Skedsheet Blog

We want skedsheet to “sell itself”, and we’ll work like crazy to make that happen  What that means is that we want to put our efforts into things that don’t vanish after a sale – having a great product, a well-designed website, and interesting stories that can last forever, thanks to the web. 

We’ve gotten lots of good advice and learned the hard way that selling is always a conversation.  In the past, when we thought we were selling, we actually just got lucky and provided a valuable tool to the people who were looking for a solution to their scheduling nightmares.

Our demo-based sale worked out fine for a while, until we actually had to convince people to buy our software.  Here’s what that looked like:

We were selling despite our sales pitch, by being in the right place at the right time.  But, it turns out that we forgot to ask a key question: “Do you care?”.  We weren’t asking our prospective customers whether they had a problem to solve. 

Instead of talking about our software, we now try to ask questions about how people are managing their schedules today – although it’s tough to avoid trying to dazzle people with our demo.  Even if I think I know the answer, I still need to ask.  It’s all about the conversation.

The reason skedsheet is special isn’t just the collection of buttons and text on the screen – it’s the unique way we want solve a problem.  The best way to understand our approach is to know our perspective on why we’re doing it and how we deal with other problems.  Hopefully by putting it all out there, we can get lots of conversations going so we can understand more and sell despite ourselves.