Quick – what’s the most important skill for an entrepreneur: Sales, Operations or Finance?
If you survey seasoned entrepreneurs, you’ll find most agree that Sales is the most critical function. If you have an army of enthusiastic customers who vote with their dollars, you can solve most operational or financial problems. Without eager customers, your business quickly becomes a money losing black hole.
Our Session Two Middle School Genre and Quest was Storytelling: Websites that Sell. Our Overarching Question: “Does power corrupt?” fit perfectly, as sales skills can be used to serve or deceive.
M.S. Eagles practiced blogging, writing drip emails and choosing the powerful words and images to help move a prospective customer through the five steps of a Sales Funnel:
- Increasing awareness and desire
- Offering a benefit
- Qualifying
- Answering objections; and
- Closing.
Eagles also learned to storyboard as a way of rapid prototyping and rated several free website creation programs, as each team went through multiple rounds of critique preparing to:
- Market a real product or service for a real business; or
- Pitch a “must have” item for the studio; or
- Sell something during Socrates’ time (which fits into this session’s Civilization focus.)
Learning to sell. Building websites. Two critical 21st Century skills.