The main reason for deciding to sell the business was of course financial. If you see your business earnings dropping by almost 75% over 5 or 6 years, then it’s fair to see there is a trend appearing there. I am a great believer in keeping things simple, the simplest description I have ever seen of how to successfully sell a product is….
- Find out what people what
- Sell it to them
Many so-called marketing specialists will at this point say, no that’s too simple you need to factor in this and that, etc. I guarantee you that those so-called marketers are enjoying a comfortable salaried position and do not have a single penny of their own invested in that project. Quite frankly by claiming that it is more complicated than that all they are doing is creating unnecessary work for themselves and justifying to their employer why they are needed. If a project fails they have lost nothing personally. I have seen such people in action and believe me it is not a pretty sight to see so much money and time squandered. Talk to the successful self-employed entrepreneurs and they will tell you a different story.
The formula is as simple as that. I ran what was effectively a one man business on those principles, which only a few years ago had an annual turnover of close to $4m – that is surely sufficient proof.
But then we stopped giving the market what it wanted. Because the board of directors got greedy and thought the golden goose would never stop laying golden eggs, they increased the prices way way beyond levels people were willing to pay. Products were discontinued on a whim, often for no other reason than “they no longer fit into our strategic marketing plan”! Great products that customers had been buying for 30 years, key parts of our range, just gone.
Little by little we lost our credibility and our turnover. Customers (i.e. the most important part of any selling process) were telling us we were on the wrong track. As a sales agent I, and other agents, fed this back to the company and we were threatened with all sorts of dire consequences if we didn’t “toe the line”. This was no empty threat, at the end of 2005 one of the most successful agents of 27 years standing was fired without warning. He was replaced by 2 salaried sales people, less than 6 months later turnover in that area had dropped by over 50% but the company had twice the costs! But that was acceptable because the new sales people did “toe the line” and didn’t report back on anything that was perceived as negative!
However as bad as that was, tales of managerial incompetence, power games and ignoring and ripping off customers are hardly unusual in today’s corporate Britain. Much much worse was to follow in 2006 which finally convinced me I could no longer sell on behalf of these kind of people. That will be covered in Part 3 of this mini-series, so make sure you read that tomorrow.