Sell Your Way To Success - sales involvement of entrepreneurs and small-business owners

Nation's Business, Feb, 1999 by Dale D. Buss

Many entrepreneurs' most valuable contribution to the companies they've created is driving sales.

It's almost 5 on a Friday afternoon, and Mathew Levine is about to rush out of his New York City-based packaging company to a nephew's bar mitzvah. But the phone rings before he can escape. It's the retailing director of a large local museum for which Levine's firm, The Metro Packaging Group Inc., is designing shopping bags. She has her boss on the line, and he wants more answers--now--about exactly how much Metro's services will cost.

"It was a complicated sale that I'd been trying to close, and we had changed designs to please them," Levine explains. The retailing director's boss, he continues, just wanted "some solid idea about what kind of numbers to expect."

Levine's delayed departure for the bar mitzvah was all in a day's work. For him, as for other small-firm owners, the sales process takes precedence over other aspects of the business and, often, over their personal lives. That's because--after providing the original idea and holding to an enduring vision-driving sales is an entrepreneur's most valuable contribution to the firm, say many owners and sales experts.

Capital is the lifeblood of a business, and sustained sales are essential to keeping that blood flowing. With many companies early in their fiscal years, now is a good time to focus on boosting sales.

Whether it's business-to-business or on the retail floor, sales rainmaking by the owner can be the most important differentiator for a firm going up against bigger competitors, and it can also be a valuable link to customers.

"I'm a salesman," says Duane Rao, president and owner of both Metrocell Inc., a wireless-services company, and Big Net Inc., an Internet service provider, both based in Sterling Heights, Mich. 'That's who I am 24 hours a day. I sell at church, at the bar at night, when I'm at a hockey game. When I meet someone, I'm shaking their hand and I have a business card in the other hand."

Entrepreneurs and small-business owners are "constantly in a selling mode," says Allan Domb, president of a Philadelphia real-estate firm that specializes in luxury high-rise condominiums. "Whether you're selling products to customers or concepts to employees," he says, "you've got to have a sales-type personality."

It isn't just goods and services that owners push. It's the company's philosophy, too. "Customers want to know right from the top" what a company stands for, says Jacky Andrews, president and co-owner of Chromacopy Imaging Inc., an 80-employee firm in San Francisco that digitizes graphics and photographs. "It's one thing for a salesperson to go out and say, 'This is who we are.' But I think it's important for me to go say, This is who we are, and I know because this is the company I built.'"

For most small-business owners, selling is not a phase they set aside once the company is firmly established. In fact, even after several years in business and with their companies having reached various levels of success, many owners still spend 60 to 80 percent of their time working on sales-in official or unofficial capacities.

"I can find production people and administrators," says Andrews, who directs sales for her firm, "but I have a very hard time finding people who understand and have the passion and the commitment that I do to the sales focus of the company. It is the No. 1 focus. I think the president of a company our size should be the sales manager."

Moira Shanahan, owner of Braindance, an Atlanta-based marketing consultancy, agrees. And she goes a step further by tying her compensation solely to the commissions she earns on her own sales, which motivates her to sell.

A Matter Of Personality

For extroverted, hard-charging personalities, becoming fully involved in sales often comes naturally. For entrepreneurs who may have started out on the technical side of their business or whose strengths lie elsewhere--in accounting, for example--spearheading sales may be a strain.

Yet a lack of sales polish sometimes works in the entrepreneur's favor, according to some business experts and owners. Often, they say, such owners' lack of sizzle can suggest a sort of bedrock authenticity, which in turn may nail down a deal better than the slickest presentation.

"They have the vision, the idea, or a grasp of technology or some other insight into problem-solving that can be crucial to a customer," says Josh Gordon, an independent sales representative in Brooklyn, N.Y., and an author on sales techniques. "They have something that in the final analysis generates excitement or interest--it does all the things that traditional sales techniques do. They're selling in their own way."

The importance of owners' attention to sales is critical to company success because so many elements of the sales process in today's marketplace differ from traditional practices of the past.

"Today, sales is a process, not a close," says sales trainer and consultant Ron Karr, author of The Titan Principle. The Number One Secret to Sales Success (Chandler House Press, $15.95). "There's a lot of competition out there offering similar products and services, and very few businesses have something that can't be obtained somewhere else. The idea has to become: How can I be a resource for my customer?"