Here’s how to make your brand into something everyone is talking about - the padel way

I’m on vacation this month with my family in Gotland, and we’ve finally tried the new hype: Padel. It’s like tennis, but you play it on a court surrounded by plexiglass, and you can bounce the ball off the walls as part of the game. It’s all the rage in Sweden and other parts of Europe right now, and it’s quite a lot of fun.

If you’re in the US, you might have never heard of it. It’s a relatively new sport, but it took off like mad here over the last year. Now, there are padel courts popping up everywhere. Anywhere you go in this country, you are never far from a brand new court to play on - and it’s practically all anyone talks about:

“Oh, haven’t you played yet? You have to try it. It’s so great.”

It is really fun, and I’m glad we tried it. But as a sales professional, I’m even more fascinated by the fact of its popularity. How did it become such a rage? How did it go from nothing to something that everyone is talking about, practically overnight?

Any time something goes truly viral, whether online or out in the real world, there’s always an element of magic that’s hard to put a finger on (and often decades of prep work.) But there are also always certain elements that we can learn from.

1. Reduce entrypoint friction

When people talk about padel to their friends, they almost always say, “Oh, it’s so easy! Anyone can play!”

And it’s true. I like tennis, but it’s not a lot of fun to play if you don’t have very much skill. You have to learn to do it well before it becomes fun.

Padel is quite simple to enjoy right from the beginning, and you don’t have to have a lot of skill to enjoy it. My wife and I, and our two children played together quite OK and had a good time the very first time.

For sales teams in complex b2b spaces, this simple entrypoint can be difficult to mimic. Software like ours, for instance, takes a little time and some effort to implement. It’s not quite as simple as grabbing a racquet and hitting a ball around a court.

Give salespeople the skills and tools needed to provide exceptional customer experiences.

But you can still reduce entrypoint friction by making your products and services simple to understand. Easy and fun to use. Beautiful to interact with.

And your salespeople can make every interaction insightful and enjoyable. When your salespeople focus on helping customers, seeing things through their eyes, and having true empathy for them, it makes people want to come back again. When they enjoy the very first experience, they will want more experiences like it.

Another thing that makes padel easy and fun the first time is that you don’t need a lot of specialized equipment. You need racquets and good shoes (which you probably already have if you play any sports), and you’re ready to go.

For sales teams, think about barriers customers might face in wanting to work with you. Are there tools, equipment, or skills they need to master before they can even enter your playing court? Can you remove those obstacles and make it easy for them? Can you provide them with the tools they need so all they have to do is show up and enjoy?

We can all benefit from looking at our entire marketing, sales, service, retention, and growth plans to see where we can reduce friction and make experiencing our products and services simple, fun, and easy.

2. Be so appealing people can’t stop talking about you

Word of mouth is an unreliable sales ally, but if you want to truly explode, it’s necessary. It’s the biggest reason, in my opinion, that padel is exploding in this country. It’s hard to go out with friends without someone asking you if you’ve tried padel yet.

The key here is that padel makes people happy. It’s not super competitive, and the rules and environment make it enjoyable for anyone at any level. It’s possible for kids to play with adults, beginners with more experienced folks, and still have fun.

You get exercise and social time while enjoying a little bit of competition.

In complex b2b sales, going “viral” may not be the goal. But you can be so great that your target audience can’t stop telling all their friends how great you are.

Train your salespeople to treat every customer with care and concern. Focus on helping them, showing them empathy, and serving as a resource. Give your teams the skills and tactics they need to provide a truly exceptional customer experience, and expand that experience to customer service, retention, and growth.

Make your products and services so great that people love to use them.

At Membrain, we work hard to make our product beautiful and easy to use, in addition to being highly functional. And we do our best to make sure our customers know we really care about their success, not just their money.

We haven’t exploded like padel yet, but we hope our customers love us at least as much as they enjoy hitting balls on a plexiglass court.

3. Make it scale

I got curious about how much it costs to set up a padel court. I couldn’t get a definitive answer, but I did learn that it’s not hard at all. With several thousand dollars in hand, you can buy a kit and set it up almost anywhere, indoors or out.

Once you have a court, you can charge folks $40 an hour to use it, with very little labor involved in maintaining or running it. I ran some back of napkin numbers and you could make quite a decent amount of money pretty quickly this way, which explains why courts are popping up like mushrooms.

There are activities out there that might objectively be more fun than padel. Scuba diving, for instance, or zip lining in the Amazon with a rainforest biologist - depending on your interests.

But padel is so simple and easy, comparatively. And, once there is demand for it, it’s easy and profitable to spread out and add more courts.

In complex b2b products and services, scale can sometimes be difficult to achieve. At Membrain, even though we’re a software platform that is technically simple to scale, we also service our product to help ensure customer success. This means that each new customer costs us an amount over the cost of delivery of the software.

So what we did was create our ClearPath Promise that ensures our customers all have a smooth and predictable experience that we can repeat over and over, even with wildly unique business models and sales systems.

It’s not quite as straightforward as ordering a padel kit and setting it up on an empty lot, but it does make it possible for us to offer our customers a predictable and simple experience, and for our salespeople to have a straightforward process to follow.

I’m curious - what are you doing to ensure your customers all rave about your products and services? How are you reducing friction and making it easy for customers to do business with you?

Where could you do better?