How to Sell Your Data Product
Landing your first few big customers is always tricky, and you will need to be well prepared
Notion's data stack includes a mix of 3rd party vendors, and I have had the honor to work with many talented folks from these data tool companies. But whenever we decide to onboard a tool, it is never a short conversation (see more in First Data Tools for Your Startup ). The conversation will involve many parties, and the process from initial contact to document review, POC setup, evaluation, and price negotiation may take a significant amount of time. While this may seem like a typical tool purchase process, data tools have unique considerations. They involve sensitive information about the company and the user, as well as the tool's primary customers - the data team. So as a data vendor, it will be in your best interest to make the process as smooth as possible to make a good impression on your professionalism and land the next client as quickly as possible.
Initial Contact
Unless you did the initial contact yourself, you would likely get connected either through a 3rd person (such as an investor) or from your website's Contact Me. During this phase, your sales team will be proactively in touch with the prospective customers and set an introductory call with them.
If you get connected through a 3rd person with the high-level leadership at a company, you might want to ask them to connect you with the data team POC as very often, the C-level people are too busy to get involved in the details of the tool purchase process.
In my opinion, a successful initial contact call should first
ask the users' expectations/pain points of current experience
understand who will be playing a role in the decision-making process, for example, whether it is the data team or biz tech person
Ask what the critical privacy and security documents they would need for a data vendor are
Maybe ask the users' preferences beforehand to see whether they would like to see a quick demo in the first call or not.
Some vendors follow a standard process for the initial calls. The first call involves sales talking with potential customers. Then, they set up a second call with sales engineers to understand specific tool requirements, and create a customized demo for the customer in the third call. While I understand the thoughtfulness behind these calls, it's worth noting that not every customer has the patience to schedule three calls before seeing the demo. It might be best to ask for their preference beforehand.
Transparency in pricing strategy is crucial. It's not just about how much the customer should pay now, but also about how the company's expected growth and the expiration of new customer discounts will impact pricing in the future.
Optional if you have a competitive study with other vendors that the customer is considering, it will be great to share with them too to help them understand how you stand out among others
Document Review
If you have asked this question in your initial call, you can start preparing the documents the customers might need. This process usually involves legal, security, and IT departments as they need to understand the potential risk of data leakage, PII accessibility, and also whether the terms of POC are reasonable. Sometimes legal, security, and IT departments might have a hard time envisioning how the data is used by the 3rd party tool as they don't work with data daily. It will be great if you have a flow chart telling the team what type of data you have access to, how the data flows into the tool, and how it stores and processes the data.
PII is something that legal and security teams take very seriously to ensure they are not shared with the 3rd party vendor during the POC stage, given the terms are likely to be weaker than the actual contract. So A useful solution is to ask the potential customers is to ask them to create a view on top of the existing data to exclude the PII fields and only use that mock data for POC purposes.
POC Set up
This usually lasts 1-2 months, depending on the specific type of data tool. For example, it might take longer to evaluate an experiment tool than a notebook tool. The key to success for this stage is having a checklist of everything the customer wants to test to ensure both parties are on the same page regarding the success criteria. It will be even better if you have a clear timeline of when to check off certain items from the list. For example, when evaluating 3rd party experiment platform, we set some specific criteria, including validating the exposure logging with our internal system, making sure the metrics are consistent with the offline calculation, etc.
Evaluation and Price Negotiation
If you have already checked out every single item on the list, it will be up to the customers to see whether they feel strongly about working with you, as this is a partnership after all (see more in First Data Tools for Your Startup ). Likely several parties will be involved in the decision-making, such as PM, eng, and data team. Price will also play an essential role in this stage, especially for smaller customers.
Suppose you are a super early-stage tool company. In that case, you might have to sacrifice your profitability in exchange for more valuable feedback to help you improve your product. Sometimes, you want to land a big brand name by giving up margin for marketing purposes. But a common mistake I saw from very early-stage startups is they probably don't know how to price their product correctly, especially if they are just about to sign one of their first enterprise customers. It would help if you did your diligence to ensure your pricing is on par with your competitors and asked experts in this field to price your product reasonably. Providing a quote that is unreasonably high may raise doubts about your business's professionalism, especially when your product is still new to the market.
Special Topic: Identify your champion
Like any interview, even if you don't pass all the loops, if you have a strong advocate, the chance you will get an offer is still pretty high. This champion can be the leader who has a solid relationship with your co-founders or, ideally, the end customer of your tool who is also the DRI (directly responsible individual) for this project. As most of the time, if the leadership has a different view from the end customers, the end customers will make the final call. Suppose, in your initial call, you already found out who might be more interested in your tool. In that case, It will be great to build a closer relationship with this person by proactively asking their opinion and taking their feedback seriously.