If You're Not Sure Which Skill To Master, Try This One First

Of all the skills you can have - the ability to speak like Winston Churchill, to paint like Rembrandt, to calculate like Albert Einstein - none will help you achieve wealth as well as knowing how to sell things.

So if you're not sure which financially valued skill to target, I recommend becoming an expert in the kind of sales that make your company profitable. And I'm going to give you a mini-course in selling right now to help you decide if this is for you.

Every private enterprise - school, restaurant, law office, hospital, building supplier, hardware store, and entertainment complex - survives and prospers by virtue of its commercial activity.

In my own life, this lesson was hard to learn. Coming from a non-business background, I looked at the commercial world from the outside in. An art gallery, to me, was a place where intelligent people gathered to talk about the latest trends and connect with like-minded art lovers. When a friend told me of her desire to own a gallery, that's the way I saw it. Until she actually bought one. The reality was very different.

A successful local dealer she knew told her in passing one day the he was planning on retiring in a few years. My friend immediately suggested that he allow her to buy into his business. He declined at first, but they kept talking. A month later, they had a deal. She paid him a sizable chunk of cash for 50 percent interest in his thriving business. She was entitled to acquire the remaining shares over a three-year period, during which time he'd teach her what he knew and phase himself out.

The first thing he had her do was invite every friend and family member within 100 miles to come to a new opening of the gallery.

"When we get them in the door," he explained, "we'll get to work on them."

My friend had no interest of "getting to work" on her friends and family members. But he was adamant. "These are prime prospects," he told her. "They like to admire you. And they know you collect art. The seed has already been planted!"

She didn't know exactly what he meant, and she didn't feel good about it. Nevertheless, she dutifully sent out the invitations. When opening night came, she followed him around as he worked the room. She was shocked and embarrassed by how hard he was selling.

The evening was a disappointment for both of them. For him, because he didn't sell nearly as much art as he felt he should have. For her, because she suddenly realized that the dream she'd bought into was, in fact, a business based on hard-core selling.

She shouldn't have been that naive. After all, having been in the marketing business for years, she knew a lot about how to make a sale. But she never had mastered the skill of selling through the written word. She never actually saw her prospects face-to-face. Now she was involved in this wonderful world of art, but she discovered that it survived on selling, too. A very direct, person-to-person kind of selling - a skill she hadn't learned at all and had no desire to learn, especially at the expense of her friends and family.

A month later, she bought herself out of his business. It was a very expensive lesson. But it taught her (and me) a great deal about business and life that has been enormously helpful to me since then.

For example:

The reason this art dealer was so successful (he was making a very high income even during periods when other art dealers were going out of business) was because he was an expert in selling art. His knowledge of art history was limited. He wasn't ignorant, by any means. He knew the important, inside stuff - what type of paintings a particular artist was admired for, what periods of production were considered the most valuable, and so on. But his main skills were in (1) getting people to come into his shop and then (2) getting those who bought to keep buying, year after year.

I began to see that virtually every private enterprise functions that way. To keep doing what you want to do (and make a profit from it), you have to (1) attract customers at a reasonable cost and (2) convert them into repeat buyers.

Let's call the first task the front-end sale and the second task the back-end sale. In the years that have passed since, I've learned to look at virtually every moneymaking enterprise in terms of these two selling skills.

This perspective has allowed me to quickly understand how many businesses operate, even ones of which I have only outside knowledge. It's no longer a mystery to me why, for example, so many restaurants and small hotels go out of business, why people in the travel and leisure business make so little money, why you shouldn't even try (as I explained to a prospect the other day) to make a business out of a llama farm - and why most good small businesses fail when they attempt to get bigger.

This fundamental perspective on sales has allowed me to provide advice to all sorts of businesses in almost every conceivable industry. I can see now how every successful start-up business is one that has quickly and correctly answered two very simple questions:

1. What is the most cost-effective way of attracting customers?
2. What is the best way to keep those customers buying?

If you can learn to see your business that way and can one day discover the correct answer to these two questions, you will quickly become recognized as an invaluable employee. That will happen because you understand your business from inside out. You will know it better than 90 percent of your fellow workers.

When problems arise - no matter what they are - the solutions must address one or both of two objectives:

1. Lowering the cost of acquiring new customers
2. Increasing the lifetime value of each existing customer

Even the stickiest problems in business - which are always people problems - can be analyzed effectively by considering possible outcomes against these two objectives.

[Ed. Note: If you're not happy with your financial situation, you're in the perfect position to change it for the better – right now. Ray has just released a special video that covers an online business opportunity that you can use to start growing your wealth. To watch this short video, click the following link: http://www.raybuckner.com]