Thoughts On Suzy Reaching Customer #100 :)
Today we crossed the 100 customer milestone at Suzy which includes some of the most prolific brands in the world. Since officially launching in March it has been a whirlwind ride, to say the least, and it goes without saying that our incredible team is by far the sole reason we've been able to reach this meaningful accomplishment in a relatively short period of time.
Since so many of you on Linkedin are struggling to get out of the gate with new ventures or seeking to inject some life into your sales and marketing efforts, I thought I'd share some of my biggest learnings this year in getting Suzy to a place where it can really create longstanding value and impact:
Relationships matter BIG TIME in the beginning: When nobody has heard of your business the only people who will buy your product are people that have heard of you. Nurture and protect your business relationships as some of the people who helped us most are the people I least expected would when we launched.
Understand the business of your customer: We have been most impactful when talking about our clients' business challenges and the ways Suzy can help,,, not spending 45 minutes talking about our product and its features
Know the larger the company you target, the more landmines, legal, and procurement hassle you will need to endure in order to consummate a formal deal
By far the easiest way to grow is by expanding your existing customers through cross-sells... the way to accomplish this is by underpromising and over-delivering and always staying close to the customer's evolving needs
Sh*t happens. As Mike Tyson famously said "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Well, in late May this year when we re-platformed Suzy to a new tech stack we all got punched in the mouth with a series of outages and issues which will NEVER be repeated... but it hurt. Despite the fact we are a software company, it was the blood, sweat, and tears of our teams that was the secret ingredient in getting us through what could've been catastrophic...We will always be thankful to the early customers that stuck with us and continue to thrive with us today.
You never know until you ask. We have been relentless at soliciting feedback from our customers and are pushing out new product functionality on a weekly basis, moving as fast as we can to deliver key product enhancements to provide a best in class on-demand consumer intelligence platform.
