Published October 1, 2013

Paul Graham once said that that there are two ways in which a startup can fail a) it can run out of VC money b) or it can fail to sell its product. This is a dead simple equation. Any business no matter if it sells a physical or a virtual product it needs money to operate. You have to pay your employees, you need an office, and there plenty of other expenses which are due each month.

Sometimes I get the impression that money is a difficult subject when it comes to startups. For founders it is an easy game — investors have money, we need it — it works. To be honest, no it does not work. In these days not being able to sell should make a startup unfundable. We all know that building software became really cheap. Maybe Silicon Valley is more expensive due to heavy competition among startups but in other parts of the world, you can build pretty much any kind of software, for under $50k. If we break it down to the basics, a true challenge for a startup is in fact not building but selling. That said I would like to focus in this post on the art of selling.

Recent years have seen an explosion of marketing tools leveraging the Internet to drive sales. I strongly believe that this is the pure essence of the net — an enormous platform connecting and giving easy access to millions of people in any thinkable segment. Life of a pre Internet marketer must have been pretty boring. This poor guy had no chance of reaching out directly to his potential customers. The Internet changed all that. Now anyone can be a marketer if he knows the right tools. One thing to really stress out is that marketing only makes sense if it drives sales. What is the point of marketing if there are no transactions at the end of the funnel.

When I talk to freshly baked founders I am always very brutal when it comes to marketing and sales. Is there someone on the team who will be responsible for selling? Does he have any prior experience? Is that person target/metric driven? These are the typical questions I might ask. No surprise, most of the times there are many blank spaces in the responses. No one seems to think as hard about sales as they think about building a great product.

I always recommend that prior to building a startup, everyone should gain some experience in sales. When I was in my early twenties I spent some time in Australia working at couple different places. Most of my positions were sales oriented. My pay was also commission based so I had to try extra hard if I wanted to earn more. I remember one job particularly well. I used to work at Gowings — one of the oldest department stores in Sydney. The company had a lot of tradition behind it, a prime location, expensive stock. When I joined the company, sales where not impressive. I think that was my second month, when Tony Gattari from the Achievers Group joined the company to lead sales. I remember it very well. Tony introduced an intense sales training program and a new commission system. I was very sceptical about it (this is typical Polish), and I said on many occasions that it would not work. Fast forward a couple of months — I was killing sales, cashing in the biggest commision among all the sales reps. I was number one for six consecutive months, with my sales targets increasing every week.

That was a life changing experience for me. From that point on, I have a very different view on sales. I know that selling is just another process which a company has to employ to be successful. If a startup dreams of making it big, the whole organisation needs to be sales driven. In a world where anything can and will be copied — the only real advantage a startup can have is an excellent sales process. Your developers, designers, marketers, everyone else on the team should be thinking sales, sales, sales. If a developer has to code something, he should think twice if it will drive sales or not. If not then why waste time on it.

Another thing I learned from Tony Gattari is that if you want to motivate people, you need to show them that if a success in sales is achieved, they get a benefit from it. We are all comfortable with stock options, but this is something which will benefit in the future (if at all). If you really want to increase sales you need to give your employees an instant benefit. This is hard to do in a world where most startups if they make any money at all they do it much further along the way. My advice to founders who are just starting out — focus on sales from day one. Before you build the product have a very detailed plan of how will you achieve sales on a day by day basis. To help you do this, you might start by saying what if there is no venture money — how will my startup survive. I hope that you will figure it out!

Originally published at ms.innovationnest.co.