Sleazy, ugly, and gross are all words that come to mind when the word “sales” comes up. But why do we shy away from such a process that is at the center of everything entrepreneurs do?
Sales, quite literally, is the economy — more sales equals a bigger economy. Increased sales means more jobs and booming businesses in return. However, the sales playbook has been completely rewritten over the past two decades.
Before the Internet, where did you go to learn about products? How would you know which vacuum to buy or which refrigerator was best for your apartment? The knowledge holders were salespeople.
Consumer information was clenched tightly and revolved around cold calls, qualified leads, demos, mass emails, television broadcasts and radio ads. It’s easy to see how these practices could become predatory. Look at when stockbrokers were calling homes “home” telling people a stock was exploding; those people had no easy access to the NASDAQ index or Google Finance to check whether that information was true.
In the age of information technology this dynamic has flipped entirely. Sales people no longer hold the keys to information anymore; the consumer does with the power of the Internet. Awareness, engagement, social networks, and direct marketing drive consumer loyalty. That is why crowdfunding is trending right now. At its very core, it targets these areas by giving creators direct access and allows contributors to make informed decisions about products they feel compelled to support.
Yet while new funding tactics like crowdfunding are popular, the projects that are successful are ones that use basic sales tactics that successful salesman have used from the beginning. Because with crowdfunding you are still trying to sell something—contributors still need to be interested in order to donate money to your project.
I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Both parents owned their own business and now my sister runs a crowdfunding company, Vann Alexandra, with 100 percent funding rate. I do things “the old fashioned way” by prospecting and conducting in-person meetings. While her work in crowdfunding represents a piece of a new economic wave, she still constantly asks me questions. While the Internet has changed everything, the fundamentals are still very much the same. We will always need to be salespeople if we are looking to capitalize our businesses. It’s the only way business will survive.
Here are three examples of selling “the old fashioned way,” and how they still hold true:
1. The Pono music player raised over 6 million dollars on Kickstarter. They did a fantastic job focusing on what other people said about their product. This social phenomenon, where other people verify the validity of the product or service, is one of the oldest plays in the sales book. Instead of Pono talking about the in’s and out’s of their technology, they showed that it worked because everyone else said it did.
2. The best crowdfunding projects are the ones that have incredible engagement with their audience. Oftentimes, donors will tell their friends and family about it. This engagement is also a classic sales tactic of maniacal follow-up. By following-up with your customers and making them feel engaged with your product or service, they will be more likely to tell others about it.
3. The “80-20 rule” still very much exists in crowdfunding as it has existed in traditional sales. It’s a known truth; the majority of a business’ sales come from a few large clients. The same applies to crowdfunding, where successful million dollar crowdfunding projects oftentimes have a few donors that donate several hundred thousand dollars. The truth remains the same: focus on your large clients and the others will follow.