Entrepreneur Selling – Essential Skills For Every Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is often born when a great idea leaps into the mind of a person willing to sacrifice sleep and sanity in order to create a business around that idea. If you have ever started your own company or thought about it, you know that there are many entrepreneur skills that are essential to securing funding and effectively setting up a new company or creating a new product. If you are one of the smart entrepreneurs, you also know that the ability to sell is one of the most important skills you can obtain.

The problem when it comes to entrepreneur selling is learning when to start making your pitch and sending out those sales calls. Some new businesspeople assume that their product is so brilliant that everyone will want to buy it without extensive sales.

Others don’t understand how they can start making sales calls before they have actually set up shop and brought their product or service into full fruition. The logic is that you must have something to sell before you actually make a sale.

Both of those attitudes about sales will cause problems for someone starting a new business. Selling is one of the most essential entrepreneur skills, and the downfall of many new businesses occurs because these skills were ignored or undervalued. All successful entrepreneurs operate with a mindset focused on making sells, and that starts the moment the initial idea for the business is born.

Entrepreneur Selling

There are several reasons why entrepreneur selling is a skill  that is often neglected:

1. Many entrepreneurs have little to no sales experience. They don’t know how to even begin selling their idea, product or service.

2. Even if an entrepreneur has achieved an advanced degree, they may not have taken any coursework in sales. They don’t understand the art of entrepreneur selling despite their education.

3. Those who reach out for guidance on entrepreneur selling techniques are often lead astray by misinformation or outdated approaches to sales.

Is it any wonder that many entrepreneurs make tragic mistakes when they start the sales process? Their lack of understanding about entrepreneur selling causes them to offer extensive discounts just to make a sale, losing money in the process.

They may also fail to recognize the advantages of reaching out to particular customers, and they make many other common mistakes. Those who recognize sales as one of the most important entrepreneur skills can avoid these mistakes by learning to sell before they actually start trying to sell.

[color-box]Learn the essentials of entrepreneur selling HERE[/color-box]

One study asked entrepreneurs from around the world to discuss their first sales, the mistakes made leading up to those sales, and what they would change if they could make those sales all over again. 120 entrepreneurs were interviewed in this study, and more than half of the participants had start-up experience.

Following are some of the most common mistakes these entrepreneurs made. You will also learn what type of objections they heard while making sales calls and study a sales model that works particularly well for start-up businesses.

Getting a Late Start

More than half of the study participants failed to ask for customer feedback prior to fully developing their products. Most recognized this as a mistake because they didn’t take the views of their customers into consideration before going through all steps of product development.

Eric Ries discusses the importance of getting in front of potential customers right from the start in his philosophy of the lean startup. Smart entrepreneur skills will tell you to determine customer reaction to the overall concept or plan prior to going into full developmental swing. The goal is to start with entrepreneur selling before the product is actually built. You do this by getting feedback from potential customers and getting them excited about the concept.

Falling on Deaf Ears

This is a huge pitfall of entrepreneur selling: pushing the product’s selling points without listening to what prospects think of the overall concept. Some entrepreneurs in the study admitted to simply not listening to what prospects were telling them while others admitted to allowing pride and ego to get in the way. It is difficult to accept criticism and doubt regarding your idea, but the willingness to set ego aside and truly listen is one of the most valuable entrepreneur skills you can develop.

Some of the entrepreneurs admitted that they later saw that ideas they discounted in the beginning turned out to be spot on for their business. Had they listened early on, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. This is why it is so important to tailor your product to what the customer wants rather than trying to force your product as-is on customers.

One of the more successful study participants said that they created a demo that described what their company did while drawing valuable information from their potential clients. This helped the company create products that would help their customers. It comes down to checking in with your market and validating your concept so that you create something they want to buy.

Discounting Your Way to Failure

Many new business owners offer initial discounts in order to encourage buyers to invest in their products. Many study participants listed this as a mistake because it establishes pricing precedents that are not sustainable long term. In order for the company to succeed, customers have to pay full price. For many, long-term pricing power was negatively affected when their discounted prices spread through their industries.

Solid entrepreneur skills in selling will help you find other ways to close deals. For instance, you may offer free shipping or limited-offer discounts that apply to select customers only. Entrepreneurs in the study noted that the terms if discounts must always be in put in writing if they are offered at all.

Selecting Your Customers

Many entrepreneurs in the study identified an unexpected mistake: they made early sales to family members and friends. What could be wrong with that? Those who love you are not always buying your product because they believe in the business.

They buy because they want to support you. If they don’t tell you their motivations for the purchase, you may have a false sense of security about your product or business idea. It is always better to sell to customers who don’t have a stake in making you feel good so that you get genuine feedback about your product. Those initial sales will help you sharpen your entrepreneur skills if you really listen to the feedback.