Ep. 063 – Over the last 10 years Hayut Yogev has worked with more than 120 startups and entrepreneurs on their strategy, marketing, and sales approach. Their success rates are exceptional.
Hayut Yogev Show Notes I decided to be my own podcast guest…. It started as an idea from one of our listeners, and I decided to go for it. Marketing has been a major part of my life for the last 32 years; With executive international brands marketing roles for the first 22 years of my career, and working with more than 120 startups and entrepreneurs on their global strategy, marketing, and sales for the following ten years. The exceptional percentage of failures of startups companies led me to develop a unique model for startups, enabling them to find the biggest opportunity for their venture in the international market. Most passionate about For the last 10 years, I’ve been passionate about helping entrepreneurs and startup founders to succeed in selling their products and services while building a leading, sustainable brand. Today I’m most passionate about my podcast the Reach or Miss podcast for the customer focused entrepreneur. On the show I interview successful entrepreneurs and opinion leaders about the customer focus and approach that enabled them to achieve their major successes. When I started this podcast in March 2017, I didn’t know what my interviewees would say. I had a clear perception of what would enable entrepreneurship to succeed. Over the last 15 months, I interviewed 60 successful entrepreneurs and influencers like Guy Kawasaki, John Lee Dumas, Mike Stelzner, Cheris Brogan, Joe Pulizzi, Marcus Sheridan, and many others. I was excited, although not surprised, to find that what I knew about marketing and business success in both established companies and entrepreneurship was exactly what all my interviewees talked about. It’s all about focusing on the right customers; it’s about listening to your customers and understanding their needs. My best advice about approaching customers My advice is always to focus on your customers. It starts with finding your biggest market opportunity; however, it’s important to remember that we look for different kinds of target audience in different stages of entrepreneurial business. When we launch the product, we look for the innovators, those that look for innovation and new solutions. Those who are willing to take the risk of a new and not-yet-proved product or service. The target audience we focus on in the second stage is the early adopters, and only then should we approach the ‘heavy users’. And as I said before, listening to your customers and focusing on their needs and behaviors is also the most repeated advice from my podcast’s interviewees. Biggest failure with a customer I think the biggest one is that I haven’t yet succeeded in making a major shift in the perceptions of most startup founders and entrepreneurs. Most of them still think they know who their potential customers are – but their thoughts are subjective, we can never know until we check! Somewhere along the way, it became reasonable for entrepreneurs to believe that startups are all about going from failure to failure until success comes. No! If you won’t study the market in order to understand where your company’s specific market opportunity is, you will never play it smarter than your competitors. And you will keep playing roulette, hoping to win one day. But in business, the opportunities are huge, if you play the game right. Unfortunately, more than 90% of the entrepreneurs I met within recent years (a few thousand) – don’t! To answer this question with a particular example, I think one of my biggest failures was with a company that offered great services in the world of rules engines especially for businesses. They decided to build a complete product for financial predictions based on an excellent rules engine they developed, but they didn’t succeed in selling it. During the research and the market strategy process we walked them through, there was a clear answer from the market about what they needed. All it required was a marketing...