And so we come to the second S in the IPESSI process, which stands for Sales. It could be argued that this is the most important part of any Machine That Makes Money, because Sales is how the machine actually does its money-making. Without sales, the machine brings in $0, and it becomes a machine that does NOT make money. Kind of the opposite of the whole goal of this web site. Machines die when they do not make enough money to be profitable. We want to build machines that DO make money.

The Sales part of IPESSI explains many of the things we see happening in successful machines. For example:

• Why are successful machines willing to spend money on advertising?
• Why do successful companies create web sites and social media accounts?
• Why do successful companies crave free PR in almost any form?
• Why do successful companies usually have direct sales forces, sales associates, etc. – people who make sales, often on commission?
• Why do successful companies have CRM systems like Salesforce, where CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management?

The answer to all of these questions is simple: when used properly, they all tend to increase sales. More sales means more income, and usually more profit. More profit is a good thing in almost all cases.

Understanding Sales

As an entrepreneur, you have your thing – The thing that your machine does to make money. Your thing is a product or a service or a stream of content.

You somehow make money with your thing:

• You sell your product and make money from every sale.
• You deliver your service and get paid for it.
• People buy a subscription to your content, or you make money by selling ads on your content.

And therefore you want more people to consume more of your thing. You want more customers, more viewers, more sales. More people and more sales usually means more money, and who can’t use more money?

If you are starting out, your question should be, “How do I get to the first 100 customers?”

If you have been in motion for awhile, your question might be, “How can I double my customers?” or “How can I get the next 1,000 customers?”

There are lots of ways to do this, but a very common one is paid advertising. So let’s look at how paid advertising works, and why you probably want to master it…