Portrait of the CEO as Salesman
inc.com
inc.com
In startups, I think we by-pass a lot of the traditional schools of thought and jump directly into hacks/objects/apps/fixes which we consider "startups."
As a startup myself, I've lost sight of the most important part of building a business: sales. Tech, product, marketing, "sales" (free users) are great, but at the end of the day, to move a company from a startup to a business is hard work and can only be done with sales.
And if there's one article that sums up exactly what I should be doing, it's this.
Thought I would pass this along and hopefully change the attitude of others in our community.
"So what the hell are you doing buying a computer?" he demanded. "You know, Jim, I've seen a lot more businesses go broke because they didn't have enough sales than I've seen go under from lack of computers. Why don't you work on first things first?"
Selling is a devalued skill. It's considered beneath anyone with an M.B.A.'s training. Marketing, on the other hand, is somehow "clean," something professional businesspeople aspire to. If you go to a cocktail party and you're asked what you do for a living, and you reply, "I'm a salesman," people look at you like you've got crumbs on your shirt. Tell them you're a marketing director, however, and they say "How interesting." In my view, this is one of the worst hoaxes ever pulled on American business. Manufacturers perceive marketing as a magic solution that takes away their responsibility for making good products. Their idea is, we'll make a product that's just as good as anything else out there--not better, mind you, but just as good--and marketing it well will make us rich. And that's a lot of crap.
Marketing is all about creating, in the customer's mind, a value that does not exist: a way of differentiating a basically undifferentiated product and charging the consumer more money for it. Selling is fundamental.
Consumers are not idiots. They want detergents that get their clothes cleaner, not detergents with slicker advertising campaigns.
Because, sad to say, it's a lot easier to differentiate your product through the quality of the marketing than through the quality of the product. To go back to the automobile industry, it's easier to change your advertising campaign than it is to build a better car--as General Motors well knows.