Many of us may have been
asked the question at one point or another in our business career or for our
new startup-“What’s the mission of the company?”. Invariably the mission has
something to do with your product, service or customers. As it should.
What if we ask the general question
“what is the mission of any business?”
I regularly teach sales
training and channel development to start-up companies and established
organizations across the globe. Each time I start a course I ask this very
question. The responses are typical and like those you or I might give,
ranging from making money, a profit or a product or service related
answer. Think about it for a minute at
a high level level. A business must
have customers to be a business. Maybe every business should have as its prime
mission to “Get a customer and keep a customer”?
For entrepreneurs this is
what should be top of mind every day for your company. Getting a customer and
keeping a customer. That means you have to sell. Many technology based startups
hire a “business person ” (http://500.co/what-does-that-business-guy-at-your-startup-do-anyway/).
So you now have one person in charge of sales and other partnerships. In fact if you don’t have at
least someone in charge of sales you really won’t have a good path to a viable company.
Related to this are startup incubators. In fact its been reported that 90% of
incubators fail-one key reason is that their companies don’t have access to business
development or sales expertise. (http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/14/90-of-incubators-and-accelerators-will-fail-and-why-thats-just-fine-for-america-and-the-world/)
This is going to be the
start of a “Startup” Sales column. To
get started there are three key things for startups to do to get sales up and
running:
- 1. Learn how
your offering is sold (This means
you, the entrepreneur, should know first and foremost how your offering is
sold-which customers, how they buy, what it takes to close a deal)
- 2. Build a
killer sales team with top talent
(get experienced people who know how to sell but before you hire get #1 , above, done first) https://www.quicksprout.com/2011/10/17/the-startup-guide-to-building-a-killer-sales-team/
- 3. Implement a
sales process (this ensures everyone
is on the same page and once you have the formula is easily replicable)
