“Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”

I found this great site for Entreprenuers, Entrepreneur America. It is a place where you can ask and get answers for the basics in business. This article is about how Sales is Job # 1. Greg Gianforte, CEO and Founder RightNow Technologies makes a great case for Sales.

There's a sign that I keep on the wall of my office. It says simply, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” In other words, sales is where your business begins. Sure, you may have a great product or service that you’ve worked hard to develop. You may have hired a fantastic staff. You may have cash in the bank, a logo and letterhead, a beautiful office, computers on the desks, all those things that come to mind when we picture a business. But that’s not what makes a business. Only sales can do that.

This is good news for bootstrappers. Bootstrappers can’t afford fancy offices or big staffs. They may not even have a finished product yet. But the bootstrapper doesn’t need those things to get started. As soon as you can start selling—that is, go out and find customers willing to buy his product or service—you have a business.

So when you’re bootstrapping a business, you don’t worry about the nonessentials at first. Your first concern is sales. Everything else can come later, and sometimes that includes the product or service that you’re selling. In fact, if you approach it the right way, sales is the best way to come up with a product that people will buy.

In other words, I used the sales process to do my market research. Had I been awash in start-up capital, I could have hired a marketing firm to run some focus groups and do some surveys of potential customers to figure out what the market wanted. But my way didn’t cost anything, and when I was done, I had a stack of orders. If the reverse had happened, if no one wanted to buy my product, I would have learned quickly and relatively painlessly that I didn’t have a viable business idea. Rejection isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than raising money, renting office space, hiring staff, producing product—and then going out of business because your brilliant idea didn’t pan out in the marketplace.

In fact, I would argue that going out and talking to customers myself taught me more about my market than a dozen surveys or focus groups. For an entrepreneur, real learning doesn't start until you actually have real customers. So the goal of the bootstrapper is to get a real customer as quickly as possible.

At first I didn’t charge for it. It was more important for me to get the software into the hands of real customers, so that I could find out what they liked and didn’t like about the product, and then fix it.

The beauty of it was that I got a lot of feedback at first. So I ran really fast and I kept dropping in changes, and eventually I heard the response, "I'm not happy because...” less and less. That’s when I knew that I was starting to get a mature product. It probably took about ten months of iterations to get a mature product.

In other words, I used the sales process to do my market research. Had I been awash in start-up capital, I could have hired a marketing firm to run some focus groups and do some surveys of potential customers to figure out what the market wanted. But my way didn’t cost anything, and when I was done, I had a stack of orders. If the reverse had happened, if no one wanted to buy my product, I would have learned quickly and relatively painlessly that I didn’t have a viable business idea. Rejection isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than raising money, renting office space, hiring staff, producing product—and then going out of business because your brilliant idea didn’t pan out in the marketplace.

In fact, I would argue that going out and talking to customers myself taught me more about my market than a dozen surveys or focus groups. For an entrepreneur, real learning doesn't start until you actually have real customers. So the goal of the bootstrapper is to get a real customer as quickly as possible.

I really believe that sales is the only job that has to be done well in building a business. There's no more important thing. A lot of companies think sales is like a necessary evil, but it's actually the life blood of your company. I'd much rather have great sales and a good product than a great product and good sales. Now, realistically, you've got to have both. But given a choice, I'd always take great sales.