So after our recent swing through Portland and Seattle, and explaining Pronetos to many, many people time and again, I got to thinking about how to recognize when a a customer isn’t interested in what you are selling, and what to do about it, and also how the scientific method plays into this whole thing (after all, Pronetos is a scholarly website).

The process of selling a product or idea is a process that involves participation from two parties - that’s the first thing to realize. You have the person with the idea, and the person to whom you are introducing the idea. So if my goal is to sell you the idea that ‘the sky is blue,’ here is how that is supposed to play out:

Chris: “The sky is blue, I tell you.”

Customer: “I don’t believe it”

Chris: “Well as evidence to support my claim, I would ask to you crane your neck toward the heavens.”

Customer: (craning neck) “Well, I’ll be. You sir, are correct.”

You see how that works? I make a claim, and support it with evidence. The ball is now out of my court. Now, the other side has to participate. If they fail to participate, or ask for more evidence before investigating your claim, you have a customer that is not interested in what you’ve got. And, with lots of customers out there, I say, move on to the next guy. I don’t know what Jeffrey Gitomer would say, but I’m a shake the dust off your sandals kind of guy.

So back to the process. You see how that sales process mimics scientific method?

• I make a claim (introduce a thesis)
• I support that claim with evidence (review the literature, run tests, present findings)

After that, I am done with my part. The response from the scientific community at that point isn’t, “I don’t believe you, Chris, provide me with more data to prove your point.” What the scientific community does at that point is set out to falsify my claims. If they can, my theory either has to be amended, or scrapped. If they cannot falsify my claims, then my theory stands as credible until someone can falsify it (in science we don’t speak of “proving” anything).

So the business parallel should be obvious. When I go out there and tell people about Pronetos, and I say things like, “creating organic, digital, peer-reviewed journals with high impact ratings is something that can be done. As evidence, I submit to you the various journals of the Public Library of Science, and PubMed, each of which publishes journals with impact ratings as high as the best journals in the respective fields.” I have made my business claim, and supported it with evidence. Now, it’s your turn to go out and attempt to falsify my claims. That is called due dilligence.

But what doesn’t work is to say: “I don’t believe the evidence you have submitted me. Defend that claim further.” Often times, though, this is what you get: people asking you to further defend your claims, or just outright disputing that the sky is blue without ever looking up.

When Pronetos presented at TechLaunch, we claimed that the company could produce $30,000,000 in annual revenues, and grow from there. How could that be posssible? Well, Pronetos will sell books, journals, and custom produced content. What is that market like? Just Elsevier’s journal business amounted to $3.1 billion in sales in 2006. So, without ever discussing the other worldwide journal producers, the academic book market, the downloadable content market, and print and digital advertising, I have just claimed that Pronetos as a company has the potential to generate .09 percent - less than 1 percent - of the journal revenues of a single company.

When you add up all the other market segments described above, $30 million in annual revenues is a paltry claim.

So now I’m out there going, “well we can probably generate $3 million in revenues in the next five years” and we still get, “Really? I don’t see how that’s possible.” So I am thinking to myself, “Hmmm. I have just claimed that in five years I can capture 1/10th of one percent of the market share of a single journal producer, in a single segment, and that’s still too big a claim?” And I have trotted out the sales figures of publisher after publisher; talked about Amazon.com moving into this space with two big acquisitions; showed LuLu’s sales figures in this space; revealed the business plans of three major Open Access publishers who are moving into monetizing content through Print on Demand, etc. I have made my case, and supported it with reams of evidence.

Now, it’s time to falsify those claims, i.e., do the due dilligence. But simply looking at the numbers in disbelief is akin to not looking up to verify the color of the sky.