I listened today to a presentation by Gharmesh Shah co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, blogger at OnStartups.com, and author of the book Inbound Marketing. 
I’ve listened to the Audible.com version of the book once and will definitely be going over it again. To give you some insight into the book and where Gharmesh is coming from, have a listen to the presentation below.
Although the focus of this talk is on Startup companies, and specifically online software companies, but it has a great deal of relevance to anyone with an online presence, isn’t that you? ..if not, why not?
A few key points from the presentation:
Risk: Assuming you have conceived your business or product, can you actually build it? Can you market it? Will anyone buy your product or service?
He introduces a concept of smarketing (sales + marketing).
Charge early. Start selling now! Not only because the revenue is important, it’s not at this stage, but the data from paying customers is exceptionally valuable.
Sell often, because you want reliable, negative feedback too. Selling early tells you whether people will buy — selling often (i.e. charging smaller amounts in regular intervals) tells you whether they’ll stay. Let customers vote with their dollars (by giving them the option to cancel their subscription).
Don’t hire sales people too early. In the early days at a startup, regardless of what your title is, you, and everyone for that matter should be finding customers.
Keep pricing simple. You’ll have plenty of time to make it more complicated later.
Implement something like the HubSpot Customer Happiness Index (CHI). It’s a quantitative method for measuring how happy your customers are.
Here’s Garmesh:
