If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.
The first thing you need to do when you start a business is to understand, you are in sales. I don’t care if you’re a CPA. I don’t care if you’re a doctor. I don’t care if you’re an attorney. Everyone is in sales. Failure to understand that could be the main reason you go out of business.
Part of understanding sales is understanding how it applies to your business model. Number 1 – Say you’re a doctor. Now, who are you selling to, the patient or the insurance companies? That’s a very important distinction. Most doctors are selling to the insurance companies. A doctor can piss off a patient and lose them, but they will stay in business. If a doctor pisses off the insurance company, they may not get paid. They may not stay in business.
You have to know who you are selling to and how valuable that relationship is. Once you’ve identified who you are selling to, if you’re selling cars, are you selling to men or women or are you selling to their fantasies or to their practical side. I used to sell cars. You can sit there and run down the list of engine size, performance and speed. Unless they appreciate that stuff, you are better off taking that person for a ride and asking them, “Can you feel the power?”
Just imagine how you feel when you roll up to your friend’s house in your brand-new car? That’s why people buy. All sales are an emotional decision on some level. If you’re in sales, you know this.
How do you go about making sales? Treat everybody like your buddy. You have to talk to people in a language that makes them feel warm and fuzzy. I know it sounds very different than the way I am on this channel. I’m in a process of getting rid of people, because they’re not my target customer.
There are some things you need to pitch. There are some things you don’t need to pitch. Once again this is all about learning that sales is job number 1. You might have a very edgy sale or you might have a sexual sale or a very practical sale, depending on what you sale and your customer.
Let’s say I am an Apple head and one of the reasons is because it is practical. This is the thing about running a business. You have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of stuff to keep up with. The less friction you have with your business, the better off you are. Do you agree, yes or no?
I had a Samsung Galaxy and the phone was big and I liked it. For me, it had too many damn options. I didn’t want that many damn options. Now, if you are a person that is a “techie” and you love all of these options, you can’t have enough. You can’t have enough applications. Whereas, for me, I like to turn on my phone and do what I need to do. I only use about 12 apps consistently and I’m good. The Apple dovetails into my workflow with the iMac and MacBook Pro so it was practical for me to get an Apple phone.
It’s all about your customer. Where does your customer live? How does your customer think? I’ve learned a lot by talking to my customer and asking some simple questions that have made me change the course of this channel. That’s how powerful it is to know what your market is.
At some point, you are going to have to learn how to sell. The sooner that you do this, the better off you’ll be. If you’re an online dude or an online chick and you aren’t used to dealing with people, you are going to be in for a rude awakening, seriously.
Years and years ago I used to sell furniture on Craigslist. I was buying furniture from Coaster, Titan Importers, Acme furniture which was essentially cheap imports. I was killing it. For a bedroom set with a sleigh bed, I would buy it for $599 all day and sell it for $1200 with free delivery on Craigslist. I was getting to the point where I was buying 10 at a time because I was moving them that fast.
Then there was this company, Underpriced Furniture. I went out to their store. I shopped them a lot because they were my competition. I saw they were selling the same bedroom set I was selling for $699. Anyone who does any casual shopping is going to find them because they did a lot of TV advertising and circulars. I realized that anybody shopping for bedroom furniture that did any due diligence wasn’t going to buy my Craigslist deal. I started seeing my sales decline.
It didn’t just happen with that. It started happening with other stuff. I go in there and I see they have everything that I have and everyone has on this first tier of sellers. We were getting obliterated. If you look around your landscape in your city or town, you’ll notice a lot of furniture stores have gone out of business. It’s because they can’t compete.
Then I noticed also that they had a lot of furniture I had never seen before. It wasn’t in my catalogs. So, I called up Titan Importer. I went to the Asian site. I tried to order from them and she said she could not sell to me because we didn’t have a contract together.
The lesson I learned from Underpriced Furniture is that they went ahead and took common stuff and blew it out the door. They were a container buyer. They were selling like ten containers a week in that store. That’s when I got into the container game. I wasn’t making as much profit as I used to. I realized that unless I became a full-time furniture seller, I wasn’t going to win. So, I started to liquidate.
Part of this whole thing was, when I saw this whole thing happening, I had four other revenue streams to fall back on versus being sunk. This is natural business law. Big fish takes smaller fish. The smartest fish outwits the dumber fish. That’s just reality.
Amazon is not this malicious monster, but the thing is their main goal is to win. For them to win, a lot of you are going to lose. This is why you’re going to lose. Small sellers who do esoteric or merchant fulfilled are probably going to be fine because that’s not really profitable for Amazon. Big sellers who are bringing in the containers who have enough money and capital and staff where they can actually create their own brand and revenue stream, they’ll be fine. You guys in the middle are going to get squashed.
If you don’t learn that sales is the number one job, and you become a person who uses tactics or who follows these certain systems in the Amazon and eBay Eco space, you need to know they are short-lived. All business changes.
The point I’m trying to make is if you learn sales is job #1 and you embrace that shit now and you build yourself some sales skills, you’ll never be hungry again. You will never go without again. You will always be able to make some money even when things change.
If you like this, be sure to get on my email list for updates to live streams and special offers. Subscribe today!