Entrepreneurs, here’s why you actually work in sales (whether you like it or not)

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The following is an edited excerpt from The Entrepreneur Mind: 100 Essential Beliefs, Characteristics, and Habits of Elite Entrepreneurs by Kevin D. Johnson. The excerpt was provided by Johnson Media. You can buy a copy here.

Entrepreneurs who start a business without thinking of how their products or services will be sold in the marketplace are making a huge mistake. Why? First, they run a high risk of wasting valuable resources to create a product or service that consumers do not want.

Second, you are in business to make money. That’s the goal. As obvious as it sounds, some entrepreneurs forget this until it’s too late. They realize it when they are too much in debt, when they have no operating income, or when they face some other cold-water-in-the-face moment. I remind myself every morning to focus on sales and profits. I think the title of George Cloutier’s book put it best: Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing.

Companies that focus on sales and customer needs from the very beginning are more likely to be big winners. For instance, without Steve Jobs’s talents in marketing and sales, Apple wouldn’t have grown to be a public company with record sales. Steve Wozniak, who certainly was the technical brain behind the Apple I personal computer, wanted to give away his inventions. Jobs, on the other hand, was adamant about selling the Apple I and other products at a premium price. The rest is history. Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg had Eduardo Saverin, who began selling advertising for Facebook in April 2004. These ads included moving companies, T-shirt retailers, and other companies that sold college-related products and services.

Of course, there are rare exceptions. For example, Twitter was born out of a brainstorming session in 2006. The project didn’t focus on sales and had no monetization strategy for years. Instead, the company honed in on developing the product and its user base. Also, Pandora took almost 10 years to become profitable.

These are great success stories, but most of us don’t have the luxury or willingness to wait that long. We must be profitable as soon as possible. The wise entrepreneur makes sales, the lifeline of any business, priority number one. An entrepreneur who has no interest in sales finds the best sales experts for the team to ensure the business’s success. If you are like me, you sometimes focus too much on how great your product or service is. You assume that because it’s the best thing since sliced bread, everyone will buy it. It rarely works that way, and finding out the hard way is too expensive.

Your customer is your boss

Everyone talks about how entrepreneurship affords you freedom and independence to do what you want. No longer do you have to suffer the rigid and long hours of corporate America. Nor do you have a demanding and an insensitive boss breathing down your neck every minute. In many ways, these things are true. In fact, I am guilty of touting these benefits of entrepreneurship to spur interest in others to start a business. However, entrepreneurs gloss over reality by focusing on such half-truths. What is reality? The reality is that even if you are an entrepreneur you have a boss: the customer.

The idea that entrepreneurs are free of accountability is misguided and delusional. Ultimately, every business is accountable for meeting the needs of the customer.

Entrepreneurs, especially those who have experienced a degree of success, feel ordained to determine what is best for their customers, more than its customers are entitled to determine what is best for them. This attitude often manifests itself in the form of poor customer service or a slump in sales, often leading to a company going out of business. Entrepreneurs in the business-to-business space must be especially careful to listen to their customers.

As for companies in the business-to-consumer space, consumers are more forgiving and accepting of features that don’t add value in a traditional business sense. For them, the value could be having the latest and greatest thing, or simply having a great experience with the product or service.

You have sales before you have a business

I had no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. The thought never crossed my mind as a viable and sustainable option in life. In fact, I was conditioned to think and accept that getting and working a well-paying job was the Holy Grail, the consummate achievement in life.

That all changed when a website I developed in college became very popular. It was so popular that I received inquiries from companies wanting to advertise. The first was from a dotcom called JobDirect, a web-based job-matching service for college students. JobDirect’s inquiry caught me completely off-guard because I had no intention of selling ads on my website. I built the site for fun and to hone my web development skills. I simply wanted it to be the best college portal on the web, and some would say that it was. In other words, I was passionate about the product, not profits.

By summer of my junior year, I had closed a partnership and deal with JobDirect that earned me an US$1,800 check. When I received the check via FedEx, I copied it and framed it. I was especially proud. My handsel wouldn’t be the normal wrinkled dollar bill you often see hanging on a business’s wall, but a big check. However, there was just one problem: I couldn’t cash the check. My website was not officially set up as a business, so I had a rather large check made out in my website’s name and no way to cash it. However, with that much money at stake, I learned fast what I had to do in order to open a bank account. I researched online the necessary steps to become an official business and followed each one. In fact, I used an online legal service to organize my articles of incorporation and file for my business license. Similarly, I submitted online my application for an Employee Identification Number (EIN) with the Internal Revenue Service. Lastly, I took my articles of incorporation, business license, EIN, and two forms of identification to the local Wachovia and opened my business account. I was in business.