"Can you sum up your company in one sentence?"

"Phil, can you sum up Ming Dow in one sentence?"

"Can I use three sentences?" ?

I am proud of my wit. In short, it is not impossible. I'm just trying to lighten the mood.

In the past three years, I have been asked this question countless times, from picky investors to busy customer bosses. Don't be ridiculous, I actually said "a word! Ming Dow is the future of the enterprise ".

With more answers and interactions, I began to understand that different questioners and different questioning scenarios may expect completely different answers to this question.

What the customer wants.

In the face of anxious and busy customers, I need to catch his attention in one sentence; In the face of customers who can give you more than half an hour, I need to accurately describe the problems that the product can solve in one sentence; Facing professional customers, this sentence should point out the shortcomings of other similar products; In the face of customers who try by chance, I want to seize the most concise value point in the product; Facing the boss, this sentence should emphasize the value related to management; Facing the leaders of functional departments, I need to know his key points. Ming Dow is facing the small and medium-sized enterprise market. Even the same customer boss role has different types and different key needs in different regions and industries.

That's six sentences! Continue to refine, sixty sentences may not be too much. Perhaps entrepreneurs themselves can have strong adaptability, but if the whole marketing team is required to master it, I really don't know what the actual effect is.

But when a specific customer asks this specific question, you can't escape. If you don't want to disappoint him, within two seconds, you want any of your salespeople to blurt out something that interests customers.

What do we do? Like all enterprises that expect to improve their sales performance, we have also invested a lot of energy in "speech training". As mentioned above, the basic method is to draw a matrix according to the customer's industry, role and needs, and let the most professional and experienced sales managers participate in the compilation in each grid, and even support the exam to ensure that everyone can master it. Although it is difficult for us to hide our hesitation when doing these things.

The actual result is that sales performance is indeed improving. Facts have proved that our salespeople are not only qualified, but also smart. Many of them can learn by analogy, not only by learning words, but also by understanding ideas. Customers want simple products, and we have them! Customers want strong products, so do we. Customers want flat collaboration tools. What we really want is that customers want process control tools, and we also have them. Ming Dow's sales consultants can gain insight into the main points of customers' needs and try their best to make products close to customers.

There is no denying that I have always been extremely proud of the team's ability, and they have also achieved higher and higher results. But as it happens, we are a SaaS product, not a hammer sale. The real customer value began to accumulate after the customer signed the contract, so we have the opportunity to verify the value of "one sentence" sales speech on a longer time scale.

When the real user activity rate and update rate data are in front of us, we begin to understand that there may really be only one sentence that is effective, and which words can really bring active, long-term and word-of-mouth customers, which are the most in line with the initial intention and do not need to bother to build. For Ming Dow, growth enterprises believe in flat cooperation, and the scale of most enterprises is between 30 and 200 people. The founder actively participates in enterprise management, but strives to create an open and transparent corporate culture. It is they who bring the largest proportion of practical uses to Ming Dow and constantly recommend new customers to us.

On the contrary, when the sales consultant caters to customers excessively and the basic needs of the enterprise can't fit well, we either pay high customer conversion costs or work in vain, which is exactly what the vernacular says-"it's not sweet to twist the melon".

Being in the consumer goods industry may be because the way of communication limits their use of "one sentence". If you are a luxury brand, you will definitely choose Gao Shuai Fu without hesitation.

We do B2B, and the cost of word decomposition may be too low. We talk nonsense to people, thinking that training salespeople can solve all problems. But in fact, the essence of all businesses is the same. You must choose a clear target customer and tell them what you really think. In this process, we can ask ourselves, otherwise, there will be a damaged promotion. In the long run, manufacturers will almost always suffer because customers can go the way.

Although this "word" will be based on changes in the market, at a certain point, product planners and marketers should say the same word.

A word that investors want.

I have always been lucky that the shareholders who invested in me did not pursue this issue and gave me enough time to think slowly. But I realized that the answer that investors expect in their hearts is not the same as what customers want to know.

Most investors will not make mistakes when choosing big industries, and it is difficult to choose the right company. Especially in the early stage of industry development, every enterprise looks different, but everyone has just started, so there is no particularly good way to choose angel wheel and A wheel. Usually we can only look for feelings from the reliability of the team.

Slowly, enterprises in the industry began to pull away some distance, and a small number of enterprises would run to the forefront of the industry. Round B and C financing usually happen at this time, and investors will start asking this question more seriously. "Can you sum up your company in one sentence?"

At this time, the answer he expected was different from the customer's question. He hopes that you can find a very clear market segment, in which you have established or possessed a unique method of hiding weapons and started to establish a super-high market share. More than one investor said that this is the undisputed basic standard for investable enterprises. In fact, most entrepreneurs fully understand this simple truth, and there are really few real actors and winners.

Entrepreneurs tend to think far and wide, and at this time they will inevitably fall into a deep dilemma, between concentration and scale, between short-term and long-term, between attack and defense. Even if we overcome this hesitation, we may still face many choices in the process of choosing to focus on market segments, and decision-making information is often extremely scarce.

At this time, summarizing the company in one sentence has become a trap problem. Say big, don't play; I'm afraid it's impossible to put it mildly.

But this is indeed a cold fact. Entrepreneurs must make choices and make the right choices. Otherwise, the answer to the investor's statement, however embellished, is as empty as "Ming Dow is the future of the enterprise". The investor's response to this sentence represents an extreme rationality, which, in peter thiel's words, is a "definite road to success", which is very different from the thinking mode of entrepreneurs in daily psychology, customer communication and team communication. We often use grand ideals to motivate the team and motivate ourselves. There is nothing wrong with this, but in the face of the final result, you should dare to put pen to paper to answer this sentence.

It is difficult to start a business, and the most difficult moment in psychology is this moment.

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