We’re going to get straight to the point today: business people have lost sight of the importance of sales in business.
Too many now value social media exposure over profit to their detriment.
These days, entrepreneurs are reluctant to speak about their concrete achievements and the means by which they reach them. Instead of describing their business and sales, they talk about “touching many people’s lives” and use other vague and unmeasurable platitudes.
Nowadays, it’s trendy and flashy to be an entrepreneur. But it wasn’t always.
Entrepreneurship is cool now, but as anything gets popular, it gets dumbed down, and fraudsters disguised as business gurus make their way into the fold with crowd-pleasing but untruthful platitudes like, “The most important thing in business is happiness.” This may be true for life, but happiness doesn’t secure a company’s bottom line.
Happiness is important in life, but in business, happiness doesn’t pay the bills. Sales do.
At its core, the only important things that matter in business are sales, revenue, and profit. The harsh truth is that if you don’t have a source of income, you don’t have a business.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to run a successful and profitable business. We’ll unveil the origins of the modern myth that sales are bad, discuss how detrimental it can be to believe this myth, and establish once and for all the importance of sales in business.
Nomad Capitalist is a boutique consultancy firm that helps you determine what path is best for you and helps you create your bespoke plan. Sign up for our Weekly Rundown for exclusive access to hand-picked insights on global business opportunities, investments, citizenship and residency, real estate, tax strategies, and diversified living.
The Origins of The “Sales Are Bad” Myth
In the world of advertising, it used to be that the easiest way to convince the public to buy your product was by associating yourself with an idea. For instance, if you were selling a sports car, you wanted to sell success and elegance.
But over the years, companies began to overdo this. The unexpected side-effect was that overdoing it inoculated people to the approach. It’s like telling a joke too much, no matter how good it is. Tell it more than a handful of times, and it stops being funny altogether.
The more money companies threw at advertising, the less they got back.
In this landscape of marketing desperation, the growing power of social media began to work its way onto the scene. And one of the many ways that social media impacted marketing, as unintentional as it may have been, was by turning marketing into a political play.
When consumers were given public access to voice their opinions directly to companies about how they marketed their products, it suddenly mattered on a much deeper level if a company was implicitly funding one cause or another by where they ran their ads.
Previously, brands never got particularly political. They just wanted to know how to run a successful business, but it turns out that politics can be quite viral, and that’s just what advertisers needed.
Essentially, as people began to care more about the social impact of their purchases, companies capitalized on that for their own marketing purposes.
The myth that sales are bad is rooted in this new advertising mentality. If this marketing stunt works for you, great. The problem is when you fall for your own marketing and put politics and social causes ahead of your bottom line.
Don’t Fall For Your Own Marketing
For the increasingly confused business people, what started as a means to double your sales by gaining a wider audience became the goal in and of itself. Rather than focusing on how to run a successful business, entrepreneurs and big businesses got lost in the social media frenzy, often to the detriment of revenue and profit.
It’s gotten so out of hand that successful entrepreneurs are wondering whether they’re doing things wrong.
We have spoken to these people.
We work with seven and eight-figure entrepreneurs who look at the madness of the crowds and begin wondering whether they’re the insane ones for focusing on how to run a successful business by generating revenue instead of waves on social media.
The primary purpose of a business is to make money, much like the purpose of a knife is to cut things. What effect you have with the tools at your disposal is entirely up to you.
Be Honest About Selling
Now, you may not be running a charity, but that doesn’t prevent you from being honest about your ultimate intent. Honesty is always the best policy. If you want to know how to run a successful business, start by being honest and upfront about the fact that your objective is to make a profit.
Then, act with that purpose in mind.
Back when our founder worked in the radio industry, and he was trying to convince people to pay him to appear on the radio, he got the best results when he presented things clearly: “We make money in the spread between the price we pay the radio station and what you pay us to appear on a show.”
In this way, the client could contextualize it as a marketing business expense. But once it was dressed up in flowery language, people almost thought they were doing them a favor for being on the show and that they deserved payment in return.
Being honest about your objectives just makes good business sense.
Do we believe charity is good and that you can help make the world a better place? Absolutely.
However, we keep things straight, and you should, too. Business is not where you go to achieve your inner zen. It’s about selling.
You should always begin with the end goal in mind and then work your way backward to achieve it. If you want to make the world a better place, start a charity. Don’t do two things at once, and in doing so, forget the original goal you wanted to reach.
Being direct about having a product or service to sell is far more sustainable than trying to tug at people’s heartstrings to get them to loosen their purse strings.
Be A Business, Not A Charity
Let us use our own business as an example. We have a YouTube channel where we upload daily videos. There’s a good chance you discovered Nomad Capitalist there. We provide all of that content for free.
We also produce articles for free. This site has over a thousand articles, the equivalent of multiple books on real estate, citizenship programs, investing strategies, etc.
We can reconcile that we’re giving away a library’s worth of content for free because it ultimately leads to sales.
We understand that 99.99% of our audience will not buy anything. At Nomad Capitalist, we offer a bespoke service that most people would find unaffordable. Our target audience is made up of entrepreneurs with annualized seven-to eight-figure incomes who make up a tiny fraction of the worldwide population, so it stands to reason that we have to cast a wide net.
However, when a potential client comes our way, we have a sales funnel in place and know what to do. We also understand the power of social media, and we use it to boost our bottom line, not our ego.
If you want to run a successful business, you need to make a profit. You need sales. They are the lifeblood that keeps the whole system working. If you don’t prioritize sales and they dry up, the entire company is in danger.
Again, if you’re wondering how to run a successful business, begin by being truthful. Be honest about the fact that you’re in it to make money.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t make the world a better place on your own time, but once you clarify the ultimate goal, the steps to achieve it and the pitfalls to avoid will be obvious.
Would you like to meet like-minded entrepreneurs and learn from world-class speakers? Join now so that you don’t miss your chance to attend our yearly Nomad Capitalist Event, with unparalleled networking and impactful discussions on everything from global citizenship offshore strategies to tax-saving tactics and so much more.
