Chad Larson, Co-founder, M-KOPA, CEO, Kopo Kopo Inc.

For the sales and marketing strategy at M-KOPA, we knew we had a product that would save a lot of customers money versus buying kerosene every day, which is what they were doing before they came on to M-KOPA. But we did realize early on that we needed to convince them of that,  that they were being asked to make a big financial commitment in the form of a down payment on the product and then an ongoing daily rate. They were committing to something that was a big change in their habits. So they really had to believe in the savings.

So as we thought about our sales strategy, we thought, this needs to have customized conversations with every potential customer. It's not something that lends itself. You can talk in the abstract about how it might save you money versus kerosene. But unless you can convince me based on my habits and my daily spend on kerosene, I think those things are much more difficult. So that led us eventually to the direct sales force, where we had trained people and we trained them about how to have that conversation. How to do the math about what they were spending on kerosene and how to show them with the math that this was going to be much more financially sound to move to this over time.

Then the marketing strategy beyond that was just having some brand identity where people knew it was a legitimate company. If you do some above-the-line marketing, some radio ads, some billboards, things like that, people know, Okay, that's a legitimate company. When the salesperson approaches them, they already know who this company is.

Derrick Muturi, CEO, Herdy 

I think if you're thinking about marketing and you really haven't tried really anything out there, I'd say, first of all, is define how much money you're willing to lose, not spend, because when you're doing marketing, you're not spending money, you're losing money. So define how much money you're willing to lose. And once you have that, I'd say just go out and spend that money.

Be sure about what you're willing to track and define that very well. Before we do any sort of campaign, we really have to be able to measure it. So we measure everything, even SMS campaigns. We have links that track how many people open the links on email, the links on SMS, how many people refer people online. We look at our data at least every two weeks, and we're able to see different spikes. We can tell we had a spike here either on sales or traffic because we did this campaign. The thing is, how do you keep that spike up without doing all those things all the time? Because it takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money. So how do you build those spikes without having to do those things? It's just finding a relationship between what you do and what you get at the end of the day. 

Key takeaways 

• Craft marketing and sales messages around customer benefits 

• Build a strong brand identity to enhance customer confidence and trust 

• Treat marketing as an investment by defining a strategic budget, tracking data closely, and optimizing efforts for growth