How much information should you share and not share to do your first sale and more sales?

How much information should you share and not share to do your first sale and more sales?

When we first start the business, we want hundreds of customers. Forget about a hundred; we struggle to find the first customer. We share every single information about our product but don’t know how much a customer should know. Maybe you are shy or an extrovert, and you want to let people know about you and your product.

There is a way to get your first sale by sharing the right amount of information. Also, you should have some information, but do you know why you should keep some things secret? In this podcast, you will know what and how much information you should share to make your first sale and more sales.

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We all have stories of our school time.

We have been good at some subjects and bad at a few subjects. We have some successes in school and maybe some failures. We may not be good at everything. There was a child called Wang Tao. He was a horrible student. His parents wanted him to study hard, and to get Wang Tao to study harder, they started bribing him. They bribed him with a red flying helicopter toy if he did well in school. And guess what, Tao’s grades improved. 

Unfortunately, his toy did not last longer than a day. 
It was difficult to fly and crashed. Eventually, it broke. He wanted to learn how to make a toy that flies. Fast forward to the future, Wang Tao created a company called DJI which is the biggest drone-making company in the world. Sounds interesting, right?

DJI sells hundreds of drones every month, but he could not sell the first drone.
While he was in college, and he researched on a radio-controlled helicopter, but due to some errors, it crashed, and he failed. Fortunately, a professor encouraged him to work on it and provided mentorship.

With the right support and consistent efforts, Wang designed a prototype and published it on an online forum.
He did not put it to sell; he just presented it without any expectation of selling it.   Someone from America showed interest in buying it and asked Wang to ship it from China to America for $7500. Wang could not believe it. He was overjoyed because it would cost him only $2200!

Wang Tao sold the product without trying to sell it. 
He did not ask people to buy. He just posted on an online forum. People started asking him to provide. While most people struggle to sell, this kid sold without trying to sell. How did he do? 

Because most people don’t show their creations, they keep their findings, work and products to themselves. 
People are far too worried about what would happen if others steal the idea. And as a result, they miss out on the big opportunities. So, share your work out here. You may think it’s nothing valuable, but others may find it valuable. You should show what you so lovingly worked on and created. People can see that passion and love. And they value it, too. 

In this podcast, we will discuss three things, 

1. Why and what information should you share?
2. Why should you not share information and be secretive about you or your product?
3. How much information should you share and should not?

The Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company was a major brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1849 until 1982. 
At one time, it was the largest brewery in the United States. They hired a famous marketing expert called Claude Hopkins. The company was struggling to sell their beers. They could not beat the competition.

Claude Hopkins did a tour around the factory and learned what they do.
He was amazed by the work Schlitz Brewing Company was doing. He found some outstanding facts

1. Only water from 1400-foot-deep artesian wells was used to ensure that the water was the cleanest it could be.
2. Beer was dripping over pipes in plate-glass rooms filled with filtered air so that the beer could be cooled in without any impurities.
3. Every pump and pipe were cleaned twice a day. Every bottle was sterilized four times before beer was filled in it.
4. The bottles themselves were brown in colour because light decays the beer

Now, Claude Hopkins is even more surprised to know that the company did not mention any of these features to the customers.
They did not educate the public about how their beer is unique. Claude asked why they did not share these facts. And they replied, “It’s because every beer producer does it the same way.” And Hopkins replied, “But nobody ever told the story.”

Claude Hopkins just gathered these facts and created ads using the process Schlitz Brewing Company was using. 
As a result, the sales increased, and the company became the number one beer company in the USA.  You know what you are doing, but people don’t know. Tell people what you do and how you do it. It puts you at the authority level. 

You create trust and interest in the customers.
They engage with you. If you just show them rather than just telling them, it would create interesting drama and get people’s attention. But there are some times when you should not share. That takes us to the second part. Why should you not share and be secretive about your product?

Steve Jobs created a very secretive culture at Apple. 
Apple is notoriously known as one of the most secretive, tight-lipped companies in tech. Secrecy is like a religion at Apple. It has become infamous for its secrecy around new product announcements and launches. They want to surprise and delight the customers at the time of launch. They even have a very big team that makes sure that information doesn’t get leaked. 

People are strictly not allowed to talk to each other.
People don’t even know what they are working on. For example, people working on a 9.7-inch screen didn’t know if they were working on a small laptop or a big phone. They realized they had been working on the iPad only when Jobs showed the product on the stage! Apple does enormous research on what customers want.

They invest so much time and money to find out what will sell.
They don’t want their competitors to know and also don’t want their customers to know before they launch. As we said earlier, they want to surprise and delight customers. Steve Jobs had a very strong instinct for what people would love to buy. That’s why being secretive about the product can work very well for you if you also know exactly why people buy. 

But we don’t have that instinct like Steve Jobs, and that can get us in trouble.
When we don’t know what will sell, we can not afford to spend months behind developing the product. It’s going to be disastrous for us. We need feedback from our potential customers in advance. Then we can have the confidence of making and selling the product. Marketers call it a validation of the idea. 

If you are as big and successful as Apple, you will attract very aggressive competition. 
Apple invests millions of dollars in creating the product, so they would want to keep things secret. But if you are just starting off or running a small business, you should share. Only share what you would be okay with your top competitor knowing. So how much should we share and what shouldn’t? That takes us to the last part of this podcast.

A very famous tech product called Slack was developed by Tiny Speck, a company co-founded by Stewart Butterfield, who previously worked on the photo-sharing service Flickr.
Slack was initially conceptualized in 2012. In 2013, Tiny Speck released Slack as a beta product. After several months of beta testing, Slack officially launched in August 2013. The team communicated their launch through blog posts, social media, and press outreach, showcasing the product’s potential to streamline workplace communication and replace inefficient email chains.

By August 2015, the company had communicated milestones, such as reaching 1 million daily active users and expanding their integration with other productivity tools like Google Drive and Dropbox.
In 2020, Salesforce announced its acquisition of Slack for $27.7 billion. Slack communicated this major milestone with transparency. This acquisition marked a new chapter in Slack’s journey, and the company continued to update users on the new features.

Here, I am not trying to share Slack’s success story.
But what we need to learn from Slack is to let people know about your product, share updates, and share your key milestones. They did not share their news via traditional emails. Instead, they excitedly shared their updates with social media posts, blogs, etc.  

Be transparent about your everyday processes. 
Share how you build things up. If you want to engage even further, share your failure stories as well. Your customers are just like you. They feel connected with you when you are truthful and honest.

On top of that, share what lessons you learned. 
Let people know you have worked hard to build things up and do all the work that you do.  Let people know what you are creating and doing. You may feel like you are not doing anything worthwhile. But your work might be liked by someone.