What Has Once Been Done, May Be Done Again

I am re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo at the moment. One of those books that keeps giving back more than you remember putting in. There is a line in it that I have not been able to stop thinking about in a commercial context.

“What has once been done, may be done again.”

Dumas wrote it about revenge and determination. I keep applying it to sales.

The First Sale Is Everything

I tell clients this constantly. Do whatever it takes to get the first sale. Go to whatever lengths of customer service you need to. Negotiate the price as aggressively as you have to in order to create overwhelming value for that first buyer. Bend yourself into shapes that are not commercially sustainable long term. It does not matter yet.

Because once you know how to make one sale, you can make it easier. Faster. Cheaper. You can reverse engineer what worked, strip out what was unnecessary, and build a repeatable process around the thing that actually moved the decision. But none of that is available to you until the first sale exists as proof that someone, somewhere, will pay money for what you are offering.

The main goal of early sales activity is not revenue. It is validation. Specifically, determining whether profit can exceed cost of sale. Once you know what the first few sales cost you in time, effort, and money, you can make an informed judgement about whether the sales function is commercially viable at scale. Everything before that is a hypothesis.

The Recurring Attitude

Most business owners say they understand this. Most are not actually comfortable with it.

The version I hear constantly, from founders across every category, is some variation of “you do the sales, we’ll have a steady income stream by next week.” The expectation is that sales activity converts quickly, that the pipeline fills fast, and that the initial investment in getting the function running pays back within a timeframe that feels manageable.

Sometimes it does. Often the first sale takes weeks. Occasionally it takes months. That is a significant cost for a small business to carry, particularly when the founder is emotionally invested in a specific timeline and the sales function is not delivering against it on the schedule they imagined.

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable.

Failing Early Is Also Succeeding

In sales, if we fail early, we call it success. That is not spin. It is the honest commercial framing of what early negative data actually represents.

Sometimes we run a bootstrapped guerrilla sales campaign for a few weeks, reach into the market with genuine effort across multiple channels, and come back with a clear signal that the market is not interested. That signal is valuable. It is worth money. It has saved the business owner from spending the next two years pouring cost of sale into something that was never going to convert, because the product or the positioning or the market timing was not right.

The problem is that it does not feel like success to the person who built the product.

A business is like a child to a founder. The attachment is real and it runs deep. When we come back and report that the market is not responding, the immediate defence is almost never “maybe the product needs work.” It is “must be the salespeople.” The product cannot be the problem because the product is the thing they built and believed in and invested years of their life into.

We understand that. We genuinely do. But our job is to be honest about what the data says, even when the data is unwelcome.

What We Actually Saved You

Here is the reframe that matters.

We did not crush your dream. We saved you years.

Two years of cost of sale on a product the market does not want is a business-ending outcome for most founders. Knowing after six weeks that the market signal is negative is a gift, even when it does not feel like one. It creates the space to pivot, to reposition, to adjust the offer, or to redirect the energy toward something with better market fit before the runway runs out.

And if the signal is positive, even weakly positive, then Dumas applies directly. What has once been done, may be done again. The first sale, however hard-won and however heavily negotiated, is the proof of concept that everything else gets built on. It tells you that the problem is real, that the offer is credible, and that someone will pay for the solution.

From there, you make it easier. Faster. Cheaper. You refine the process, tighten the pitch, find the buyers who look like the first one and understand why they bought. The first sale is not a commercial outcome. It is a blueprint.

Just get it. Do whatever it takes to get it. The rest follows from there.

For more on how we think about early stage sales validation and building a commercial engine that is worth investing in, there is more at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.