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It is amazing how many entrepreneurs make the mistake that Koch almost made. It was as if selling was something secondary and unappealing.

I was once invited to address a business club at a local university. I spent the 90 minutes allotted to me talking about the importance of selling. Afterward, the dean of the business school came up and congratulated me. One of those businesses has to do with the product you make or the service you provide. You make toys. You cut lawns. You fly people from city to city. That part of your business, Ciuba says, is easy to get wrapped up in.

Ciuba is right. As a business owner, selling should be your number one priority——and you must act accordingly. There is only one way to do this: Invest most of your time, attention, and energy in the selling process. They spend most of their time, attention, energy, and capital on things such as setting up an office, designing logos, printing business cards, filing forms, writing contracts, and refining the product.

I have always thought selling was a deplorable activity. But now I am going to have to rethink my position on that. In fact, they are wasting valuable resources on secondary and tertiary endeavors. The activities that relate to making the business look and feel like a real business i.

As tertiary considerations, they should be given little or no at- tention. Refining the product and establishing customer service stan- dards are important jobs, but for most start-up businesses they should be considered secondary considerations until an effective sales program has been tested and launched.

If you are opening a restaurant, you have to get the product right from the start. So, too, if you are manufacturing cars. But for most entrepreneurial businesses, it is enough to have the product and cus- tomer service just okay at the outset. Perfecting them can be done a little later, after you have gotten feedback from your customers. These people were proud of the new products they created and were convinced that as soon as they introduced them to the marketplace, all the selling would get done by itself.

They felt that the selling process was beneath them and could easily be assigned, at some time in the future, to someone else. There are two things wrong with this line of thinking: 1. It is arrogant. How do you know that your product idea is good? Because you think it is? Business is not and must never be about what the business owner thinks is good or right.

Business is about providing value to the customer. And that value can be determined only by the customer. It is foolish. If customers think your product idea is good, they will buy it, recommend it to their friends, and then buy from you again and again.

If they think it is bad or useless or too expensive and, therefore, bad , they will not buy it—or they will buy it and return it and will not recommend it to their friends. Wise business owners know that they cannot determine the goodness of an idea until they try to sell it. So they will try to sell it as soon as they can—if possible before they have spent a lot of time and money making it perfect. Money and time invested in perfecting the product before it goes to market are often wasted.

What may seem like thoughtful improvements in planning may be deemed by the customer to be unnecessary or even undesirable. After I had my first success with a new product idea, I was in his office almost every other day with new ideas for improving it.

But maybe they will. When they start complaining we can talk about their complaints. I want you thinking about the sales we are currently making. There will be a time for that later. Right now, I want you coming in wondering about how many units we sold last night and what we are doing today to improve sales. A seller: someone to market the product. An improver: someone to improve the product. An organizer: someone to make sure things flow smoothly.

A pusher: someone to get people to do what they are supposed to do. As your business grows, you will probably hire people to take on most of them——but at least during the first two stages and probably longer , you should be in charge of one of them.

Which one should that be? Most business experts would say that the most important role for the business leader is to be the organizer, to make sure that all the parts of the business work well together. In a recently published compendium of his best ideas, a book called The Essential Drucker HarperCollins, , he provided dozens of great tips on how to organize and manage a business more successfully.

To me, the most important job of any entrepreneur—and the one role you should not give up as your business grows—is to be in charge of marketing your products. During the first two stages of growth, the priorities should be in this order: 1. Selling 2. Pushing to make sales 3. Improving products and sales 4.

I found nothing. But you do have to understand how your business creates its revenues, and you have to be able to step in and stimulate more sales when they are needed. That is the ultimate strength of an entrepreneur: the ability to stimulate sales. There are many other important skills that can help your business succeed I would rank the ability to create great products very high on any list, for example , but there are none that will make as much difference as salesmanship.

It certainly was for me. Having come from an academic family, I harbored an unconscious bias against sales when I began my business career in earnest in the late s. After teaching English literature and philosophy at the University of Chad in Africa for two years, I returned to the United States and soon was working as a journalist for a small company in Washington, D.

