The market doesn’t pay you to have the best products or service. It rewards you for solving problems. A transaction takes places where, in the mind of the consumer, the value of the solution you’re selling outweighs the price you’re asking.
Let me be brutally clear and not mince my words about what I believe to be the single most important rule in business.
It is this:
As the owner, your number one responsibility is to sell.
Selling is not something you do on the side. It’s not something you can outsource or completely delegate. It’s the single most important job of any business and consequently any founder or owner.
It doesn’t matter whether you have a great product or service… Your entire existence as an entrepreneur lives and dies by how effective your sales and marketing is at producing new revenue.
Your business success is not based on your motivation, your team, your passion, or your desire to help people.
If you have a marketing and sales machine that predictably brings in hordes of new customers every day like clockwork, owning a business can be phenomenal.
If you don’t, owning a business can be unpredictable, unreliable, and incredibly stressful. This is because the destiny of your company, your income, your family’s income, and the income of your employees and their families rest in whatever ‘fate’ drops in your lap.
You can choose to ignore this fact, turn a blind eye, and tell yourself that ‘everything will work out fine’. Or you can read this and ensure your business doesn’t become a depressing statistic.
Either way, you must understand that all the latest shiny marketing tactics, hacks and tools being peddled will not solve the number one problem business owners face: ‘How do I get more customers – and therefore more revenue?
More tactics are not the answer. And you likely already know this deep down inside. Because if you’re like most business owners, you’ve gone through countless CRM software programs, landing page builders, all the latest gizmos and gadgets and you may have even hired marketing agencies, only to find very little success.
The reason for this is because these are all designed to treat the symptoms to low sales and not cure the systemic cause of the problem.
You need something different.
Are You Ready?
In this article, I’m going to tell you things you won’t hear anywhere else.
The methods I divulge in the following pages are highly controversial.
Not because they’re untrue. It’s because they are truer than anything else you’ve likely ever been taught about sales and marketing.
What you’ll discover in this article is going to change everything for you,
and especially the way you think about business and your income.
You see, after working with thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs, I’ve realised most business owners don’t really understand
the business they are in.
What I mean is the baker thinks they are in the baking business, the builder thinks they are in the building business, and the dentist thinks they are in the dentistry business.
When in fact they are not.
They are in the business of selling those particular products and services.
You bake bread. You build homes. You fill cavities. This part of your business, the product or service, is likely the reason you got started in business, and it’s easy to get wrapped up in this kind of thinking: ‘I’m a builder, so I must spend my time building homes’. The fact is, most of the business owner’s time should be spent on the real business that every business owner is in – selling.
As a business owner, selling should be your number one priority – and you must act accordingly. This means spending the bulk of your time on marketing and sales-related activities – or as I call them, revenue-producing activities.
This doesn’t mean you have to be the one on the phone actually doing the selling yourself. Nor does it mean you must write every piece of sales copy on your website. However, you must be very much involved in every step of the sales and marketing process, so you understand the problems intimately and can identify the opportunities.
Because it doesn’t matter what sort of expertise you bring to your business – whether you’re a problem solver, a great manager, a numbers person, or a systems and processes person.
To be a truly effective entrepreneur, you must become your business’s number one expert at selling.
There is only one way to do this, and that is to invest most of your time, attention and energy in revenue producing activities – or the activity of selling.
The ratio of time, effort and money spent on selling as opposed to other aspects of business should be 80/20, with 80% of it going toward revenue-producing activities and only 20% towards all the other management activities in your business. Or, if you have a team in place, you should apply this 80/20 analysis again, and only be focussed on your activities that move the money needle.
You see, there are five major functions of business—product development, customer service, accounting, operations, and marketing.
The one function that should always be given top priority in any business is marketing. The other functions are clearly vital to a well-functioning business, yet without marketing you will not have sales and without sales, you will not have cash flow and without cash flow your business will die from lack of cash, which is the oxygen to any business. Without it you will not be able to pay for all the other functions, and you will go out of business very quickly.
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