Whoever knows how to sell never runs out of money.

The product changes. The ability to make someone buy remains.

I have been thinking a great deal about the difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to sell what you do. At first sight, it looks like a small distinction. Even slightly vulgar. There is a certain elegance in saying someone is an engineer, a doctor, an architect, or an inventor. There is less social elegance in saying simply that someone is a salesman. The first seems to master a science. The second seems to be always trying to convince someone of something. Perhaps that is precisely why most people prefer to learn to produce and treat selling as a minor stage, almost undignified, that should happen naturally once the good work is finished.

I am no longer convinced of that.

The more I observe companies, professionals, and people who manage to make money, the more I suspect that producing and selling are completely different activities, and that the second has a characteristic that is unpleasant to the pride of whoever produces: it decides whether the first will have any economic importance.

You can manufacture the best chair in town. If no one buys it, you own an excellent chair.

You can build a better apartment than your competitor. If the competitor sells his and you do not, he is the one who will keep building.

You can write the best book, build the best company, master a given subject, or work harder than everyone around you. None of that obliges anyone to pay for it.

The market has no moral obligation to recognize effort.

That may be one of its cruelest and, at the same time, most honest aspects.

We are used to thinking of effort as though there were a kind of invisible accounting of the universe. Someone works hard, therefore he should be paid a lot. Someone studied for ten years, therefore he should earn more than someone who studied two. Someone suffered to produce something, therefore the product should be worth more. It is a childish way of seeing value because it confuses the cost borne by whoever offers with the usefulness perceived by whoever buys.

The buyer does not remunerate your suffering.

He remunerates what he believes he will receive in exchange.

If you spent a hundred hours producing something nobody wants, the hundred hours do not raise your price. Perhaps they merely make the mistake more expensive.

There is something important in that.

It means being good is not enough. One has to stand in the right position between what one knows how to do and someone willing to pay for it. And that position, as far as I can tell, belongs to selling.

Today I read a piece of news about something new from Apple. A few days ago they opened a store of applications for the iPhone. I do not yet understand the scale of it, and perhaps it is merely one more technological novelty among the many that appear and disappear. But one thing caught my attention: Apple announced today that more than ten million applications were downloaded in only three days.

Ten million.

I am not particularly interested in the applications. Some are games, others tools, things for productivity, medicine, communication. There are hundreds of them, made by different people and companies. What interests me is something else.

None of those people had to build their own store.

None had to convince each buyer to visit their address on the internet.

None had to create a worldwide payment system from scratch.

None had to manufacture a device.

Apple did something far more interesting than simply letting third parties place programs inside the telephone. It created a shelf.

And the shelf may be more powerful than most of the products sitting on it.

That seems obvious once someone points it out, but it was not obvious to me.

We are used to admiring whoever manufactures. The factory is visible. It has machines, employees, a warehouse, trucks. It is easy to look at that and say: here is a company. Distribution is less theatrical. Often it consists merely of a relationship, a contract, a client list, a known address, a well-located store, or the habit of a person going to a certain place when she needs something.

But perhaps it is exactly that invisibility that makes us underestimate it.

Imagine two people.

The first knows how to manufacture an extraordinary product but knows no buyer at all.

The second cannot manufacture anything but knows a thousand buyers, knows what they want, and can put products in front of them.

Which of the two holds the stronger position?

My first reaction would be to say the first, because he has the technical knowledge. Now I am no longer sure.

The manufacturer needs the distributor.

The distributor can change manufacturers.

That changes quite a lot.

Whoever masters production is powerful while his production remains special. Whoever masters access to the client may survive changes of products, suppliers, and even entire markets.

It is a less noble advantage in the eyes of those who like titles, but apparently a more resistant one.

Perhaps that is what I am trying to understand: which skill keeps its value when the circumstances change?

I cannot know what will be sold twenty years from now. Nor ten. Perhaps many products that look indispensable today will disappear. One need only observe how many companies sell things that did not exist a generation ago. The reverse will certainly happen too. Things that matter today will look ridiculous in the future.

But I doubt the need for someone to make another person buy will disappear.

As long as there is property, scarcity, and desire, there will be exchange. As long as there is exchange, there will be selling.

It is hard to imagine an older skill.

And perhaps precisely because it is so old it gets treated as a simple thing. Everyone thinks they know how to sell the same way everyone thinks they know how to hold a conversation. Only after watching someone truly good does one notice the distance between talking and steering a decision.

A bad salesman describes what he owns.

A better salesman perceives what the other person wants.

