Nothing matters in business more than selling. Many first-time entrepreneurs have the impression that they are doing things in a logical order when they look for the perfect office space, create their brand identity, and order a lot of inventory. The reality is they are wasting valuable resources on secondary and tertiary endeavors. If no one is going to buy what you want to sell, you’ve just wasted a bunch of money on a business that will never be.

When your business is in its infancy, the ratio of time, creativity, and money spent on generating sales leads as opposed to other aspects of business should be 80/20, with 80 percent of it going toward selling and only 20 percent toward everything else. Unfortunately for entrepreneurs, selling can be terrifying. It can be tough, gritty, unglamorous work. But when you make that first big sale, you realize it’s also exhilarating. Here are a few successful sales techniques to get you started:

• Know that the customer really is always right. If you have had some business success in the past, you may have strong feelings about what sort of product or sales prospecting techniques will work for your new business. You should remember that your customers, not you, are the ultimate arbiters of what is good and valuable and exciting. The sooner you can find out what they think — whether it supports or contradicts your judgment — the better.

• Discover your magic three. Every successful business has perfected its combination of media, pricing, and positioning in order to bring in their most qualified customers. This trifecta of selling is called the optimum selling strategy (OSS). Figuring out your OSS will require you to answer four important questions: Where are you going to find your customers? What product will you sell them first? How much will you charge for it? How will you convince them to buy it?

• Find the right price for your product. To be successful you will need to find the optimal selling price — the price at which the selling campaign will yield the greatest profits. This optimal price can change during the life cycle of the product — being higher when the product is hot, for example — but it’s always important to know. If you deviate from it significantly, you will reduce profits or even create losses where profits should have been.

• Figure out your product’s unique selling position. You can sell your product by talking about its many features, but you will find that the most successful advertisements are those that highlight a single benefit. If you want to sell a new product into an established market, it helps if you do one of two things: make it better than the competition, or make it seem better. When this benefit, or supposed benefit, can be presented as uniquely characteristic of your product, you have an advertising proposition that can last.

• Focus on direct-mail marketing. Direct mail is the best way to test new ideas because it’s fast and cheap, two qualities that are very important for a business in its infancy. Most important, direct marketing is more reliable than other methods. It allows you to do more than ask people what they might do, which is the case with customer satisfaction surveys and focus groups. You can give them a chance to actually do it — by selling them your product.

— Michael Masterson, author of Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat

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