When I sold aluminum siding and then pots and pans as a high school student, I did it because I had to do it, but always felt it was somehow beneath my dignity.

When my friends and I had a house-painting business and then a pool-installation business during my college years, we were happy to leave the selling to our customers. My predecessor had done a pretty good job of marketing the newsletters we wrote. Despite the fact that my predecessor had discovered an effective method of selling subscriptions direct telephone sales to corpora- tions and embassies , I did little of that during my working hours. Instead, I spent time doing what I thought was more important: fuss- ing around with the editorial product.

I had all sorts of ideas about how to make our newsletters better. But I gave scant thought to selling them. I probably spent 12 hours a day hiring and firing and train- ing editors, writing editorial guidelines, brainstorming topics, out- lining issues, editing copy, and so forth.

I spent two hours a month reviewing new orders that mysteriously trickled in. And I had faith that if the editorial product kept improving, so would the sales.

When our industry experienced a recession in the early s, our new sales—which were never great—came to a stop. Renewals were still pretty good, but the dip in new sales put the company into the red for the first time. Since I had no experience selling our newsletters, I had no idea what to do about the decline in sales. Gradually, the company became weaker. I left before that business collapsed, but I carried with me the humiliation of knowing that I was incapable of saving the company when it needed saving.

So I spent my first year at the new job happily doing the same thing I had been doing for three years: namely, fooling around with editorial guidelines and style manuals.

Then, one evening, I had a transforming experience: I decided to become rich. He told me that the best way for me to achieve my goal would be to help make him rich—and that the best way to do that would be to start spending more of my time and energy on sales and marketing.

I continued to fuss over our newsletters—but with an entirely dif- ferent perspective. I no longer cared whether our writing was clever or correct or corresponded to The Chicago Manual of Style but, instead, whether it was likely to please our subscribers and thus improve our renewal rates.

I devoted every spare hour to learning the selling part of that business, which was direct-mail marketing. And after coming up with dozens of bad ideas, I finally came up with an advertising cam- paign that my boss liked. When it worked—and it worked extremely well—I was hooked on selling. I further reduced the time I had been investing in tweaking the editorial quality of our newsletters, and focused even more time and energy on sales.

The result of combining our efforts dramatically increased growth and profitability. Learning the Lesson Once Again The year before that business peaked, my partner had a heart attack and decided he wanted to retire.

At 37, I felt that I was too young to retire, so we reinvented the structure of the business, selling off most of the equity to key employees, and stayed on as consultants. Two years later, in , I decided to retire and take it easy. But in making this investment in what I thought would be the per- fect retirement business, I temporarily forgot everything I had learned.

I imagined that I would spend my days sitting in the showroom, surrounded by beautiful paintings, reading Tolstoy and occasionally being interrupted by browsing art lovers who would admire my col- lection, enjoy the espresso I so kindly served them, chat intelligently with me, and then insist on buying an expensive work of art. Such was my dream. The reality was entirely different.

The fine-art business, it turned out, was just like every other busi- ness I had ever been in. Its primary activities were all—in one way or another—about selling. Yes, my new work space was beautiful. And, yes, some of the customers were intelligent, well-spoken, and worldly. A former psychologist, he had—as near as I could tell—only one sales technique. When a customer was wandering through the gallery, he had a wonderful way of casually chatting them up. But it worked like gangbusters.

Since then, I have seen it used in dozens of different ways by many successful sellers of art, collectibles, antiques, jewelry, and expensive watches—something to remember if you decide to go into one of those businesses. This rule is true throughout the life cycle of any business, but it is especially true in the beginning, when you are just starting out.

One, a New York realtor, wanted to broker surplus office space through the Internet. When the website was done, he was happy—until he activated it and discov- ered that nobody was rushing in to take advantage of his free offer.

