Mark Cuban: To Be A Salesperson

Last year, I had the incredible pleasure of interviewing Mark Cuban, a serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, investor on Shark Tank, and the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.? One of the most memorable pieces of advice that Mark imparted to our audience on my podcast In Search of Excellence was the importance of sales skills — and it began with a story about selling garbage bags.

Born into a Jewish working-class family in Pittsburgh, Mark always possessed an innate entrepreneurial spirit that he brought to life at the age of twelve.? Going from house to house and knocking on his neighbors’ doors, Mark began his entrepreneurial journey with a simple sentence:

“Hi, my name is Mark, I live down the street. Do you use garbage bags?”

During our conversation, Mark emphasized that learning how to sell is the fundamental building block of any venture.? The art of selling is not a ruthless effort to force customers to buy your product — it’s about helping them realize that they have an unmet need, and that you can be the one to meet it.? With this mindset, Mark went on to start a variety of businesses in his early teens: ?a stamp business, a magazine distribution business, and finally a software provider business called MicroSolutions.

Mark’s story about selling trash bags as a twelve-year-old inevitably brought to mind my own experience of selling t-shirts as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan.? With a mix of confidence and resilience, I hopped from dorm to dorm, knocked on doors, got kicked out al of them, re-entered them from another floor, and knocked on more doors to sell my t-shirts.

I faced a ton of rejection – there were times I would knock on 40 doors and ask people to buy a t-shirt without a single sale.? But I didn’t care about the rejection because it was a numbers game: there were several thousand dorm rooms on campus and I was going to hit most of them.? My shirts looked great and had very cool logos, and I knew the next sale could be – and often was – the result of me knocking on the next door.? I made $7 for each short-sleeve shirt I sold, $11 for the long-sleeve shirts – and every sale motivated me to keep selling.

Mark and I both share the same spirit of perseverance when it comes to selling a product.? As Mark aptly puts it, to be a salesperson is not about changing someone’s mind — it’s about helping them purchase something they either want or don’t know they wanted before they met you.?

This article is based on my interview with Mark Cuban, a serial entrepreneur, investor, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and a host of Shark Tank on NBC.? Mark made his initial fortune through the sales of his startups MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com in the 1990s and was ranked #177 on the 2020 Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest residents in the United States.? In January 2022, he launched the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company with the mission of lowering generic drug prices for end consumers in the US.? Mark is the best-selling author of How to Win at the Sport of Business and occasionally appears in popular television shows including Entourage, Dancing with the Stars, and The League.? Mark is also the founder of the Mark Cuban Foundation, which leads programs including the AI Bootcamps Initiative, a free Artificial Intelligence training program for underserved high school students, and the Fallen Patriot Fund, which helps families of U.S. military personnel who were killed or seriously injured during Operation Iraqi Freedom.? Listen to the full episode here.

You may also enjoy other episodes on In Search of Excellence, which can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and YouTube.

Randall Kaplan?is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist, and podcaster. He is the founder and CEO of?JUMP Investors, a venture capital firm that has invested in more than 80 early-to-late-stage technology companies, including Google, Seagate, and Lyft. Randall is a Co-Founder of?Akamai Technologies, a publicly-traded technology company that has 8,000 employees around the world and earned $3.8 billion in 2022 revenues. He is also the Founder and CEO of?Sandee, the largest provider of information about beaches in the world with over 100 categories of information for more than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries.

Randall is the host of?In Search of Excellence, a podcast designed to motivate and inspire others to reach their potential and achieve excellence in all aspects of life. Randall’s guests have included?Mike Tyson,?Mark Cuban,?Kevin O'Leary,?David Solomon,?Bob Pittman,?Sharon Stone,?David Rubenstein,?Steve Case,?Orlando Bravo,?Sammy Hagar,?Sam Zell,?Rachel Zoe,?Tim Draper,?Kliff Kingsbury, and?Eric Garcetti, among many others. Randall is also a dedicated philanthropist – he is the founder of?The Justice Ball?which has raised more than $8 million for a non-profit legal clinic that aids more than 12,000 poor, sick, elderly, and homeless residents of Los Angeles each year, and is the Co-Founder of?The Imagine Ball?which has raised millions of dollars and is dedicated to ending the cycle of poverty and homelessness in Los Angeles.

Read Randall's full bio at?www.randallkaplan.com.