Why you need outbound sales!
"Modern sales is about seeking inefficiencies in the world, finding qualified prospects who have a business pain, but don’t know about the solution or need help to find it."
Your job as a business owner is to fill in a pain point for your customer but you also have to hunt for your customers.
Don't expect SEO or ads to do your outbound sales job for you.
Don't just hunt for every customer out there make sure you know what customer will help your business succeed.
Happy Hunting
I completely agree. When I have conversations with founders, some of them are under the assumption that building a valuable pain solving product will attract customers. I personally believe they are wrong, even world's best products will need to be sold to customers. Sales/marketing is one of the key reasons why products fail.
Yea your exactly right.
I wish I would have worked in sales for someone else's start up before starting product development on TimeKeeper because even the best ideas die if they can't be sold to the right people.
I used to think that I had to build a product first to sell it now I have learned its better to sell first and build later.
Very hard lesson to learn after spending so much time and money building out a product that has a huge societal benefit but without the right marketing in place it will fail.
Couldn't agree more Keith. Founders need to wear multiple hats, most founders are comfortable wearing the design, coding, operations hat but struggle with being uncomfortable wearing the marketing hat (me included). I've come to terms that I will need to push myself out of the comfort zone to hustle and drive contributors to my social venture.
So how does one learn about sales?
Thats a great question!
I learned a lot about sales from being sucked into Click Funnels but then I realized that their software product was way to expensive but understanding the stages of funnels are pretty important but when it comes to marketing it is actually a really big field.
There are a ton of great tools that can help you in your marketing but strategy is all about finding out what works for your business.
Here is a great audio book that should warm you up to the sales mindset.
How to master the art of selling by Tom Hopkins.
I hope some other IH's will chime in with their most influential sources of knowledge for marketing and sales.
If I had to do it all over again I would learn sales first before going into any business venture.
Without sales a company can not exist no matter what it is offering.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago