MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Michael Mas­ter­son has built sev­eral dozen com­pa­nies, all of which are very suc­cess­ful. His first com­pany didn’t do that well, and from there he also learnt what not to do, which is also incred­i­bly impor­tant. I could quote his entire book, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Mil­lion in No Time Flat which has hit #1 on Amazon’s best-selling book list, but here’s what really struck me as I read it.

Any­body and every­body in a new com­pany should be spend­ing 80% of their time on selling

That’s a bold state­ment, because peo­ple are usu­ally too afraid to com­mu­ni­cate the impor­tance of rev­enues, prof­its and sales. Michael Mas­ter­son says that in launch­ing new busi­nesses, many entre­pre­neurs do the oppo­site of spend­ing 80% of their time on sell­ing. If you’re not doing it, you’re wast­ing time, energy, effort and resources because that’s what it takes to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful company.

If your sales gen­er­at­ing model isn’t run­ning well, your core is not right. How will you get any­where if you don’t have any money com­ing in? All the books I’ve read lately have com­mu­ni­cated that mes­sage. I love cre­at­ing the world’s most demo­c­ra­tic work­place and push­ing that to the next level, but what comes first is sales.

I’m totally com­fort­able say­ing that, and I’m glad that many other suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs artic­u­late the same thing. If you don’t sell, you don’t impact people’s lives. I don’t believe that peo­ple who read free lessons have as much impact as the peo­ple who buy. Very sim­ply, if we don’t get peo­ple to buy, we’re not impact­ing people’s lives.

I will quote his point directly from his book.

It doesn’t mat­ter what sort of exper­tise you bring into a new ven­ture, whether you area num­bers per­son, a peo­ple per­son, or a sys­tems per­son, to be truly effec­tive in a startup you must become your busi­ness’ first and fore­most expert at sell­ing. There’s only one way to do this: invest more of your time, atten­tion and energy into the sell­ing process. The ratio of time, cre­ativ­ity, and money spent on sell­ing as opposed to other aspects of busi­ness should be some­thing like 80/20.

How did he learn this les­son? After his first suc­cess with a prod­uct idea, he and JSN (his part­ner and men­tor) worked together almost every other day. Because he’s a high achiever, Michael Mas­ter­son was dri­ven by a view to improv­ing their product.

“How do you know the prod­uct needs any improve­ment?” JSN asked. “I just know it does,” Michael said.

When JSN asked Michael Mas­ter­son whether their cus­tomers had actu­ally asked for or com­plained about any of these things, Michael Mas­ter­son said, “No, not yet…maybe they will…well, I’m pretty sure they will –these are obvi­ous improvements…”

JSN’s advice? When they start com­plain­ing, you can start talk­ing about their com­plaints but before that, you shouldn’t think about that at all. You should only be think­ing about:

1. The sales you are cur­rently making,
2. How many sales you made yesterday
3. How you will make more sales today

That is some­thing most of us don’t think about all the time. I was a vic­tim – it took me 3 years to learn this. We tend to look at things and think, how can we make it better?

Michael Mas­ter­son says it very clearly: if you’re not even sell­ing it yet – don’t think about mak­ing it bet­ter! Think about how to sell more of it.

As a per­fec­tion­ist, I know how it feels to have 10 ideas to make some­thing bet­ter even before it’s released to the mar­ket, but some­times you have to real­ize that it’s the last thing you should be doing. It’s not about mak­ing some­thing bet­ter, but about sell­ing some­thing, sell­ing a lot more of it, mak­ing the sales process bet­ter, and then improv­ing it based on what your cus­tomers say.

It takes a dif­fer­ent way of doing things – many expe­ri­enced peo­ple have noticed the lack of empha­sis on sales because it’s per­ceived to be some­thing bad or ‘evil’.

What should you be thinking?

Again, I’ll quote from his book. Just what should you be think­ing when you think about the sales you are making?

• You should be think­ing about how to make more sales.
• Don’t think about what’s wrong or right with the prod­uct –there’ll be time for that later.
• Think about how many units you sold last night
• Think about what you are doing today to improve sales

If you make a habit of that, if and when your cus­tomers tell you that they want you to improve this prod­uct, you will have the money to make all the improve­ments that they want.

Most busi­ness schools don’t appre­ci­ate the impor­tance of sell­ing at any time — whether it’s at the begin­ning, the mid­dle or the end of a cus­tomer or com­pany life cycle

That’s the rea­son why so many MBAs go into busi­ness unpre­pared to take sell­ing seri­ously. I totally agree with Michael Mas­ter­son — it is hard to take sell­ing seri­ously some­times. We’ve all been corrupted.

Although Vishen always had a sales-minded atti­tude, I have had to be cor­rected because I’ve devel­oped sev­eral bad habits even though I’ve gone to 2 busi­ness schools. It was good to finally read these things –that it’s not just ‘ok’ but vital for the growth of your busi­ness. I’ve come a long way because just 3 years ago, I didn’t ‘get’ it.

If you are not talk­ing about sales and rev­enues 80% of the time, you are not doing your job as an entre­pre­neur. Sales and growth are the ulti­mate mea­sure­ment. You can­not build your com­pany or your busi­ness with­out achiev­ing those goals. In short, focus­ing on sales is not bad; it is not evil – it is almost required.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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