He spent the little money he had left on a few desperate marketing schemes, but to no avail. He had exhausted all his resources building a professional-looking site with lots of bells and whistles, but he had never tested his basic sales assumption—that he could attract lots of free postings and then convert them into paid advertisers. Meanwhile, another entrepreneur, a car repairman, had a very dif- ferent business idea. He called his venture Street Glow Inc. And he spent most of his time traveling to custom auto shops and automobile- themed events, trying to make sales.

At first, people were curious but most were hesitant to buy. After talking to them, he made adjustments to his product, his pricing, and the way he presented it. He worked fast. He took enough deposits to build the systems ordered, delivered them, and then reinvested the profits in selling more systems. For months he earned nothing, because he was reinvesting his cash flow into sales. But at about the one-year mark, he was able to start pocketing profits.

At that point, he began fixing up a shop, buying some new tools, and ordering inventory. By devoting his attention to selling first and taking care of the other, secondary business concerns later, he ensured that his fledgling enterprise would not suffer the normal and normally lethal cash shortages most first-year businesses encounter.

By the last year financial data was available for this privately held company , Street Glow Inc. When beginning a new business or launching a new product within an existing business , the sooner you can make the first sale, the better your chances are of success. The story of Alex Tew illustrates this. In order to earn money for college, Alex decided to join the growing trend of young people who were getting rich from Internet innovations.

On a summer evening just before he was to begin classes, he stayed up late talking with friends and brainstorming moneymaking ideas. Continued After rejecting dozens of ideas as impractical or unlikely, Alex seized upon one that he felt he could accomplish in the very short period of time that stood between him and his first tuition bill. The basic idea—selling advertising space on a website—was being done by thousands of others all over the world. His marketing goal was simple and challenging: to sell one million pixels at one dollar each as soon as he possibly could.

Alex had a bit of experience designing websites, but he was hardly an expert. But with his tuition bill looming, he slapped together the best site he could with the money he had—a mere hundred dollars—and activated it as MillionDollarHomePage. From start to finish, it took Alex only 48 hours. He devoted the time that remained to what he had the sense to know was his number one priority: selling those pixels.

He dashed off a half-funny, half-desperate sales letter—his first effort at direct-mail marketing—and sent it out to the people on his personal e-mail list.

Inspired by his initial success, he wrote up a press release about his venture and sent it to local radio and television stations. The response was as good as he could have hoped for.

As soon as the first small bit about him aired, he began receiving orders. In a matter of weeks, he had generated tens of thousands of dollars. This gave him fodder for more press releases, and more publicity followed. When the story of his homespun ingenuity was picked up by re- gional television stations, he was flooded with orders. Continued Alex would have been happy with that, but the story kept getting bigger. When the national and international media got wind of his business idea, demand soared exponentially—so much so that he needed to hire people to help him fill orders from individuals and businesses in 35 countries.

Selling is what matters most in the first stage of a start-up business. If Alex had given himself a reasonable period of time to launch his business—say, a year or two to build a great website and learn about marketing before he started selling—chances are he never would have succeeded. Sell it. Then, if it sells, make it better. Most would-be entrepreneurs do just about everything else first, such as taking care of legal requirements forming a corporation, getting local business permits, filing DBAs, etc.

For one thing, selling is difficult. Rather than do the hard thing first, many people want to take care of easier jobs. This is also true of many small-business consultants. One such consultant, an online company I profiled in Early to Rise several years ago, is a typical example. Create an instant impact message that describes the chief benefit of your business. Put it on your business cards and brochures, which you should hand out at business functions and meetings. Create a paper trail—tracking all meeting dates, attendees, and discussions.

Consult a lawyer and obtain his or her advice on how to best protect your business. In a January article, I poked fun at a similar set of suggestions made by the writers of More magazine for novice female entrepreneurs. Here are the tools More magazine provided to help its readers get started: r Consult with an attorney to make sure you set up the right legal structure.

Making the first sale is critical for two reasons. You need to create cash flow to keep your business going. You will never really know whether your big idea—what mar- keters call the unique selling proposition USP of your busi- ness—is a good one until you give it the ultimate test in the marketplace.

