What is one thing most entrepreneurs do not understand about sales?
1. You Are Not Your Customer
Only a very small percentage of entrepreneurs are the target customer for their own product. Too many companies use the language of tech startups when they should be learning the language of their target market.
- John Rood, Next Step Test Preparation
2. Questions Are Valuable
When I started out, I would spend 80 percent of meetings telling clients about my business and how it could help them. I developed a few relationships, but many slipped through the cracks. I read a great book called Spin Selling, and since then spend 18 percent of meetings asking questions, 80 percent listening to answers and 2 percent telling people how my company can solve their specific problems.
- Mark Krassner, Knee Walker Central
3. You Sell Differently Than Sales Reps
As an entrepreneur, you have a true passion for your company and a solid understanding of how it can help your customer. Hired sales people won’t have your same passion or understanding. Building a sales process where anyone can make the sale will make hiring sales people more effective. It’s about finding people who can follow a repeatable sales process. But that process has to start with you.
- Mark Cenicola, BannerView.com
4. You Have to Sell
Sales are the foundation of any company, whether B2B or B2C. In order to make money, you can’t just have a cool product and expect to get inbound leads. Perhaps that may work for a lucky few, but most need to hit the ground running and make outbound sales to be successful and take the next steps.
- Bryan Silverman, InStall Media
5. Sales Is a Business Partnership
No matter what business you’re in, you are a salesperson. So own it. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling your own products and services or selling yourself to your team, everything relates to sales. Yet, when you start “selling” to a customer instead of working with and helping them, you won’t win. Great salespeople win by serving as business partners, first.
- Marjorie Adams, AQB
6. You Need to Understand Gross Margin and Cash Flow
There are two important things to understand: gross margin on sales and cash flow. Some sales have a high margin, such as banner advertising, since you don’t need to consider the cost of goods sold. In terms of cash flow, you should aim to get paid in 30-45 days. Anything longer than that and it’s simply too difficult to operate your business off of these slow receivables.
- Luke Skurman, Niche.com
7. Sales Can Take a Long Time
You may need to start today to close sales seven to 12 months down the road. In the meantime, build a relationship with your prospects — get to know their budget cycles, where and how they spend now and how you can help them. That way you will be in the best position to close the deal when the client is ready to buy.
- Marcos Cordero, GradSave, LLC
8. You Can Also Be Sold To
Entrepreneurs who are not versed in sales can fall into the trap of being sold to by their own sales team. It is important for entrepreneurs to understand how to set realistic sales goals and look for sales trends alongside their sales team. If you don’t establish these metrics and goals, your sales team may end up selling you a lot of excuses or speculation of why deals are not happening.
- Phil Chen, Systems Watch
9. Sales Requires a Lot of Effort
Most entrepreneurs, particularly those who have never started a company from scratch before, don’t understand the amount of effort and organization it takes to build a real sales engine. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs are good at one aspect of the sales engine. But very few are good at pulling all of the aspects of sales together into one finely tuned machine that continually delivers leads.
- Janis Krums, OPPRTUNITY
10. All Customers Are Not Created Equal
Every sale is not the same. When building a company, it is important to align oneself with the right partners in every avenue, including customers. If a would-be client is difficult to deal with or requires a lot of bandwidth during negotiations, he/she won’t be any easier to deal with after the signature is on the dotted line. Every entrepreneur has a limited bandwidth; focus yours on good people
- Brittany Hodak, ZinePak
11. You Can’t Do All of Sales Yourself
Many entrepreneurs typically generate their company’s first round of sales. As they begin to grow, they are not able to do all the sales moving forward. Realizing when this time has come and hiring rockstar sales people is key. Be sure to record and document all of your systems for winning sales as well as expected sales metrics and ratios that will constitute success for your coming sales team.
- Matt Shoup, MattShoup.com
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