That’s fantastic, love to see you crushing it!I just got the commit for a deal that will yield me $140k/mo profit. I don't even have a company name or logo because this biz idea came to me 2 weeks ago. I made a bare-bones version of the product with Chat-GPT and pitched a demo to them a few days later. It still has bugs that need to be refined, but that's okay for now. It will ultimately recover a ton of money for them.
Personally, I’ve come to believe that these skills are ultimately not as important as some people make them sound on this forum for entrepreneurs. I will explain why below.I invite all of you to either learn to code or learn sales. I will die on this hill.
Is it? I’m not sure about that water bottle since I can’t read the brand and research it, but this water bottle sells for $60K: The World's Most Expensive Bottle of Water Costs $60,000Why is the water in the grocery store $2/gallon while this bottle of water is $5k? Positioning
Al Ries and Jack Trout define positioning as what you do to the mind of the customer, NOT to the product. As such, it is about the story you tell about the product.
It’s me taking a supermarket tea, researching its origin, and then telling some story about how monks in Japan or wherever create this tea and then drink it for potency and physical strength or whatever. And thus, convincing people to pay more than what they’d pay at the supermarket and pocketing the difference.
It’s basically taking the same product, and changing the story / emphasis.
This is NOT what makes the bottle above sell for $60K. If it was, then I could take any other bottle of water and sell it for $60K, and I can’t. What allows it to be sold for $60K isn’t the story (although that certainly contributes to it), but rather the product itself:
The water is sourced from France and Fiji (two points literally on opposite sides of the globe, which likely adds to the cost) and is sold in a bottle designed by Fernando Altamirano of Tequila Ley (the same guy who designed the Cognac Dudognon Heritage Henri IV bottle, which is the most expensive bottle of cognac in the world).
The way it is manufactured. This goes under product, not positioning. Can you manufacture a similar product? If you can’t, then your positioning skills are useless, you won’t even be able to position it in this way. Remember, positioning is about what you do to the mind of the customer, not to the product.
Being a giant nerd and obsessed about what creates business success, I’ve read all those books, copied sales letters by hand and did everything you’re talking about. Can’t say it’s not helpful, but it’s not the key to success that you make it out to be either.
- copywriting(copy legendary sales letters by hand)
- sales(specifically tech sales)
- how to create systems(Zapier is your friend)
- how to identify low risk, high leverage opportunities(read Jay Abraham's books)
- how to create win-win situations(again, read Jay Abraham's books)
Why?
Copywriting: this is how I got my start. I worked for some of the best players in the direct response industry. I’ve read 100+ copywriting related books. Copied 100s of sales letters. Did that give me a huge advantage? Nah. Most copywriters aren’t rich, and even the ones who are or were rich like Gary Halbert were “small” rich, not big rich. Copywriting teaches you what to say… you can say all the right things and someone still won’t buy. Because they don’t trust you, because you don’t have enough social proof, because they don’t like your face, because they don’t like the product and so on. Ultimately what a copywriter can do is limited by the brand they’re working for. Usually copywriting works really well for dumb people — Agora sells billions in less than honest “products”… newsletters and such. This works on the mind of a gullible person. But in real B2B business, it doesn’t. Or it works despite the copy, not because of it. Jay Abraham sells because of his reputation, not his copy. If it was his copy, you should be able to steal it and reproduce his results. But you can’t. I’ve tested it. Therefore it’s not the copy. The copy Tony Robbins uses is cheesy and crap. If you used the same copy, 0 results. Therefore it’s not his copy that sells, but his brand. And I can go on.
Sales: I’ve read more sales books than copywriting ones. How to Win Friends, Spin Selling, Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar, Challenger Sales, Gap Selling, Selling to VITO, Natural Selling (not the name of the book, but the name of the method), Pitch Anything, Mastering Influence (course, Tony Robbins), Way of the Wolf + Straight Line Selling (course), To Sell is Human, Sell or be Sold, Stop Acting like a Seller Start Thinking Like a Buyer, Smart Calling, Little Red Book of Selling, The Secrets of Closing the Sale, Influence, Ultimate Sales Machine, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success, Insight Selling and many many more, these are just some of the more famous ones that come to mind.
All those books are mostly useless. Businessmen are sucky salesmen. And most salesmen make sucky entrepreneurs. Sales people are sort of cannon fodder. They’re given product info, given use-case info, given case studies, given a territory and sometimes leads, and told go out there and sell this crap. If the crap sells, it’s usually more to do with the crap itself and the company, than the salesperson and their sales skills. Why do you think “good” salespeople fight to work for top companies that usually sell very high priced enterprise level software? Because the margins are the highest there, and it’s easy to sell something like that. Why don’t they become entrepreneurs, the vast majority of them? How you handle objections has to do mostly with how well-thought out the product is. How you tell the story of what your product does has mostly to do with what you product CAN do in the first place. How you ask questions to uncover needs is limited by whether the other party will speak to you or not, and that’s mostly a matter of the company you’re affiliated with and its reputation. And I can go on.
Bill Gates can’t sell for his life. Neither can Elon Musk. Despite them being called “master” salesmen by the likes of Peter Thiel and other non-salesmen. Suffice to say that the way these guys sell, has nothing to do with what you can learn within sales books. If you want, it has to do with building a brand, building a reputation, and so on. These are all things that make sales easier, and that if you put behind a good salesperson, he can do very well with, but without them, he’s hopeless!
I’d say the skills that truly matter to entrepreneurs are much more about:
• Creative problem solving within economic constraints (even most of sales is about this for an entrepreneur. I’m thinking, for example, how can I provide more value for a minimum cost upfront to acquire customers more easily? Or what other services should I be selling to maximise lifetime value? These are all questions that a salesperson is NOT asking, because they are above his paygrade — salespeople are taught to operate WITHIN those constraints).
• Organisation-building (putting together SOPs, attracting talent & investment etc)
• Leadership (motivating people)
• Strategic Foresight — ability to zero-in on the right ends to be achieved and then assembling together the means of achieving them.
Entrepreneurs are far from being just glorified salesmen. Most entrepreneurs who glorify sales forget that what is actually responsible for those sales has little to do with sales skills.
And the best entrepreneurs I know can’t sell to save their life. They hire people to sell, and put together the environment that makes sales easy for them.
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