Robert Louis Stevenson said, “everyone lives by selling something”. I wish that all of the small businesses I have encountered over the years had heard this. It happens time and time again that people who work so hard to follow their passion forget that you have to sell something. You have to build a model which compensates and pays for sales. You have to build a pricing model that allows someone to make a living selling your product or service. You have to have a method and means of paying for the method of selling the product or service.
I see a common theme amongst start-up business which is “sales” or better said “lack of sales”. There are plenty of people in this world who have good ideas, and there are plenty of good ideas, but nothing means nothing if you cannot sell it.
It goes deeper than if you can sell it, “it” being the product or service, to being able to have a replicable sales model. Can I put together a sales program that will work time and time again? Will the end user, the client pay me for my product or for my service. Am I adding value to someone?
Sales is a numbers game, but the numbers will not work if you are not adding value, and if you have not thought-out how the sales and marketing plan are going to work.
This may sound elementary, but you would be surprised how many companies go out and build the best most high tech mouse trap in the world, but they have not figured out how they are going to sell it. In fact, in most cases they have not done the research as to how much someone is willing to pay for the product or service.
Part of the “lack of sales” problem is that many companies do not budget the cost of sales in their plans. You have to pay for sales and depending on the type of product or service, the market you are serving, will depend on your cost of sales.
In the day of the internet, lots of start-ups tend to forget about sales. Don’t forget about sales. If you want your business to work, YOU must be able to sell your product or your service. You then must be able to replicate your efforts into multiple efforts with a sales team or a process, and you must build this into your cost.
Presumably over time as sales increase the cost of sales decreases. The idea being that when you build your plan you must front in load the cost of sales. For one, more times than not you will have to pay to hire sales people or at least pay them a draw for a period of time if they are going to take a risk going to try and sell your product or service. Once you have an established, sales model and have a sales team or a sales process your cost of sales will decrease because there is less risk in the process, and you will succeed.
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