Is Your Business Sales Sufficient? [Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Applied to Business]

I have been often asked by business owners and presidents how to create a great business with happy employees, satisfied customers and an admiring community.

A very noble thought. Yet, my first question to them often is, “Are you sales sufficient?” Because until a business achieves a level of sales sufficiency “all the other stuff” does not matter.

It’s like someone who has not secured stable means to feed, clothe and shelter himself yet wants to improve “the quality of his life.”

In his ground-breaking work, Abraham Maslow proposed that a human being has three or four levels of needs:Physical (food, clothing, and shelter), Emotional (esteem, affiliation etc.) and spiritual (he called it self-actualization).

These needs have a hierarchy. Meaning that if we can’t feed, clothe and shelter ourselves, we really won’t be motivated to pursue other things like esteem of our colleagues, affiliation or being accepted into a group, or being “self-actualized.”

A business’s ability to bring consistent, healthy sales with sufficient profit margins is its most basic need. Until this need is satisfied, it’s very difficult to focus on other things such as the quality of life for its employees, having customers who are it’s raving fans or making the world a better place.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s important to have these things. In fact, I believe that for a long-term success, a business must achieve a status above that of a mere subsistence. I am also not saying that a business can’t dream or think about such things if it is not Sales Sufficient. All I am saying is that unless and until Sales Sufficiency is achieved, all the rest won’t show up or won’t matter if it did because it won’t be sustainable.

A Sales Sufficient business has reached a point where it is exceeding it’s sales goals month-after-month, quarter-after-quarter and year-after-year with predictability, consistency, control, and confidence.

It also means that it is attracting the kinds of prospects and clients who are its ideal clients and filters out those that don’t fit that mold.

And it also means that the salespeople enjoy the process of selling, are self-motivated and look forward to doing what they need to close sales because they are perceived as Trusted Advisers, not Killer Salespeople.

In other words, they attract prospects and close sales in ways that help develop a deep emotional bond with clients as opposed to the “hard selling” techniques taught at sales training seminars.

The first step is to find out what it takes to be sales sufficient and to remain that way for a long, long time to come.

How would you know if your business is sales sufficient? One way, of course, is to look at your financial statements and consult your bookkeeping system. But your financial statements is a just one piece of the big picture. They tell you the end result.They don't tell you how to get there. They also don't tell you how to stay there. And if you are already at the healthy levels of sales revenues, they also don't tell you how you got there. 

What you need to find out is if you have the mechanism in place to consistently bring in high volume of sales at good margins (and preferably from quality clients who love and cherish you). I have been secretly putting together a tool called Sales Sufficiency Index (TM). It will be designed to tell you if your business is sales sufficient on a percentage scale. It will also give you some strategies, techniques and mindsets for achieving sales sufficiency.

If you would like to get notified when this tool is published, please get on the waiting list here. In the meantime, please browse this blog. I have written quite a bit on this subject, specifically {here} and {here}.