Attention Entrepreneurs: Sell or Die
Last week, I was chatting with a friend who has a background in sales. She had been working pro bono for a startup that offered her a permanent position with substantial compensation. Although, she’s been having reservations about officially joining the startup. Interestingly, she wholeheartedly believes in the startup’s mission. So what are her reservations? She doesn’t believe in the selling abilities of the executive team. Make sure the check out what every startup should live by.
You may be thinking that my friend is crazy. Why not take a position that’s offering you a hefty compensation package? Who cares if they can’t sell, get paid now! Right? I understand where my friend is coming from. As a startup, a big part of your success relies on your ability to sell. You’re not just selling a product or service. You’re selling an idea to a marketplace and investors that determine your fate. In theory, my friend can take the position at the startup but without the ability to sell your idea, startups have a slim chance of survival.
At ZipFit, our motto is sell or die, which was inspired by a study conducted at University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The study showed that in 2011, 400,000 startups were born. By 2014, 34% of those companies went out of business. By 2018, only 30% of those companies will have survived. The tough reality is that no company has immunity from selling, not even mine. So what specifically is interfering with thousands of startups ability to sell?
Your company is the best thing since sliced bread. To be an entrepreneur requires a certain amount of confidence especially when you’re faced with rejection and uncertainty on a regular basis. Although, confidence shouldn’t be overshadowed by naïveté. Often I meet entrepreneurs that think their idea is the most innovative thing ever when the reality is that someone has already thought of the exact same thing and probably has made a business out of it. It’s even worse when entrepreneurs think that people will magically adopt their concept over another in the marketplace without doing any work. What is important is how you’re differentiating and selling your idea to the marketplace to justify its existence. You can have the best idea ever but without marketplace validation, your idea will cease to exist.
Be careful where you focus your time and energy. As entrepreneurs, it’s easy to get lost in the many daunting tasks that you’re faced with on a daily basis. It’s even easier to get stuck on making whatever you’re working on “perfect”. I personally struggle with this. Whether it be making the perfect version of your website to the perfect email blast. Unfortunately, perfection can interfere with productivity. You need to be okay with settling for good enough sometimes because anything you do in a startup is a work in progress. For example, up until a month ago, ZipFit had a pretty poorly designed website that didn’t have the best user experience. Regardless of how much it bugged my team that it didn’t have all of the bells and whistles, we were still able to sell to our customers through that website. If we would have waited until the website were “perfect”, it probably still wouldn’t be up and we would have lost a good chunk of revenue. As an entrepreneur, your top priority should be selling so when you prioritize your list for the day make sure to tackle the items that will assist in doing so and don’t allow perfection to hinder your ability to sell either.
You Will Be Rejected. Even when you focus your energy on selling, there’s still a high probability that you will be rejected. For example, cold calling has about a 2% conversion rate. Yes, 2%. That means, you’ll face more than a fair share of rejections if you find clients this way. Rejection is completely normal and an opportunity to gather data on what approach works best to better drive your message home. The other good news is of that 2% that convert, you have the opportunity to provide an exceptional experience that leads to referrals, which have a 50% conversion rate.
Perhaps the startup my friend is considering working for suffers from one or all of the above. The fact of the matter is that when you aren’t selling, your startup will suffer and if you keep pushing it off your startup will die. Hopefully you’ll consider this when you work on your next to-do list.
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