Sales Is Everything

The older I get, the more I realize one thing the remains true: Everything is Sales.

Literally everything. From launching a business and selling a product, to going for a run in the morning and selling yourself on why it’s good for your health.

Sales is the art of convincing someone (even yourself) they need something. On a more basic level, it’s communicating the value of something in a way that makes someone take action. The art of persuasion.

A few years ago I tweeted something along these lines. Back then it was more of a joke:

But more than most of the dumb things I’ve written on the internet, this one keeps finding it’s way back into my head over the years. There’s something inherently true about it.

Sales is funny because the best ‘selling’ is usually hidden. You really only notice sales when it’s bad — the archetypical image of the ‘used car salesman’ comes to mind.

But when it’s done well, it’s a beautiful thing. The grandmasters are people who can persuade you so well that you’ll pay them to solve their problems.

It’s funnier because it’s often the part of starting a business that most people underestimate (especially in tech). Most founders assume naively that if ‘you build it, they will come’ like Field of Dreams is gospel.

As Peter Thiel says in his book Zero to One, “if anything people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenge of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy”

In reality, building software and creating a product is often the easier part in the grand scheme. And these days with AI and automation, it’s actually never been easier to spin up a new product from scratch.

Think about it: a top-notch sales strategy can shill the worst of products, but the best of products are DOA without someone to get them in front of buyers. (if a good product is built in the woods but no one is there to see it, does it make a sale?)

Sales takes on many forms, but ultimately it all comes down to two main metrics within your business:

1. How much does it cost to acquire a customer (CAC)

2. How much will the average customer pay you over their lifetime (LTV)

The entire lifeblood of a business is being able to make more money from your customer than it costs to find them. LTV > CAC.

There is a natural spectrum here based on the price point of a given product being sold.

For high cost products (~$10M ball-park), you can justify complex sales processes that may involve sponsoring big conferences and flying clients out for 5 hour dinner sessions.

For low cost products ($1 ball-park) you must rely on smaller-touch viral marketing efforts to recoup any expense at all.

Peter Thiel summarizes this beatifully in his book. And an important takeaway is this: you must pick ONE, and that one will be determined based on the price point of your business.

Most startups fail because they mismatch the sales method to the product.

So step one is not even implementing a product, it’s designing the sales process INTO the product before you build it in the first place.

Sales. Is. Everything.

Peace,

Ramsey