Steal Rockefeller’s Simple Sales Pitch
For most early stage startups, the single greatest opportunity is for the founder(s) of that company to get serious about sales. Serious about learning how to sell, who to sell to, why they should be focusing on it and when to start letting sales people take over for you. Why then is it that the vast majority of founders are either good but adverse to sales or terrible and adverse to sales?
I understand the aversion problem. You think about salespeople and think about the way they are depicted in popular culture, shabbily dressed, uneducated annoyances. You think about telemarketing and cold calling and then you think “that’s not for me”. Founders believe their job is vision, or team, or product but not sales. These people are wrong, if you are a founder, your job is sales. Your job is keeping money in the bank and you do that by selling to customers or selling to investors.
Outside of aversion the big issue is a perceived lack of skill. It can seem like there are natural born salespeople and if you’re not one of those you should stay out of the board room. I don’t buy that. Sales at it’s core is actually quite simple.
One of the best examples I seen showing this is John D. Rockefeller’s pitch he used when building his fruit commission business:
“I would go into an office and present my card and say to the man I supposed his business connections were satisfactory, and I did not wish to intrude upon him, but that I had a proposition that I myself believed in and believed it would be to his advantage, that I did not expect him to decide off hand but asked him to think it over and I would see him again about it.”
It’s that simple.
- You show up. Not “one of your people”, you go to your potential customers.
- You are polite, friendly and show you believe in the product.
- You state your intention to try and sell them something.
- You explain how purchasing good/product/service will benefit them.
- You don’t push too hard.
- You follow up and ask for the sale.
At it’s most basic that’s sales. You show up, treat people like humans, give them the information, let them digest it and come back and ask for the sale. It’s not hard, but it’s necessary. The second richest man in the history of the world started his career going door to door and selling his products, what are you doing?
