Talk to any business owner or salesperson and they will testify that the hardest part of the day has something to do with the sales process. The job of sales is a really tough aspect of business that small business owners and sales persons have to come to terms with. For sales people, it’s a job. For business owners, it’s everything. Either ways, a sale means a lot to both categories of people. Here’s the only, and possibly the shortest guide, you’ll ever need:

Accept rejections, they are a part of the job

Every sales person or a small business owner has to go through the tough part of accepting rejection. No matter how great your product was or no matter how good you are, you are bound to be rejected. The reasons for rejection can be many: it could be because the customer isn’t ready, your offerings are not relevant to your customers, or they might not be ready yet. Whatever the reason is, rejection is a hard thing to take. It has a tendency to hit your ego and make you feel worthless.

The key to do well in sales is to accept rejection as a part of the process. A customer rejecting you doesn’t have anything to do with you or your products/services. Once you understand and accept this, sales is much easier than you thought it would be.

Relating to customers is more important than making a sale

The world’s worst person probably has a sales conversion ratio of 10% — that means that if they talk to ten 10 people, at least one would buy. Depending on that 1O% ratio of conversion would be the dumbest thing you can do. The more this conversion ratio is, the more money you make and the more successful you are. The only way to increase the conversion ratio is to change you into a better person. You should be looking at how you ‘relate’ to your customers than worrying about how many sales you make in a month.

Go the extra mile

People like you – in fact they can’t help but like you – when you go out of the way for them. When you take the extra step for them, let them know it somehow. In terms of sales and situations involving prospects and customers, there will be times when you have to do things for them that don’t really define your job description. You know what the best part of going the extra mile is? You either get a customer or you get someone who respects you and becomes a friend – none of these is a losing proposition.

It’s all about numbers

The last, but most important point, is that sales are all about numbers. It means that your results really depend on how many people you talk to. In fact, this is pervasive; it’s everywhere. For a website to make money, it’s all about how many people visit the site. For you to sell, how many people do you meet each day? How many products you sell depends on how many people you talk to each day? Go low on the number of people you spoke to and the sales numbers also go down.

I happened to talk to a designer the other day and I realized that she had great design specs in her portfolio. I asked her if she does freelancing or something of that sort and she said no. I thought I’ll dispense some advice. While I was doing that, I thought it’d be great if I can share what I told her here since its entrepreneurial in nature.

CafePress.com is going public, according to this feature on WSJ. That tells me that Cafepress.com is also making a lot of money. That, in itself, is a good sign that people are making money off it. I think that CafePress is a great opportunity for the following reasons:

Have Designs; will sell

If you could come up with great designs that could cross over to plenty of products such as T-Shirts, Mugs, Botte openers, refrigerator magnets, pillow covers, iPad cases, etc., you can be in business. CafePress has all of these products made and standing by. Once you open a shop  (whether for free or as a premium member), you can just upload your design to specifications and the store is ready for business. When customers place orders, CafePress.com will ship out products while you make money off the margins.

You take out more than you put in

You can get started for free in CafePress.com. If you are already a designer, have basic design skills, or even if you just creative and are willing to learn, you can easily create designs (they could be just captions that go on T-Shirts and mugs, for all you care) and you could be in business right away. If you have photography skills, it helps you even more since you can edit these photos and give more punch to your design. Yes, it takes time for you to create designs but it’s just one time work that pays off each time a product is sold off your shop.

Marketing is all you have to do

You don’t hold inventory, you start for free, and you don’t have to ship. You spend time or pay someone to do the designs for you and that’s all the investment that you. Once your products are ready and you set up shop, all that you really have to do is to learn to market online. Promoting your store is your only task (not easy by any means but it’s much easier than doing it all yourself).

Have you ever considered this opportunity? I didn’t but I know it’s there. How about you?

Setting an e-commerce store can be an exciting proposition. It could be the best thing that you could start, provided your ideas work and that you can manage your business well – which includes sourcing products or services, handling shipping (if you have to), setting up and running the site, etc. Assuming that you can take care of the operations well, what will you sell online? Here are a few ideas (could vary depending on where you live):

Do Niche Research

If you were to do affiliate marketing, you would do keyword research by selecting a broad keyword and then digging deep into sub-niches and long tail keywords. Before you think of setting up an e-commerce site, do a similar research and try to get a better understanding of what customers are searching for online. What niches seem to be doing very well? What are people searching for? Do you have enough sites catering to these customers? How about geographical differences? There could be products being sold in the U.S but what about other countries? Answering these questions could help you decide better.

Check out other e-commerce sites

One of the best ways to get ideas on what to sell is to check out other e-commerce sites. If you visit online shop solutions such as Shopify, Etsy, tripleclicks, or NetSuite, they would have a “showcase” of their clients – those who already did the hard work of choosing what products to sell. You could check these sites for possible ideas and also how they designed their websites.

