What Skills Do You Need to Be Good at to Succeed in Business?

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

CapForge Founder and Owner Matt Remuzzi reacts to business advice being shared on the internet. In this video, he reacts to this video that suggests three things you need to get good at to have a successful business. 

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video:

In order to build a successful business you need to get good at sales. Yes, you need to get good at marketing. And they’re not the same thing. You need to get good at brand building. I believe that selling is uncovering the value you have so well that people are happy to exchange the money they have in their pocket for the value you’ve revealed.

Matt’s Review:

Interesting. Okay, so three critical things for business; sales, marketing, and brand building. But then he really only talked about sales. I would agree that sales is critical. If you don’t sell, you could do everything else right, but if nobody is willing to give you their money in exchange for whatever you’ve got, then you really don’t have a business. Marketing is the precursor to sales. It’s what gets you to the point where you can have a conversation where you can sell something. So you need to have marketing to draw people in, to be aware of your business, to see what you have to offer, and initiate the sales conversation. And it could be, you know, you could be an ecommerce business, and the sales conversation is really them putting in the cart and paying for it. Or it could be a complex sale where you have multiple rounds of talking to a salesperson, and explaining things, and going through proposal, and altering the proposal, and then eventually they sign up. But whatever it is, sales is getting them to buy and marketing is getting them to be aware of the possibility that they could buy. So they are two separate things and they’re both important. Brand building and that’s like a distant third. If you know how to get in front of people who are gonna be potentially interested that’s marketing. And you know how to then sell some of them that sales. Having a brand is sort of less important. It kinda goes with marketing. But you could have a name nobody’s ever heard of, and a logo that is super ugly, and a website that’s pretty marginal, but if you got a good offer and you get in front of the right people with it then you’re gonna have sales. On the flip side, you could have an amazing brand, a beautiful logo, a fantastic website, but if you can’t get in front of the right people or even when you do you can’t convince them to buy, then the brand isn’t worth much. So the brand is kind of third pretty far down in my mind of what’s important for a business. 

And him talking about sales is not convincing someone to buy, I agree. Again if you can show somebody the value and they see it then you don’t have to convince them beyond that for them to exchange their money for it. The perfect example of that is if let’s say your house is on fire. And then somebody comes up and they have a bucket of water. You know, at that point, you don’t have to convince them very much that they probably really want that bucket of water so they can put their house fire out and not lose their house, right? You don’t have to do a lot of convincing. So when you think of the traditional sort of stereotype salesperson, like a used car salesman.  They’re really trying to talk you into something and hard sell you on buying it, that’s probably because it’s not a good deal. Probably cause a lot of the value they’re trying to convey isn’t really there, and you’re gonna regret the purchase. If you’re gonna regret the purchase and the value is not there, that’s when that hard sell kind of comes into play cause they have to overcome your reasonable objections. If the opposite side you can just show them a lot of value and then they can decide for themselves you don’t have to sell them at all. You’re just showing them what they can get and if that’s something they want are gonna buy it. So I agree with his points. I think brand building is the least of what the business needs. But for sure sales and for sure marketing.