It’s a funny thing what you learn as you work to grow a company. We have pivoted multiple times at Cooleaf and we’re still learning every day. What matters most is traction and solving a problem for a customer that is important enough that they are willing to pay for it. That is easier said than done.

For some time we were troubled about being a service based company. At our core we loved technology and wanted to be a tech company. We transitioned into focusing our messaging to prospects on the product. What we learned is that people don’t buy your fancy product. They only buy a solution to their problem.

After building an incredible technology platform, we found it hard to sell. It was great to demo and we would get very positive feedback but the contract would never close. Our product would allow a customer to execute on an employee engagement strategy in great depth with extensive product features that we would tout. The problem was most of the prospects we talked to weren’t that great at creating an employee engagement strategy and they did not have a burning need to have a tool to manage it.

I find a similar analogy with marketing automation products such as Hubspot, which is a great tool if you know how to use it. We purchased this tool and let it sit on the shelf for about six months while we figured out our marketing strategy. It didn’t matter how many features the tool had, until we had our strategy in place we were not going to get value out of it. We found the same thing with Cooleaf and our customers.

Based on these learnings, we have embraced a services component to our company that lives in our Customer Success Manger role. By our team working with many customers in different industries we have learned best practices to achieve the greatest results that a customer is seeking. We now focus on the front-end strategy with a new customer that we call our on-boarding period which is basically a short project plan to lead a customer to being successful using our product.

We’ve found that some of our customers just want to be told what to do. I don’t blame them. It’s not their core business and they want us, ‘the experts’ to show them the best way to achieve their goals.

In the sales process now, I focus on understanding the customers end goals and share about how we can help achieve them rather than sharing product feature after product feature. This has been a lesson learned for me that I hope helps other founders to find their product traction.