For Starters #24: Sales Pipelines For Starters
You have a yoga practice and a mindfulness practice. How about a sales practice?
When I went out on my own the first time, all the experienced design professionals I consulted warned me of “feast and famine” cycles. They were warning me of a non-obvious byproduct of focusing 100% on selling work, then making the hard shift to 100% focusing on doing the work - suddenly stopping all the outbound sales and marketing efforts. Then, restarting sales from a near stand-still each and every time the projects dry up. This whiplash is especially gut-wrenching for business models still billing by the hour. It’s even worse when Founders pull back on sales prematurely because of lack of confidence in their organization’s delivery capacity.
As full-time salespeople know - sales is it’s own discipline, it’s own creative problem solving, and it’s own mindset, and strategy. If you’re a Founder or solopreneur, you also know switching between the discipline of sales and the discipline of what you’re selling is it’s own biathlon.
To try and keep any bit of sales momentum, I used to alternate between ‘selling’ days and ‘doing’ days - mainly because it would take me a day to shift between the mindsets.
If your organization is still reliant Founder-led sales (among all the other things the Founder is responsible for), one way to maintain momentum is to implement just enough structure, along with a few easily-do-able habits.
The majority of the sales literature is focused on full-time salespeople at well established organizations. Whether these organizations are B2C (think car dealerships) or B2B (think Big Four account managers) - these organizations have known offerings, known pricing, known sales cycles, and most of all known customers. Sales itself then becomes executing a known playbook. A playbook that is bloated, heavy, and unnecessarily complex for starters. No, SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics doesn’t make sense for a startup or 2-pizza team. Even HubSpot might be too much.
However, there are systems and processes to make sales as an ongoing practice easier - for the Founder, the business, and the customer;
having a screener to ensure new leads are within the target customer profile.
planning for each sale to be a multi-step process.
knowing where prospects are within this process.
knowing what the specific next action for each and every prospect.
the discipline to hold to all of them.
While all of this is readily within reach of every Founder and the many-hat-wearing small business owner, it’s often not for any number of reasons;
Vast majority of tools designed for these tasks are designed for the aforementioned established business.
Founders have difficulty admitting they’re salespeople, especially because long term, they don’t want to be.
Founders just don’t even know where to begin, and so they don’t.
An internal belief that any structure will restrict their opportunities and constrain their abilities.
Yet, with a little bit of structure, process, and breaking down the overwhelming parts into a sequence of specific and repeatable next actions, sales can quickly become a flywheel accelerating your startups growth – driving increased demand for your product.
What if all it took was one afternoon to overcome this inertia, establish an obvious sales pipeline, and build a steady sales practice for your business?
Would you invest one afternoon to get your sales process under control?
My long-time collaborator Jim Bernard and I are confident that’s all it’ll take, and that’s why we’re offering ‘Sales Pipelines For Starters’.
‘Sales Pipelines For Starters’ we’ll help you: create a sales pipeline that fits your business, fill it with 20 of your best prospects, and transform sales from something you actively avoid to a regular practice.
Sound good? Reserve your spot.
The first 20 customers get 25% off - just $1,500 to level up your sales.
Got questions? Simply reply or book a 15min call.