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.

So what’s the most important Sales skill?  Being able to tell a convincing story that sells (and is true to your values and long term vision.)  Successful entrepreneurs spend much of their time describing an resistible future for customers, investors and employees.  Storytelling is the secret sauce that creates great value out of nothing.

Staying with this year’s genre of storytelling, our focus for Sessions Two and Three will be creating stories that sell, specifically, stories that sell via the internet.  Eagles will learn to create powerful hooks, using a few vivid words and pictures or a series of trickle emails; moving prospects from awareness of a need; through qualifying all the way to closing the sale.

Each Eagle will choose a product and create story boards, test their pitches in focus groups, and finally learn enough programming to create a website and auto-respond letters to convert leads into customers, at pennies per purchase.  They’ll also create a blog to attract leads.

In the end, Eagles will pitch their creations to a panel of real ad executives, to see who might be hired for an apprenticeship.

Yes, we’ll still be hard at work on math at Khan Academy; reading Deep Books, performing Between the Lines literary analyses and learning Ninja writing tricks – but in the next few weeks, Eagles will dig deeply into the most important entrepreneurial skill of the twenty first century – crafting a story that will sell on the web.