For the last few months we’ve been searching for a mythical whale to support our business.

The moby dick of clients if you will.

In my imagination, this whale operates at a size and scale considerably greater than what our current clients do.

The idea was not to sell the whale on a profit sharing model like we have with our current clients, but a flat monthly account management fee.

The pitch being, we could run and manage the Amazon account for a price that would cost them less than a full time employee with benefits.

The whale was supposed to get us to a large percentage of our monthly revenue goal, and allow us to keep expanding other parts of the business.

I’m not sure if the great whale exists, but whether it does or not we can’t afford to wait around for it to beach itself in front of us.

Our clearest path to growth is getting more clients regardless of their size.

With our profit sharing model, every product that we sell on Amazon for a client is an opportunity for profit and growth.

With that in mind, I went through the local chamber of commerce website and found all the businesses that sell physical products that may be a good fit for the Amazon marketplace.

This process produced a list of around 20 leads.

My focus has now turned to finding the best way to get intros with each and every one of these 20 business owners.

I have some experience with cold calling businesses, and the process is pretty horrible. The summer before going to college I worked for a digital agency tasked with lead generation.

They used some SAS product to scrape the web for contact information, and you’d just go down the list calling and emailing random business owners.

When you actually got someone on the phone they were usually a combination of really confused and pissed off.

I’m not saying cold calling doesn’t work at scale. It probably just takes a larger list of leads and more manpower than one teenager with a cellphone.

Reflecting on those early days is the reason my partner and I recently chose to join the local Chamber of Commerce.

This way we could get intros to every single one of the 20 business owners on that list through the Chamber, and not just show up at their doorstep a complete and total stranger.

I have been trying to learn more about sales.

If anyone has sales literature they’d recommend please send it my way.

Allow me to reflect on my experience with selling our business’s services so far.

To date, I have not been extremely inspired by the traditional sales literature that I’ve come across.

A lot of the literature seems focused on mind games and psychological manipulation.

Maybe this is college student naivety, but I neither like this emphasis on mind games and manipulation or think it’s necessary.

I’m not a door to door salesman trying to offload some expensive insurance policy.

I have a product and service that my partner and I have worked really hard on developing, and that I sincerely believe would help these business owners.

I think allowing that sincerity to come across is far more honest, compelling, and convincing than any amount of attempted manipulation.

The sales literature that I’ve read so far talks a lot about how to convince someone that you’re a trustworthy person.

How about just being a trustworthy person?

Answer all of the questions honestly, and don’t try to inflate your product or service into something that it is not.

That being said, don’t undervalue your product or service. If there is an area of their business that you think really can add value to, communicate that!

Okay that concludes my limited selling experience that has produced 5 paying clients thus far.

The next few months will involve a lot of pitching and selling, and I hope this translates to the growth and revenue we need to hit our 10,000 MRR goal by graduation day.