Reflecting on purple cork 8 months in—Part 3

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Part 3: Go-To-Market

To round out this series, I saved one of my favorite topics, go-to-market. As CEO of a small, super fast growing company, you’re the VP of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success all at once. Let’s dive in with four things I’ve learned along the way in case helpful to you and your own journey…

Amaze your customers

I feel so fortunate to have built incredible relationships over the last 8 months with CMOs, CEOs, field marketers, executive assistants, agencies and other early fans and supporters.

The customer should always be amazed, surprised, delighted, and loving what you do. Period. There are numerous times where I’ve eaten into margin to try to do the right thing, like hiring a TaskRabbit to drive bottles from my personal collection down to Palo Alto so the client would have them for the tasting. I’ve lost money on some tastings, and that’s okay at this stage.

More tactically, make sure you measure customer success, things like:

  • Who are your top customers by revenue?

  • How many tastings have you done for them?

  • What was the NPS of the last tasting?

  • What’s your repeat booking rate? You get the idea…

You’ll need a good CRM and analytics to answer these questions. I use Zendesk Sell, which I think is perfect for purple cork, and try to take 30 minutes at the end of each day for CRM hygiene, or a working Sunday like I’m doing today.

Sell it in your own way

Behavioral science author Daniel Pink says, “Whether we like it or not, we all work in sales.” Coming from marketing roots, I never thought I’d be any good at sales. I’m not the loudest person in the room, and I don’t have proper sales training. That said, I’m so passionate and excited about purple cork and the impact I’ve seen it have for companies that it’s contagious and it sells.

For you account execs out there, if you’re not truly passionate about what you’re selling, I’d encourage you to take a step back and think about why not. Either get reinvested in the product, or it might be time to think about a different company or role. And it never hurts to get your CEO on calls with customers to share their personal founding story.

As another tactical tip, you’ll need an awesome pitch deck that clearly explains what you’re all about, proactively answers questions, and ideally evokes some emotion. Think gorgeous imagery, less words. And you’ll also need simple, clear proposals and contracts, ideally integrated in your CRM as I talked about in my first post.

Get the word out

Use that megaphone! You can have the best product on the planet and none of it matters if people don’t know about it. Do you know your top marketing channels? Where do your customers hang out? For purple cork, word of mouth and LinkedIn have been huge in the early days.

A lot of these referrals come from our amazing existing customers. So while you’re acquiring new customers, don’t forget about customer marketing! This might be even more important than demand gen. I like sending a frequent email newsletter to keep in touch with updates on new partner wineries, wine education and other happenings.

Related to this, as a CEO, you have to evangelize your brand. Be yourself. Be authentic. I post a lot of videos on Instagram and LinkedIn so people can see the personality of purple cork. Pictures are good, videos are better.

Also test collaborations. For purple cork, we’ve tried partnerships with local shops and restaurants, as well as agencies and a top sending platform to introduce purple cork to their customers. This is a critical way for a smaller company to build awareness quickly with the right audiences.

Tinker, learn, tinker

Last but not least, building a business is about continuous improvement. A great example is your website. My old CEO used to call this the “front door” of a company, so you’ll constantly be making tweaks and improvements to better tell your story. Make it easy for prospective customers to learn what you do, how you do it better, and how to get in touch.

And as you’re tinkering, make sure you set aside enough time to reflect on what you’re actually learning. For me this often happens on long runs or Zooms with my customers and team. Then tinker some more.

That’s it for now! I’d love to hear what you think and other tips you’ve picked up along the way. To growth!

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purple cork featured by Melanie Ofenloch (Dallas Wine Chick)