Think of it this way: When you begin a new business, you have no idea whether your idea is good or bad. The faster you find out, the better for you. Several years ago, an old friend referred a young man to me who was in the process of setting up an Internet counseling business. The young man and his backers had already spent a fortune on the website, and he wanted my advice on putting together a huge network of counselors to respond to the advertising blitz he was planning.

I told him I thought he was making a big mistake. And if so, how much would it cost you to do it? And when he was done—in 30 days—he would know with confi- dence if he had a viable business idea. Instead, he spent two years raising a million dollars and then the third year blowing it. Oh, well. A woman I have known since high school called to tell me about a cosmetics business she was starting. She had spent several years devel- oping her own line of natural skin treatments, and had shared them with others, who raved about them.

Encouraged by their reactions, she decided to go forward. She told me about the new labels she was designing, the contracts she was negotiating, the shopping she was doing for a retail space. But as far as she was concerned, her business was already up and running.

She was busy day and night working on it. And she was spending all kinds of money. Eventually, of course, we stopped talking about it. They were really very good. Out of the blue last week, an old friend called her to say that he was starting a business selling Brazilian-made accessories in the United States, and he wanted her to be his partner.

He has lots of contacts in Brazil. And he will put up most of the money. He has another business, so he needs someone to be his partner in this new one. He said he knew I had a good feel for the kind of products he wants to offer, and that I could be an asset to him. Let me ask you an important question. How do you guys plan to sell this stuff?

Also in the pile was information about import regulations, a letter from a real estate agent about office space, and a DVD that she urged me to watch.

It had arresting graphics, a catchy soundtrack, and lots of images of handbags, hats, and costume jewelry. You are the one with all the experience.

Here I was, writing this chapter on the importance of selling and, in particular, about the importance of focusing on sales at the very beginning of a business, when I am interrupted by someone with a bag full of business ideas but not a single one about sales. That sounded like a very bad idea, but I knew better than to say so. To start anything new, you have to be prepared to put in both money and time. If you put in less money, you need to put in more time. She frowned. Rental contracts are like marriage licenses.

They feel good when you are heady in love, but after reality sets in they may feel expensive and restricting. In this case, there are several ways our young entrepreneur can do that. First, she can rent booths at local flea markets and art fairs on a daily or weekly basis and peddle her merchandise there. She should begin by going to the one she thinks will be best for her merchandise, but she should try them all because her hunch may be wrong. Third, she should try to wholesale her merchandise to existing retail shops and try to make distribution deals with them.

This may require her to discount her merchandise so severely that there will be little profit in it. What she wants, initially, is to figure out what types of accessories will sell and at what price. Fourth, she should sponsor office- and home-based accessory parties, where small groups of women would gather to look at her merchandise and buy what they want in a friendly, low-pressure atmosphere. Fifth, she could make deals with local restaurants that would allow her to personally model the accessories, going from table to table in their dining rooms, in exchange for a commission on any sales she would generate.

This is done very effectively in a few of the better restaurants in my hometown. First, you will discover which of your products sell well in what kind of selling environment and at what price.

Second, you will learn how to sell your merchan- dise—what specific type of sales effort works best for the type of customers you want to attract. Third, and no less important than the others, you will generate cash that you will desperately need to run your business. Find out what the market wants to buy. You will know what products to stock your store with and how to price and package them, and you will even have a good idea about where they would sell the best.

In giving this advice to our would-be entrepreneur, I mentioned that my brother-in-law and his partners started a jewelry business this way about 20 years ago. Could she be successful faster by going directly to retail? But if she is wrong—even by a little bit—it could spell disaster. Then, continue by. And finally, fine-tune by. If you want to sell cars, you have to manufacture them first, and if you want to sell pharmaceuticals, you have to obtain Food and Drug Administration FDA approval for them.

And if selling is essential, learning to sell i. Everything you are about to learn is easy. I will teach you one concept and four secrets. You will learn the concept in about five minutes.

