First, it doesn’t matter how you feel about Sen. Clinton, you have to agree that she has persistence and tenacity. While the majority of pundits wrote Sen. Clinton off months ago, she is blocking, tackling, and clawing her way to the finish line. I would argue that the most important characteristic of a successful entrepreneur is persistence and stamina. And after 18 months in this campaign, she has outlasted quite a few other candidates – and she still wakes up every day acting like a winner.

I see it time and time again - companies with great ideas not getting off the ground and just burning through cash without revenue.  More often than not, at the very bottom of the problem is an inability to sell.  But how do you know you need help?  And what can you do?

I've spent the better part of the past 20 years selling.  Selling is just plain h-a-r-d.  But it is also a LOT of fun... I love selling!  In my mind, there is almost nothing that you can do as an entrepreneur that gets you to the heart of capitalism better than selling what you have created and satisfying customers. 

As a service to our readers, here’s a good compendium of solid and legitimate organizations you can go to for a variety of marketing-related information, including articles, white papers, terminology, etc.

These organizations vary from pure marketing to functions and specialties such as research, advertising or public relations; from US-based to internationally-based; from brick and mortar to web-only; from open-to-all to level-specific such as executives; from well-known to specialized and less well-known; and from all industries to industry-specific organizatons. You’ll also notice some Washington, DC-centric organizations among these.

How many software or Internet business plans have you seen recently that rely on advertising as a business model?  Investor beware!

I've been in the Internet full time since early 1996, and in advertising-based businesses on the Internet since 1997.  I've seen plenty of hype and plenty of failures, and I personally lived the rapid rise of the Internet, followed by the crash, followed by the second rapid rise of the Internet.  And now in this second rise (even more so than the first rise) advertising is being touted as the future of the Internet by many content, software, and Web-based service companies -- and the concept is being bought into by many Venture Capitalists.  But is this real?  Can it work?  Based on my experience (and I have sold Internet advertising for many years now), the answer is a simple NO.

Man, diligence sure does pay.  Ask me, I just lived it first hand.

I have been working on my next startup (#5, but who is counting?), and we are vetting through a number of ideas and aspects of the new company's offerings.  So true to my own writings, I was out in the marketplace meeting with potential customers.  We asked a lot of questions around the idea we had, trying to find "market pain" to sell against.  What did we hear?  Nothing.  Crickets.  Silence.  We took the questioning down another path, working different aspects of the business and product concept.  Again, nothing but crickets.  A call to a second prospective customer yielded identical results.  Ouch.

As much as the White House likes to deny it, we're in a recession.  As an entrepreneur, perhaps you are asking, "is a recession a good time to start a business?" My vote is yes!

The way I see it, any time is a good time to start a company.  Some times may be better than others, but it is all a matter of degree.  Once bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, postponing doing your startup is a very, very hard thing to do.  It's like when you have both arms full of, say, groceries, and you get a wicked itch on your leg.  The more you think about it, the more it itches.  It only gets worse, never better.  Sooner or later you need to put the bags down and scratch the itch.  Same with a startup - the itch only gets worse the more you think about it.  Caught in bureaucratic meetings?  Itch.  Watching your peers build companies?  Itch itch.  Thinking, no knowing, that you have what it takes to build a great company.  Itch!

Almost every time I see a series of business plans, a few of them stand out as more features than products.  Features are nice, but products make companies.

So you have a business idea, and you're building a business plan.  But you keep struggling on how people are going to find, buy, and use what you have created.  Perhaps the issue is not with your business smarts or knowledge of marketing... perhaps you have a feature and not a product.  Features are almost always neat, clever, unique, and impressive.  But a business needs more than a "neat" factor, it needs the ability to engage customers and earn revenues.

As an investor, board member, and 4-time entrepreneur, I am constantly amazed by the number of business ideas that are pitched that just don't make sense.  And I am not talking about some amazing wisdom or insight that I possess (or more likely do not possess), rather I am talking about business ideas that just don't pass the test of common sense.

Ideas that don't make sense are often ideas that don't scale, that have lousy margins, or that are not differentiated in any meaningful manner.  They are ideas that have not thought out sales, marketing, or overall customer acquisition and retention.  They are ideas that are features and not products (more on this one in a future blog).  And they are ideas that the team executing on it just don't have experience with in the past.

The discussions about saving money in your startup continues, and there are a lot of good ideas out there.  But in this thrifty environment, is the workaholic the best hire?

Just a few weeks back I wrote about how cash flow is king in a startup.  And maybe you saw the recent postings by NYC Entrepreneur and super-blogger Jason Calacanis.  Jason wrote recently about how to save money in your startup, and he created a whirlwind on controversy around a few of his ideas, particularly the one about dedication.  I think he has a lot of very good ideas in his list (and there are quite a few in the posted comments below his original blog), and every entrepreneur should take these ideas to heart.