UlTImATE SUccESS GUIdEplanning, market research, financing, delivery and distribution systems,
people, processes, promotion, advertising and especially sales.
sAles Is All IMPoRtAntThe most critical element in an entrepreneurial business is your ability
to sell the product or service in sufficient quantity to pay all your costs
and make a profit. Every successful entrepreneurial business starts off
with someone who is very good at sales. Without a top salesperson, no
business can survive or succeed for long.
Dun & Bradstreet summarized 50 years of research into thousands of
successful and unsuccessful businesses recently with the conclusion
that, “The reason for business success is high sales; the reason for busi-
ness failure is low sales. All else is commentary.”
Your ability to sell the product or service is the primary driving engine
of entrepreneurship. This is because cash flow is the lifeblood of the
enterprise, and cash flow comes from sales. Every business start-up is a
race against time. Can the entrepreneur generate enough cash to support
the business before the existing cash runs out? There must be a total, one
hundred percent commitment to selling until the business gets off the
ground. Otherwise, it will surely fail.
All successful entrepreneurial businesses focus on sales single-mind-
edly at the beginning. However, there is a common mistake that many
entrepreneurs make once the business gets going. Because selling is
hard work, the entrepreneur starts thinking about backing off into man-
agement of the enterprise, and getting someone else to do the selling.
The entrepreneur hires a salesperson to sell, and becomes the manager,
for which he or she is usually not suited either by temperament or abil-
ity. Now the company has an average salesperson on the outside and a
mediocre manager on the inside. Invariably, the company’s sales begin
to decline and the business starts to lose money. It has the worst of all
possible situations.
Usually, before the company hits bottom, the entrepreneur fires the sales-
person and goes back to selling, where he should have been in the first
place. Very quickly, the company recovers and begins to grow again.