Sales strategies

for disruptive technology

MADRID 2015

Product

UX/UI

Marketing

Tech

Lurtis Rules

Lurtis.com
Industry

Artificial Intelligence created 3D assets

Founders and team

Founded by brothers Luis and Jos Pea, the

startups technology is based upon more
than 15 years of research they have done on
different aspects of artificial intelligence in
video games.

Lurtis Rules has the mission of creating easy

to use tools that allow amateurs and experts
to produce high-quality contents.

Lurtis Rules has

created a disruptive product for 3D
assets that combines the exibility
of a custom design
and price point of
an off-the-shelf asset. Contrar y to
common belief, the easiest way of communicating value to customers is focusing either
on exibility or just the price, thus Lurtis
faces a particular kind of sales challenge.
Selling such a product requires a strategic
approach in which sales force creates value
by empowering users to learn new ways of
working so that they can take most advantage of the product.
Marketplaces such as Turbosquid and 3DOcean as well as design agencies and freelancers cater to the growing market of 3D assets. A design solution which provides the
best of both worlds seems as a valuable tool
for the industry, but it requires a shift in designers behavior. This is a sales challenge
that if properly cracked may unlock great
growth for Lurtis Rules.

What were they focusing on prior to Google Launchpad?

Interesting readings on the subject

If SaaS productos sell themselves, why
do we need sales?

Andreessen Horowitz blog- By Mark Cranney

One of the biggest mistakes enterprise
startups make

Both sides of the table - by Mark Suster

*Rethinking the sales force: Redefining
selling to create and capture customer
value

Book by Niel Rackham & John Devincentis

Crossing the Chasm

Marketing and selling High-Tech products to

mainstream customers - by Geoffrey A.
Moore

Lurtis Housebuilder app creates fully usable and highly

customizable 3D buildings in just a few clicks. These buildings can easily be integrated into video games or a model
of a city for city planning purposes. Current options for
users are either hiring a designer to custom make a building, which is costly, or buying a cheap off-the-shelf design
which cannot be fully customized.
Since Lurtis co-founders are computer science researchers from University, their core abilities were in
technology development. They had been focusing on
leveraging their abilities to polish the development of the
Housebuilder app, which was being co-developed with lead
users in their community. Even though they had started
working on their sales approach, a full-edged sales strategy had not yet been developed.
One of their main concerns was the business and use
model. Commonly, professional design apps are downloaded and installed in the device that they will be used in,
and they are mostly paid once upfront but also growingly
more paid as a subscription.

What is the best way to communicate a

value proposition?

These approaches work well for current design projects,

however, as Lurtis Housebuilder creates value in a different
way, they started considering providing it through a webapp. By targeting a different market than the professional
designers that would create a custom 3D building, they
would need to focus on features such as ease of use rather
than providing precise tools, and ease of access to the app,
rather than requiring casual users to keep an app in their
PC taking valuable space on the disk.

Discussion thread on Quora

What feedback did they receive from mentors?

Why do startups need to constantly

communicate with their customers

TWN article - by Carlos Eduardo Espinal

Justo Hidalgo, raised the importance of having a sales

toolkit available and that is constantly updated as the organization grows and learns. Having a centralized repository using a cloud based sync tool can significantly increase the speed at which the organization shares what it
learns and also makes it easy for everyone in the organization to be up to date on the most relevant sales data.

What did they discover during Google Launchpad?

Creating value Vs Communicating value

Most sales effort is centered around communicating how a product compares against its
competitors, thus the effort is made to communicate the value that the product creates for the
customer, but no value is created during the actual sales pitch.

As markets become competitive, the sales

process has to evolve and create value in itself.
As *Rackman and DeVincentis point out, with
this challenge in mind the question becomes:
What things do we do for our customers during the sales process that are so valuable that
customers would be prepared to pay for them?

To get the most value out of Lurtis Housebuilder, its users have to find and create new
ways of working and adapt the way they do
things today. In this context, the focus for Lurtis
sales strategy should be helping users in finding
and creating those workows. In other words, a
phone call made by the sales department
should aim at helping them find new ways of
working rather than just telling them the benefits of using their product.

The 3 selling strategies

Outlining and executing a successful sales
strategy is about finding the right customers for
your products or services. Even though some
services would add great value to customers, it
is common that most customers barely have
resources and time to implement the simplest
and most narrow solution to their problems.

What is their new focus or action plan following

Google Launchpad?
Validating their sales approach, starting with
their web-app Housebuilder solution and approaching their first potential customers. Defining a sales strategy and iterate as they learn.
How can I use this in my startup? The sales
process of a disruptive tech company.

Products or services that are truly transformative require of a sales force that is able to identify the customers that are able and willing to
leverage others resources. Disruptive services
require time to create awareness of their benefits to the wider public and become mainstream.
Focusing on a small but well defined base of
customers is the most efficient way to start.