Starting the sales process early
There are many varied elements to starting up a business, all of which should be careful planned and well executed. It is all too easy to spend all of your teams time in building and developing the product at the early stages - overlooking other equally important parts of the process, most of which can have a similar impact on your chances of success.
Sales is a classic example of this. If you are starting a company that will sell a physical/virtual good/service, I believe that it is never too early to actually start selling. The temptation will be there to wait until the product is finalized and shrink-wrapped before putting it in front of a real customer, after all, its comforting to have the product in hand and you can let the product itself doing all the selling.
But depending on what you are selling and to whom you are selling it, the sales process can be long and intricate. Why not get out there and start selling the product as soon as you have a clear sense for what it will be? Part of your diligence should be to figure out the right set of potential customers. Why not go talk to them about the product you are building? You can discuss the problems they currently have, and how your product will help to address them - you will probably pick up some product feedback and guidance at the same time.
If you get them interested, they will ask to see a demo as soon as you have one, and if you play your cards right, you might even be able to sell them the right to be a pilot customer.
Its a great feeling to actually ship your product to customers that are already waiting, and it saves that nervous time lag between releasing and selling that many companies suffer from.
The sales process should end at the point of product launch, not just be getting started.
