You’ve got to be good at sales if you’re going to succeed at raising investment

Salespeople are often considered ‘black sheep’ when it comes to selling a product or, with a founder raising investment, proving the saleability of your idea. At best, they’re a necessary evil; at worst, they’re a “colouring-in department.”

But the truth is, to attract an investor, you’ve got to tick a lot of boxes. Two of those boxes are ‘Make them believe in you’ and ‘Give them a vision to get excited about.’

You won’t achieve that unless you have an excellent understanding of sales and marketing strategy. Without that sales and marketing acumen, it’s going to be impossible for you to raise investment.

The billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel once said, “The most fundamental reason even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.”

In our experience, Peter Thiel’s right.

Let me tell you a story.

One of our clients had a venture capitalist on board and was surprised when the VC suggested a merger between our client and another of the VC’s portfolio companies. The VC proposed this merger because one of the companies had market-leading tech but couldn’t…