Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Cross selling is an attempt to sell additional products to current customers to whatever they are already buying. It can be as simple as the bar tender asking if you want peanuts masala  to go with your drinks.

How to adopt Cross Selling

• Own its own - Many cross-selling opportunities arise naturally. If you are selling tennis racquets, for example, you can also offer a bag, balls. To gain the extra sale, you might simply have to mention that the other products or services are available.
• Be relevant – If you overload customers with too many unrelated cross-selling suggestions, you may blow it. Offering balls with tennis racquet is certainly a good fit. But if your attempts to cross-sell are not closely related to the original purchase, they are far less likely to succeed. The figure represents a bad cross selling.

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What are the most important things that investors look for before investing in a start-up? What separates rejects from stars? Here are seven characteristics most venture capital investors look for in a promising venture.

A Proprietary Product, System, Method or Approach

Investors look for surefire indications that the firms they are investing in have a leg up on competitors. While patents, trademarks, copyrights and other trade secrets do not guarantee success, many successful ventures enjoy one or more of these advantages.

A Large Potential Market

What good is a great product or service if the potential market is too limited? In a relatively small market, a venture might have to capture the entire market to be profitable. Most investors look for ventures that operate in markets large enough to result in significant revenues and profits. Large sustainable profits usually lead to greater enterprise value.

Customer Acceptance

Nothing is more convincing than a rapidly growing base of satisfied customers. Well-written business plans, multiple patents and spectacular Power Point presentations are great, but early rapid product acceptance is where the metal meets the road.

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Have you analysed how many features of your product are effectively used, in most of the products 10% of product features are mainly used and 60% of the feature are good to have features and rest 20% are very rarely used and 10% are never been used. So why not concentrate on 10% of the features and evolve into product instead of running behind in accumulating features mainly to counter competition.

Most of the VC’s reject you stating “its a damn feature not a product”, they don’t see any value proposition in it and raises concern in its adoption. Before adopting by millions of users worldwide Isn’t twitter just a status message feature, now its most reputed company. Paypal is one of the best example i can cite in this context, it has become a big company/product in itself. They realized early and understood what users need and understood users are not liking the complex cryptography based solution. Besides this one has to abandon the extra features which will make new users confuse about the solution, in short they should KISS (Keep it simple stupid)

How to determine feature can be turned into product -

There is no straight away answer for it, check for user adoption and make a call.

What’s your take on it, do share.

-Hitesh, vcbytes.com