I still cannot define exactly what makes someone very good at it. But I can recognize some mistakes. The first is talking too much about the product. Whoever produces something generally falls in love with its characteristics. He wants to explain material, process, technology, finish. The buyer, most of the time, is thinking about himself.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons inventors frequently need salesmen and salesmen frequently manage to get rich without inventing anything.

The inventor falls in love with the thing.

The salesman has to take an interest in the person.

I do not say that romantically. It is not necessary to love the client. It may not even be necessary to like him. It is necessary to understand him.

There is a difference.

A person may say she wants quality when in reality she wants status. She may say she is worried about price when in reality she is afraid of making a decision. She may say she needs to talk to someone when she simply has not found a sufficient reason to say yes. She may ask for a discount not because the price is high, but because she wants to feel she won something in the negotiation.

The stated reasons and the real reasons are not always the same.

Perhaps selling is the study of that difference.

That interests me because economic decisions are generally presented as though they were perfectly rational. Price, quality, comparison, choice. But one need only watch people buying to notice that they want first and explain afterward.

A man may buy a car far more expensive than he needs and find ten technical arguments to justify the decision.

A family may choose a particular apartment saying they liked the floor plan when perhaps they liked the idea of living at that address.

A person buys a piece of clothing she could replace with a much cheaper one because she is not buying only fabric.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. The mistake is pretending people are machines maximizing utility with a calculator.

We are much stranger than that.

And whoever sells is perhaps forced to discover it before whoever spends a life merely studying theory.

There is another characteristic of selling that seems important to me: it gets a fast answer from reality.

You can hold an opinion about your own talent for years.

You can believe you have an excellent idea.

You can believe a product is worth a certain price.

You can receive compliments from friends.

You can obtain the approval of polite people who do not want to offend you.

Then you try to sell.

Selling destroys a good part of the courtesy.

"Interesting" does not pay a bill.

"I liked it a lot" does not pay a bill.

"Let's talk" does not pay a bill.

There is something brutally useful in the moment when someone has to put money on the other side.

Either he puts it or he does not.

Money turns opinion into consequence.

Perhaps that is why so many people prefer environments where they are judged by internal criteria. At school, someone explains what needs to be done and then gives a grade. In a large company, there is a superior who evaluates work. In many professions, there is a clear sequence of credentials.

In selling, the judge can simply walk away.

And he does not have to explain why.

That is uncomfortable, but also liberating.

If I can sell something, I depend less on someone who has to formally recognize my worth.

I can find the demand.

It is a form of independence I had not understood before.

Whoever does not know how to sell has to associate with someone who does. It can be a company, a boss, a partner, an intermediary, a store, a brand. At some point in the chain there is someone who can turn work into revenue.

The question is knowing where in that chain you stand.

Perhaps one of the best ways to understand any company is to ignore for a few minutes everything it says it does and look for exactly where the sale occurs.

Who brings the client?

Who controls the relationship?

Who sets the price?

Who can raise the price?

Who decides which products get in?

Who can replace the supplier?

Who owns the list of buyers?

The answers probably reveal more about economic power than the org chart does.

That is why the Apple news bothered me in a productive way.

The initial impression is that the developers received an extraordinary opportunity. And they did. But there is another reading: suddenly hundreds of developers came to depend on a single shelf to reach millions of buyers.

Who became more powerful?

The developers, because they now have distribution?

Or Apple, because everyone has to pass through the distribution it created?

Perhaps both.

But not symmetrically.

If one developer disappears, the store keeps existing.

If the store disappears, that developer has to figure out all over again how to reach the client.

That asymmetry seems important.

I do not want to overstate a three-day-old novelty and pretend I already know how it will end. It may fail. It may be replaced by something else. It may be irrelevant a few years from now.

But the mechanism interests me regardless of the fate of that particular store.

The person who controls the path between producer and buyer seems to hold a kind of economic toll.

He does not have to own all the value that passes through.

He merely has to be hard to bypass.

A road does not have to own the cars to charge a toll.

That may be a better way to think about distribution.

Everyone looks at the car.

Few people look at the road.

And the road can make money from different cars for decades.

I have begun to suspect that the best businesses have some characteristic of that type. Not necessarily a monopoly, because that word is too large and carries other implications. But a position where other people find it convenient, or necessary, to pass through you.

A store on a busy street.

A broker who knows every relevant buyer.

A distributor with relationships across hundreds of points of sale.

A brand the consumer turns to automatically.

A bank where people already have an account.

A company that controls a given channel.

Perhaps wealth is produced less by the quantity of things someone can do and more by the quality of the position he can occupy.

That runs against the cult of effort.

If two people push a rock and one chose to push it uphill while the other put the rock on wheels, it would be ridiculous to pay them according to their exhaustion.