And it will take you about half an hour to understand the four secrets. Discovering how to apply the four secrets to your particular business and your particular product—well, that will take a little time. But I am talking about days or possibly weeks, not months. All you really want to learn is how to sell one particular product to one particular market.

In essence, you are going to become a one-trick marketing pony—someone who can do one thing, and perhaps only one thing, very well: selling the hell out of your lead product. If you have faith in this concept and the four secrets you are about to discover, your success at getting your business from zero to a mil- lion dollars in revenues—from Stage One to the beginning of Stage Two—will be virtually guaranteed. As long as it keeps working, you should keep doing it.

Later, you will acquire other selling skills. For now, this one thing is enough. For start-up companies, the lead product is usually the only product. Those points are the four stages of business development I laid out in Chapter 1. And the four secrets you are about to learn will provide you with the insights you need to make success at each one of those stages not just possible but inevitable. There- fore, Stage One entrepreneurs should be focused on that: figuring out how to acquire customers in a way that creates cash flow.

They are so excited about their product that they imagine it selling itself. And even experienced intrapreneurs—divisional marketing executives or CEOs—often give scant attention to selling strategies when they launch new products, because they mistakenly assume that one way of selling is just about as good as another. Nothing could be further from the truth. How you sell your pro- duct—the specific decisions you make about presenting and pricing and talking about it—has a huge impact on whether you will be suc- cessful.

The product is important but almost never sells itself. To launch the product successfully and take your new business or product line from zero to a million dollars and beyond , you have to discover what I call your optimum selling strategy OSS.

This chapter and the next are devoted to teaching you how to do that. Discovering the OSS for your product will put your business on the right track. It will make everything that happens afterward easier. Problems will be easier to solve. Obstacles will be easier to overcome. And objectives will be easier to reach.

Your business will grow quickly, because you will have taken care of its biggest problem: acquiring new customers without depleting your bank account.

Once the business has a back-end marketing strategy in place, for example, it is possible to create profitable growth through negative cash flow strategies such as financing or loss-leader selling. I will cover these concepts in later chapters. Some of these businesses can be very profitable. One of them, real estate development, has been a professional hobby of mine for more than 20 years. During that time, I have done everything I can to reduce that negative cash flow requirement, because sooner or later it bankrupts most developers, even successful ones.

So, although I admit that some businesses seem to require debt and negative cash flow, I prefer to stay away from them—or, when I do dabble in them, change them as much as possible to reduce the risk of debt. This understanding will allow you to lead your employees with confidence as the business grows, and to help them fix problems if and when they arise later.

There are many problems that can occur as a business grows, but there is only one that is deadly—and that is the inability to bring in new customers. When you understand the basics of how to sell to your market- place, nobody can fool you with cockamamie marketing strategies and idiotic sales programs.

And even if you let other people take over the marketing and sales functions, you will be able to guide them as the company grows and help them take advantage of opportunities and avoid potentially damaging mistakes. As the business grows out of its infancy—as it goes beyond the million-dollar revenue mark by selling many more products through many more channels—you can let other people do most of the day-to- day selling.

But by establishing your marketing credentials during the first stage, when the selling secrets of your business are still unknown, you will gain a deep understanding of your business that will serve you well for the rest of your career. Should you advertise on local radio programs or television channels? Should you buy space ads in local newspapers? Does it make sense to set up a website and try to generate business on a national or international basis with Internet strategies such as pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization?

These are questions you may be asking right now. And if you look to experts for answers, you will get plenty of them. Media brokers will tout the advantages of space ads. Direct-mail marketers will try to persuade you to sell your products through the post office. Internet marketing gurus will highlight the benefits of marketing on the Web. Ask the key questions: r What other products can we sell? There are hundreds of ways a business can go bad, but only one sure way to make it better: Identify the optimum selling strategy for the stage of growth that you are in and then focus 80 percent of your resources on applying it.

New customers bring new cash, and that cash can be spent on anything your business needs, including better products, customer service, fulfillment, and so on.

