
Today, I’ll be sharing some resources to help you reduce buyer friction. Friction is a momentum killer and an excellent way to think of Paul Graham’s classic essay, “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” as a way to reduce friction. Transferring friction from the customer to you is a way to put this advice into practice.
Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.
This resource from SaaStr will help you get your list started. It takes you through some of the big buckets of buyers' objections: time, risk, and money. Use these to help you create a list of friction points you can focus on alleviating.
Almost all products come with some component of risk with saying yes and trying out that product. And you want to minimize that risk as much as possible. You want to understand that risk and then work in your product to build against that risk so that it makes it much, much easier for that buyer to say yes.
This story from Kintan Brahmbhatt shows that scale doesn’t mean you stop obsessing over friction. It’ll take you through each step of the friction-mitigation process, from anticipating friction to learning and adapting from churn.
“A customer’s experience with your product should be smooth and seamless. Start with the customers and work backwards. Listen to and observe your customers closely. Find the potholes and bumps in the road. Where do they get slowed down or tripped up?” Brahmbhatt asks. “Carve out the path of least resistance for your customer. Always stay true to what’ll take friction out of the process — products that falter are often ones where this has been neglected. It takes effort, but it’s worth it. And it’s not always as hard as you might think.”
Hope to see you at the webinar. Let me know what you thought of this newsletter here or on Twitter.
Do Things that Don't Scale is a classic I needed to be reminded of. Thanks for sharing!