But we do that mentally all the time.

We admire effort.

The market tends to admire leverage.

The word may not be exactly that one, but the idea is simple: finding a way to make the same effort produce more result.

Distribution seems to be a form of leverage.

A salesman who talks to one person at a time has a certain limit.

A store puts products in front of hundreds.

An advertisement reaches thousands.

A network reaches millions.

The skill of selling stays the same in essence, but the mechanism multiplies its reach.

Perhaps I am beginning to separate two things I used to confuse: selling and distribution.

Selling is obtaining the decision.

Distribution is managing to stand in front of enough people for decisions to be possible.

It is possible to be excellent at one and bad at the other.

An extraordinary salesman placed in an empty room sells nothing.

An extraordinary channel with a bad product can sell a great deal for a while and then destroy its own reputation.

The power probably lies in the combination.

But if I were forced to choose what to learn first, I would still choose selling. Because distribution without the ability to convert attention into money is merely traffic.

That word, "convert," may sound too technical, but it describes well what I mean.

Attention does not pay by itself.

It has to be turned into a decision.

I notice there is a great obsession with money as though it were something some people receive by merit and others do not. It may be more useful to think of it as a consequence of transactions.

You do not "make money" in the abstract.

Someone hands money to you.

Why?

That question is far more concrete.

If I work for a company, it hands me money because it believes my work is worth more than what it pays me.

If I sell a product, the buyer hands over money because he prefers the product to the money at that moment.

If I intermediate something, someone pays me because my presence made a transaction easier than it would have been without me.

Money always comes from somewhere.

Following the path it came from may be a better education in business than memorizing complicated words.

I am also noticing there is an enormous difference between revenue that depends entirely on my presence and revenue produced by a structure.

An individual salesman has to keep selling.

A distribution company can put hundreds of salesmen to work.

A store can keep receiving buyers even when the owner is not there.

A brand manages to make part of the sale before any salesman opens his mouth.

The App Store seems to do something even more curious: hundreds of producers work to create the products and millions of users do the work of choosing and downloading. The company that controls the store organizes the encounter.

There is economic beauty in that.

Not moral beauty. They are different things.

A mechanism can be efficient and still produce bad consequences. A person can make a lot of money doing something contemptible. The market is not a moral tribunal. Confusing the two leads to mistakes on both sides: some think being rich proves virtue; others think virtue should automatically produce wealth.

Neither is true.

Money has mechanisms of its own.

I want to understand them before judging them.

Perhaps that is exactly what attracts me to selling. The salesman has to accept the world as it is, not as he would like it to be. He cannot simply say the client ought to value a certain feature. He has to discover what the client actually values.

There is a kind of forced humility in that.

If nobody buys, something is wrong.

It may be the product.

It may be the price.

It may be the person approached.

It may be the moment.

It may be the way the offer was presented.

It may be your reputation.

But it is useless to blame the buyer for not understanding your genius.

That is the favorite excuse of people who prefer being right to making money.

I do not want to make that mistake.

Nor do I want to conclude that selling means manipulating. That view seems to be the resentment of someone who has seen only bad salesmen.

A lasting sale has to work for both sides.

If I convince someone to buy something he should not, I may get a transaction. I probably lose the relationship.

If, on the contrary, I can identify a real need and offer something that improves the buyer's position, I can sell again.

That introduces a difference between revenue and reputation.

The first can be obtained quickly.

The second requires repetition without betrayal.

Perhaps the truly large businesses are built when the two reinforce each other.

You sell.

You deliver.

The person comes back.

She refers another.

The next sale costs less effort.

Then reputation begins to work as distribution.

A good reputation places you in front of clients before you go looking for them.

That may be one of the most interesting forms of capital, though it does not appear in a bank account.

It is accumulated slowly and can disappear quickly.

I find it curious how some people spend decades trying to look important when it would be more efficient to become useful to the right people.

Being known by everyone and being sought out by those who matter are different things.

I think I prefer the second.

I have no special interest in being the salesman who talks loudly, fills the whole room, and insists on being noticed. That character strikes me as insecure. When someone needs to announce constantly that he knows how to sell, he may be trying to sell his own image before anything else.

I prefer the idea of knowing the mechanism.

Knowing how to ask.

Knowing how to wait.

Understanding incentive.

Noticing when a person can actually buy.

Knowing when to walk away from a negotiation.

That last point is probably underrated.

Selling is not merely obtaining a yes.

It is knowing where not to waste time.

Time is capital too.

If someone spends a week trying to convince a person who would never buy, he lost the chance to talk to someone who would have bought in five minutes.