You name it—cash and a little time will make it happen. These four questions are: 1. Where are you going to find your customers? What product will you sell them first? How much will you charge for it? How will you convince them to buy it? Four answers to four questions—very simple, or so it seems. There is a catch, though: You need to answer all four questions, not just some of them. The optimum selling strategy for your business can unlock a padlock and open the gates of entrepreneurial success.

But that padlock has four keyholes. And each of those keyholes requires a separate key. We never did. He provided that, and also contributed his oldest son, just out of college, to help run the business. And that son brought a friend, who worked as a marketer.

The two of them were in charge of developing EarlytoRise. They bought pay-per-click names and gave them each a free sub- scription to the daily Early to Rise e-zine, which then sold them all sorts of reports and home-study programs that had been created by other people.

Whenever one of those information products sold well, they would obtain permission to sell it directly to other websites and e-zines. People who bought those products online received the Early to Rise e-zine for free. Those who decided not to buy those products were given a pop-up opportunity to get the e-zine for free. Eventually, we had the answers to the four questions we needed to know: 1. Where our customers were. What product s to sell them. Eventually, we knew enough to start creating and testing our own products successfully.

What price to charge. What marketing copy to use to convince them to buy. We were al- ways testing copy. We tested headlines. We tested leads. We tested hard approaches against soft approaches, benefit-oriented pitches against idea-oriented ones. We tested just about anything, so long as we thought what we were testing had a reasonable chance of increasing our response rate by a substantial margin.

Once we figured out our optimum selling strategy, cash flow increased sharply. We knew where our customers were, how much we could pay for them either as pay-per-click names or by splitting revenues with affiliates , and what they were willing to spend on new products. The products we sold them and the marketing copy we used changed as time went by. As a general rule, we found that we had to come up with a new lead product and copy about once every six months.

But that was easy to do, because we understood the most important thing: our optimum selling strategy for getting new products off the ground and running. After about two years, when sales hit about a million dollars and EarlytoRise.

And then, once again, we changed our OSS as we changed the business. Are they listening to Howard Stern? Are they reading The Wall Street Journal? Are they watching Oprah? Are they surfing the Internet? The answer may not be as easy as it sometimes seems. You might think that the best place to find your customers would be in pro shops, where they are standing in line waiting to pay their greens fees and thinking about their swing. Perhaps the square foot of real estate next to the cash register would be the perfect place to reach them.

If so, you might be able to lease that space and install a point-of-purchase display. Or maybe it would be better to place an ad at the back of a golfing magazine. There are dozens of magazines to choose from, you discover, each with a different circulation and rate. Perhaps you could get started with a handful of small ads. Or maybe you should go all out and produce a commercial that you can run on national TV during a televised golf tournament.

With millions of people watching, you figure you could make a fortune with a single promotion. And then, in a passing conversation with a friend of yours who is in the direct-marketing industry, you learn that you can rent lists with the names and addresses of amateur golfers—more than five million in total.

He tells you that mailing a targeted sales letter to a portion of those names will give you the best bang for your buck. Indeed, if you talk to the media brokers who represent each of these advertising options, you will hear good reasons why you should invest your money in theirs.

The Ultimate Marketing Strategies for Newbies My best advice on this matter will not stir or inspire you. It may even disappoint you. But it is my best advice: Do what everyone else is doing. In the next chapter, I will talk about how to distinguish your sales pitch by creating a unique selling strategy. But when it comes to figuring out where to find your customers, what to sell them, how much to charge them, and the terms to offer, the answer is: Do what the competition is doing—in the beginning, at least.

As you move on and gain experience, you may be able to come up with innovative changes. You might find a new advertising medium that will deliver fresh customers, or you might develop a new offer that increases your response rates.

But for now, at the beginning, it is smart to start by imitating success. Locating the Best Locations So how do you find out where successful companies in your industry are finding their customers?

That is relatively easy. Start by looking around in all the likely places. Like you wanted someone to talk to? A best friend perhaps?

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