We are going to talk about some basic concepts. Let’s summarize these concepts.
First Concept
So, the first fundamental concept is that money is made by selling. There is no money in making. There is no money in making, and money is only in selling and optimizing. There is a certain kind of seller in the marketplace that is successful. There is a kind of seller in the marketplace who not only has control over getting the right kind of buyer for the right kind of product. They also have control over getting the seller. So they control what is being sold, control the sellers, and definitely, get the buyers. So that is a concept that we call the linchpin. So the linchpin seller is a success in any market, especially in the slow down. All of the linchpin sellers are true successes. All of the others are facing trouble.
Second Concept
The second thing is structural selling. There are two schools of sales of thought. And if you’re a sales and marketing professional or a small business owner, you will probably relate to this. There are two schools of thought. One is a slightly older school of thought that says definitely sales in the numbers. If I meet 20 prospects a day instead of 10 Prospects, I can basically beat everybody else in selling. I can collect the biggest profits, and that makes me the biggest player in the market. That is definitely true. But I would like to bring your attention to one of the key facets of what Steve Jobs said. Somebody asked him, “Your phone is better than all other phones.” He replied, “I’m not in the phone business at all. I’m in the business of making the intelligence that runs the phone. He says the phone is a wrapper. I’m in the business of that intelligence, which is called the iCloud.”
So the reason that Apple is a linchpin, in addition to controlling the marketplace, is because it is very difficult for people to sell products on the iCloud Marketplace. The security restrictions are very tight. They want to take care of the customer. They want to protect their customers.
Compare it to the Android marketplace where the security is compromised. The security features are better on Apple. So apple is a linchpin of its own platform.
Another thing is that the iCloud is so intelligent that if you have three or four Apple devices, they are all synced with each other in such a fashion that it is very difficult for you to get out of. Even if you say okay, I’m done with apple. Steve Jobs is no more. I don’t like how the company is working. The new our products are not impressive. It is tough to get out of the iCloud because you’re used to that intelligence.
As soon as you come downgrade to Windows and Android and all that integration between the phone and the computer and all this becomes so much of a headache. So it isn’t easy to get out of Apple, not because of the phone, not because of the computer, it is because of the intelligence that runs the phone. So Steve Jobs says, I am in the business of creating the intelligence that runs the phone.
We are going to do hard work in a different fashion. We are going to create a machine that does our selling for us. This is what we call structural selling.
So we are in the business of creating the intelligence that does the selling for us, and definitely, hard work is involved, but it is a better lifestyle than going after hundred prospects or thousand prospects yourself.
And then definitely, we want to get to a point where we are the linchpin. We control the supply, the demand, and we are immune in our slow downtime.