Perhaps a large part of commercial intelligence is selection.

That holds for clients, products, and even relationships.

Not all revenue is good revenue.

Some clients pay and cost more than they paid.

Some sales destroy margin.

Some contracts lock the company into bad obligations.

Blind obsession with turnover can be as dangerous as the inability to sell.

Even so, among the possible defects, I would rather have to learn selection after learning to sell than own every filter in the world without being able to close an operation.

First you have to make the engine run.

Then you learn not to crash the car.

I am 18 and there is certainly naivety in much of what I am writing. Perhaps in a few years I will reread this and find it simplistic to say selling matters so much. Perhaps I will discover that capital, product, management, technology, or something else is far more decisive.

But there is a question that seems hard to knock down:

if nobody buys, what is left?

A company that does not sell can survive for a while on accumulated money.

It can receive investment.

It can take a loan.

It can convince other people to finance its losses.

But at some point there has to be someone paying voluntarily for what it offers, or the mechanism ends.

Even sophisticated businesses seem to come back to that.

The sale is where financial reality enters the company.

That is why I find it hard to accept the contempt some people show for salesmen. It may be a kind of status defense. It is more agreeable to imagine that the world remunerates credentials, intellectual depth, or technical difficulty. That way, each person can position his own specialty as superior.

Money is less polite.

It goes to whoever can capture it inside an exchange.

It may be an extraordinary scientist.

It may be an ordinary merchant.

It may be someone who knows the client better than everyone else.

There is no automatic aristocracy in the market.

Perhaps there is a personal lesson in that.

If someday I lose everything, what would I want to keep?

A property can be seized.

Money can be lost.

A job ends.

A company fails.

A market disappears.

Technical knowledge can age too.

But some skills seem portable.

Knowing how to read people.

Knowing how to negotiate.

Knowing how to create trust.

Knowing how to identify a need.

Knowing how to present value.

Knowing how to ask for a decision.

If I keep that, perhaps I can rebuild.

That is the reason I am starting to think whoever knows how to sell never ends up completely without money.

Not because selling guarantees wealth.

It does not.

Nothing does.

Life is full of ways to lose money, health, time, and reputation. One sufficiently large mistake is enough to destroy years of good ones. Whoever believes he owns some infallible skill is probably just waiting for an accident that has not happened yet.

But selling seems to increase the number of available paths.

Whoever depends on a single profession has one door.

Whoever knows how to sell may be able to find others.

The product changes.

The client changes.

The city changes.

The economy changes.

The ability to find out what someone wants and build an exchange remains useful.

That may be the idea I want to keep.

I have no interest in being a "salesman" as an identity.

Identities are dangerous when they start to limit what a person can see. I want to understand selling as a mechanism.

Perhaps tomorrow I will sell properties.

Perhaps something else.

Perhaps someday I will realize that what is most worth selling is not a physical thing.

I do not know.

Today I am still trying to understand the first layer.

And the first layer seems to be this: before asking which business I should build, perhaps I should ask which position I want to occupy inside a transaction.

Do I want to be the fellow who manufactures something and waits for someone to come get it?

Do I want to be the one who knows who buys?

Do I want to control the shelf?

Do I want to bring the two together?

I have no answer.

But I now know those positions are not economically equal.

The Apple news may disappear tomorrow. Perhaps in a few months everyone will be talking about something else. That matters little to the conclusion.

In three days, millions of individual decisions passed through the same place.

Hundreds of people created products.

Apple created the path.

I do not know which of the applications will win.

I do not know which companies will be born out of this novelty.

But I suspect that, from here on, when I look at any business, I will pay less attention only to what is being sold and more to the path that exists between the thing and the buyer.

Whoever controls that path may control more than it appears.

For a long time I thought getting rich was mainly accumulating something: knowledge, wealth, inventory, money.

Now I am beginning to consider another possibility.

Perhaps getting rich is first learning to occupy positions.

A good position lets value circulate through you.

A good product can be replaced.

A position that is hard to bypass is another matter.

I do not yet know where the best one is.

But I know which skill seems necessary to find it.

Selling.

Not that small version of the word, limited to convincing someone to buy something today.

Selling as the ability to turn knowledge into revenue, product into demand, attention into decision, relationship into trust, and trust into exchange.

If I learn that early, perhaps the rest can change without leaving me completely lost.

I am 18.

It is far too early to know what I will do with my life.

Perhaps that is precisely why I would rather learn something that does not depend on knowing the answer.

The world will certainly be different.

The products will certainly be different.

But someone will still want something another person has.

When that happens, there will be space between the two.

And someone will be paid to occupy it.

I want to understand how.

Leo Bentier