What’s popular on the top e-commerce sites?

Head over to amazon.com, bestbuy.com, or even eBay and check out what sells on these sites. You could probably pick one just one of the categories that amazon.com has, for instance, and build a whole new business just focusing on that niche. By focusing on one single niche, you carve out a brand from this effort you put in.  You’d also be able to find wholesalers specific to the product you decide making it easier for you to compete.

Go with the flow

Let’s say you still have no idea where to start and absolutely no clue as to what to sell online. If you were like many entrepreneurs, you’d step out and start talking to wholesalers, dealers, and other merchants (networking is the key here). While talking and discussing with them, you might just chance upon merchants who have great products. If you think that they have potential to be sold online, you could just go with the flow and start selling these.

What are you going to sell?

“Getting the sale” is always a big challenge for most entrepreneurs. For those who start out delivering services, it’s just as much a challenge as it is for those who start with products. In fact, it’s slightly more challenging for selling services than products due to the factor of intangibility involved therein. How then, can you sell more? Here are a few tips for you:

Think of ways to differentiate

For every service you think of delivering, there are plenty of others who aim to deliver the same service, throughout the world. For some, lowering prices for the same set of services provide wouldn’t be difficult if they are from countries where the dollar stretches more and it still works in their favor. The only way you can win this price war is to deliver value. Think of what you can provide to your clients that others can’t (or at least find difficult to provide).

Do more than the clients expect

Let’s assume that you are in the web designing business. Working on the project and delivering in time is something that most freelancers and businesses can do. However, doing the website with some free but really well written, strong, and authoritative content could delight your customers. Perhaps throwing a year of free hosting for small businesses would bode well with your clients. If your clients asked you to design a simple, 5 page HTML/CSS website, you could deliver that with a mobile version too.

How do you plan to delight your customers?

Market yourself, everyday

I needn’t stress this enough, but I will. Dedicate an hour or two each day to market yourself. How do you do that? There are a million ways to do it. You start, however, with methods that work for you. Treat each channel as a cluster and have a roster to note what you do each day.

Use a CRM if you have to – there are plenty of options for you today. Call up, email, connect on social media, and send out proposals. Do what you can. It’s all a game of numbers. 5 Proposals per day would knock on so many doors that at one point, you’d find that you’d have too many clients to handle.

Keep the relationships, despite the circumstances

It could be that one of the proposals you sent out was rejected. You could have connected through Twitter and now you know that the client isn’t interested in your offer. That doesn’t mean you shun the client. Go on and Retweet their tweets, congratulate them when they come up with something new. A professional writer who happens to be a friend of mine had a client who published a book. He went all out and promoted the book’s “pre-order” page. He didn’t get the project but at least he gets good Karma.

What would you do?

In my earlier post,  I wrote about how jobs are different from businesses and how it’s so different to be working on a job as compared to starting your own business. While a job requires you to be technically proficient, committed, etc., being in business requires you to do all that and much more. Here are some reasons why business owners are several notches above people who have a job:

Business owners are risk takers

Think about it: the fact that business owners leave their jobs for doing something that might or might not work itself is a big gamble. They leave that comfort zone, create an enterprise – however small or big it might be – and then set off on a journey that’s mostly lonely, as most people don’t get the passion, the zeal, and the excitement of running a business. Most people entrepreneurs are associated with think that business is a huge risk and hence don’t share the same level of enthusiasm.

It takes money to make money

How many people get that? Practically very few! Most people are so focused on earning money instantly or yesterday that a concept like putting in the money today to make money tomorrow is almost alien to most people. Even if you were to introduce it to them, they would balk at it. They would give you the look. They would think that you are nuts. But they are nuts. If your investments work out and your efforts payoff, you stand to make so much more than any other person you know.

Hard work is in the blood of an entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs don’t take holidays. If they do, it’s much less than what others take. They work every single day, including weekends. They put in the longest hours ever. All of this hard work to get that business up and running is only so that entrepreneurs can finally see their final goals come kicking in to make them happy. People who work on jobs also have ambitions, but they are not this lofty. Jobs have a set path. Jobs have limited potential. A business owner can go anywhere, could do anything, and potentially make unlimited amounts of money.

Entrepreneurs operate in the blind

With nothing but an idea, a gut feel, and a strong sense of conviction, most business owners set out on their entrepreneurial journey without knowing what’s up ahead, much like a Mach truck driver battling with the snow. They have no idea what’s coming up to them. They have to develop the ability to bite their losses, invest their profits carefully, plan and execute relentlessly, battle with the challenges competition throws at them, and much more.

Who says it’s easy to be an entrepreneur?