Salesby5’s Erik Darmstetter, Advises on Having a True Purpose in Your Startup
May 14, 2009
By Erik Darmstetter, Salesby5
When you’re building any company or an organization, having a true purpose is a fundamental driver that will get future employees on board as well as help keep you on a successful path. This purpose is the why you do what you do and not how or what. If it is to make money then you have no real real purpose for keeping people or recruiting people on your team as getting a paycheck is a commodity.
Purpose is the reason to get up in the morning and do what you do every day to help benefit others with your product or service. The importance of have real purpose versus something that sounds good is that customers or employees can tell if your culture or your behaviors do not match what your said purpose is or REAL Vs. FAKE!
Our purpose at Salesby5 is to inspire others. We talk of inspiration often, as it has so much to do with sales. One of the stars on our team is Kya, who is our Brand Evangelist. She has radar that picks out “REAL.”
She has a unique strength to know if someone is sincere (real) or fake in seconds, where most are about 100 times slower. Why does this matter? She can pick off someone trying to get a date, sell copier toner or attempting to get in your wallet faster than my computer can get an Internet connection.
Tomorrow’s success is today’s real. This is why we fire customers who are rude, lie or don’t pay when they say they will pay. This is why we do not take a customer or vendor who we do not feel has the REAL Win-Win attitude versus just WIN. We need to feel good about making them prosper or there are plenty of others.
A few thoughts on being real regarding sales:
- If you have to remember your pitch: Fail
- If you can’t remember the prospects problems and your opportunities: Fail
- If you remember a client’s child’s name because you care: REAL!
- If you remember they love Papouli’s Greek Grill’s Mediterranean Salad for lunch on Thursdays: REAL!
The point: Get real or get a new purpose. Today is about transparency and about being real. Fake billboards or sales pitches that leave me wondering don’t work anymore. Do you need some REAL in your life?
