Sales: The Lifeforce Of Every Entrepreneurial Business

By Steve Biko / Published September 20, 2022 | 10:06 pm

KEY POINTS

For your business to be as healthy and prosperous as possible, you need to keep an eye on profit, cash flow, and petty cash.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Sales are the bloodline of your cash flow. Without sales, you have no cash flow. Without cash flow, you have no business. Do you understand me now? Entrepreneurship idealistic. It looks at the bigger picture of things. Sales are surgical

What drives a business? What keeps it going? I am a trained lawyer and that means I should have a grasp of current affairs, right? Wrong. Having a degree in law or any other course doesn’t make you a salesperson. Experience has taught me that this is a realm. A complete ecosystem that needs to be learned from the bottom up.

So what makes a business grow? My experience is really pained in this aspect. Cash Flow is the Lifeline of the business. If your cash flow is weak, your business will be anemic on a constant basis, and this does not retain the best staff and does not retain clients either.

Sales are the bloodline of your cash flow. Without sales, you have no cash flow. Without cash flow, you have no business. Do you understand me now? Entrepreneurship is idealistic. It looks at the bigger picture of things. Sales are surgical. They are precise. It focuses on a product or service. Sales are the life force of your business. Ask any entrepreneur which is more important, their product or service, or how it’s sold, and you’re likely to get a long explanation on why the product takes the cake any day of the week. They are not wrong. You don’t have a business if there was nothing to sell. But this is KEY if the product or service is worth being sold.

You must design and produce a product or service that has a market, and you must have a team that will sell it because it’s easy to launch something into the market but it’s a miracle to sell it and keep selling it to a point of making great profit. Therefore, it is important to understand how sales work and how it plugs into the overall aspect of the business because it’s the bloodline of the cash flow.

Healthy cashflows mean;

Easier access to credit
Retention of the best talent
Properly planned design for expansion
Easy ways to carry out our research and market intelligence

Sales are something that I have realized that entrepreneurs never focus on hence leading to the death of over 70% of the Start-Ups within the first three years.

The entrepreneurial sale means selling to get revenue. Selling to convince suppliers to give you good products at a good price. Selling to suppliers to increase the number of days of credit you have. Selling to investors to put in more money. Selling to someone to be on your advisory board. Selling to your colleagues to be partners with you. Selling to get talent to come work for you. All of these are selling scenarios, but people don’t see it that way, and this is why we fail, and we wonder what went wrong. It’s because we ignore the lifeline of the business which is SALES.

Many entrepreneurs shy away from the sales side of their business because sales mean facing rejection and calling people who might hang up on you. It involves asking people for money for products or services that we are not confident in ourselves. It’s simply earning the trust of others by having them give you, their money.

After being in business for Eight years, it has come to my attention that for me to grow and scale the heavens, then sales must become the focal point of our business and ensure that cash flow is constant and growing.

For your business to be as healthy and prosperous as possible, you need to keep an eye on profit, cash flow, and petty cash. Although all are important, there are differences between the three that are useful to know so you can make better-informed business decisions. Today we are focusing on cash flow and why it is important. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of learning sales as the owner or entrepreneur of the business. You cannot demand this from your team if you are not able to deliver on the same. Being a pro in sales will ensure that;

You become tenacious
You become an ace in creating the perfect social networks that are key to your business
You become persuasive
It exposes you to your competition and you can understand what you need to tweak and change in your business
You know what the market wants and needs.

Many of us are never taught sales and from experience, it is the first thing that any entrepreneur must do. Spend some money to get your best bearing on what sales are and how to proceed.

My advice to all entrepreneurs is that it is important to keep a lid on your cash flow because;