Gettin' On My SoapBox - Sell! Sell! Sell!

I recently was honored when a young female entrepreneur asked me to mentor her. She’s an online business in a different space than ours – also specialty and niche but nothing to do with bath and body.

We sat down and chatted for a few hours. I loved her business concept, her business name and the entrepreneur herself. She was a dynamo! Only one problem: she didn’t have very many sales.

So, what did she do? She went out and started another company, having diagnosed her lack of sales as a positioning problem. In trying to start the new company, she all but let her first company sit in the weeds, gathering dust. She did no new marketing, no new products and quit writing her daily blog.

Now, 6 months later, she has one company not making any money (the first one) and another company … not making any money (the second one).

I see this disease in so many entrepreneurs (myself included) – misdiagnosing the problem

It’s natural to do only what you like to do. It’s natural to do the fun things first. It’s natural to want to eat the dessert and skip the broccoli. It’s natural to have too many good ideas as an entrepreneur.

The key is to squelch those natural instincts and actually follow through on ONE good idea. If you thought it was a great idea a year ago, why isn’t it valid now?

The sales part of any business is what’s hard. Actually convincing your potential customers that YOU’RE the one to buy from requires daily, incremental painful effort. It means doing the same things, day in and day out. It’s not sexy. It’s not always fun. It’s sometimes boring. It’s repetitive. But, it’s what will win the day in the end.

You don’t have a positioning problem. You don’t have a cash problem. You don’t have an employee problem. You don’t have a niche problem. You don’t have a packaging problem.

You have a SALES problem.

Get more sales and poof! All of those so-called “problems” go away and get magically solved. Why magic? Because with sales comes money. And with money comes more resources. And with more resources comes more bodies to work on your “problems.”

Don’t re-do your packaging yet again. Don’t re-jigger your formulas yet again. Don’t redesign your web site yet again.

Get out there and sell.

Then, in a year, when you’ve quadrupled your sales, you'll look back at those other ideas that had been tugging at you and be able to use all of your new found cash to expand your business in a logical, thoughtful manner.