Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

Friends, Family and clients still ask on occasion “how did you do it – how did you manage to sell over $600K in shoes?”

As mentioned in previous posts, the supposed “secret” to selling is actually not a secret at all. Based on my experience, there are three skills you must embrace to become a top-tier sales Jedi in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace:

1) Understand selling is just a numbers game

One day you’ll sell $11K in three hours of work and the next you’ll struggle to sell $1K over the span of an entire day. But in the aggregate, remaining steadfastly focused on your goals will pay off, with a gradual climb toward long-term success.

2) Understand the 80/20 rule

As mentioned in post #2 of this series, memorize the 20% that makes 80% of the difference until it’s instinctive. This is imperative; your long-term viability as a sales professional depends on it.

3) Develop the ability to quickly identify, hone and leverage the triggers of your target consumer

Of the above three skills, point #3 will catapult you the furthest and fastest. Triggers become significantly more apparent as the frequency of sales presentations increase.

Nordstrom is the ideal environment for scaling sales trigger understanding because a sales rep executes roughly 20 presentations/day during the week and more than 40/day on the weekend. Retail is a fast-paced and transaction-oriented environment. Therefore, within a very short amount of time you’re blessed with the benefit of executing hundreds transactions and obtaining large swaths of customer feedback. These are crucial in facilitating your understanding of the wants, needs and ultimately the triggers of your target consumer.

The downside of this type of sales environment is the very “short leash” you’re given. If you don’t produce the boot will arrive on the horizon very fast. You are expected to ramp up sales significantly faster than in other sales contexts.

For instance, on the other side of the pendulum reside enterprise sales. In the beginning, these are long, drawn out and sporadic transactions (2 – 6 month sales cycle). Every opportunity to identify and hone sales triggers must be cherished. In this environment, you are given a longer lead time to “figure it out,” but even then your “leash” is only as long as the market allows – which isn’t more than four months.

I am currently working with a company on a sales strategy. One thing I am trying to push is (especially in this economy) is figuring out ways to demonstrate need. One thing,really works well–showing your client hard data on how they can financially benefit by using your product. I’m not talking about speculation or wishy washy statements like “you will get more exposure!,” but real hard quantifiable data. For example showing “here is what it costs to do X now. With our product it will cost this much less, which will pad your bottom line with those dollars.” In an economy where more cash flow means more likelihood of survival, I can almost guarantee you will get attention with this approach.  And I’m not alone in my thinking. Check out Startup CFO for the same solid advice.

As a follow up to my post on the importance of a great demo, I would like to talk about the old adage – fake it til you make it. This holds true just about everywhere. Have you ever seen that ass kissing idiot rise up through the ranks of your corporate bureaucracy only to one day many years later have an original thought of his own and be thought of as everyone’s savior? It happens. He faked it until he made it. The key is confidence. Even if you are brilliant and right but you don’t have confidence, people won’t listen to you. So its important even when you don’t necessarily know what you are talking about to be confident. Now that doesn’t mean talking over people or disparaging dissenting thought but speak with confidence and the masses shall listen – at least once. The same holds true with pitching your company to clients and investors. Often times you’d be surprised what you can get away with using a slick demo and understanding the psychology and playing to it of your target. The system doesn’t have to work, it just has to appear as if it does. Then get the contract and figure this out. Now, you may say this is unethical – but its how the world works to some extent. It is how Microsoft became the worlds’ biggest company and stayed there for a while. The truth is people don’t care if your product works, they just want to feel confident than you will fix it when it inevitably will break. 

One of the biggest mistakes companies, both big and small make is that they try to sell their product. Now, before you say “Oh no! he wants to give it away for free!” let me explain what I mean.

Most people think the best way to drive revenue is to call on people and sell. That is wrong. The best way to sell is to position your product in such a way that you’re customers come to you. There are a number of ways to do this: one is to become influencer, another is great trade press, another is to offer people free trials and prove your worth instead of hard selling. The point is you want to build credibility in the eyes of your customers and you can’t do that by hard selling them. If you’re product is good enough, it will sell itself - you just need to put the option in front of your potential client and show its value and it will sell itself. This is not easy to do but keep in mind how you and your product is perceived before you make your next sales call

So back again to what I actually do for startups. One of the most important things that I do for my friends and my collection of startups is something I dub Positioning. Now, I spent a long time trying to figure out what to call this but here is what I consider Positioning.

It is the overall development of a Sales & Marketing Strategy stemming from customer research and feedback and including but not limited to: Name Selection, General Branding, Niche Branding, Sales Pitch, Process, Training and Recruiting, Market Planning, Go TO Market Strategy, Traditional, online, alternative, napalm & hijack marketing. (this the verbose business school definition i came up with)

It’s a lot of stuff. At the end of the day its figuring out what your product does, how it solves a customers problems and figuring out how to most effectively get your product in your customers hands and make money. It’s a whole lot of crap. It’s basically what a CMO would do starting from the time a startup is the still in the womb of its founders and leading up to launch.

Those of you lucky or unlucky enough to come into contact with me in the last few weeks have gotten to see me going through quite a number of changes. First I think I have fully grown out my set of balls, shown my humility, got a lot more intelligent and became a true marketer.

I don’t call it marketing though, i go beyond standard marketing - I call it Positive Manipulation & HIjack Marketing.

Yes, these are strong terms - but that is part of their beauty - i welcome the controversy over the terms because now you are thinking about me

My theory is that you never actually should enter a battle or negotiation, before it starts you should already be able to set the tone and steer the solution. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty here but here’s an overview:

1) You must be relaxed
2) You must be willing to walk away
3) Your or your product must offer “perceived value” and always add it
4) You must be a good person and not use these powers for evil

You do positive manipulation by guiding people to do things for you by helping them. Here’s a simple story. A friend of mine runs an ATM company. He places machines in candy stores. When he puts up lots of signs in front of store - more people use the machines and he makes more money. However, every sign he puts up takes space away from the store. One of his signs fell down and the store owner called him. He went to the store and truly is friends with his store owners - he jokes around about payments - a sign of a real relationship and they offer him to put up a new sign in the best place in the store. They also said “thank you” for fixing the sign. Who makes more money off of the ATM? My friend or the store? My friend. because of his relationship they let him get away with making himself more money but he is adding perceived value because the store does make a little more money because of the ATM. It’s a win win situation but my friend got the better side of the bargain.

The key is to understand people’s goals and motivations and self interest and offer value in a way that they will seize on it and even get a little greedy (lust for it) and then they will go out of their way to help you and walk into your hands because you helped them first. Long term you get more value but they don’t care because you helped them first.