Episode #290: Work On Your Sales Not In Your Sales

We have all heard that business advice to “work on your business, not in your business”. When we are the owner of the business we can sometimes forget this, because we love doing the sales ourselves and spending time establishing relationships with our clients. I know this a problem for me, because the successful sales process is like a drug and you want more of those dopamine hits when you land the deal.

Salespeople like people and they like the personal elements of dealing with buyers. To grow the business though requires scale and that usually means hiring, training and developing more salespeople. If you are out there landing deals, then you cannot scale and will be stuck right where you are now. Most small businesses are trying to bootstrap their growth, so you need deals to fund the growth. This leads to a chicken and the egg situation, where you need to be in sales mode to land deals to generate the cash to expand. If you stop selling, then the cash flow gets impacted and there isn’t the cash to hire more people.

Another issue will arise if you ever decide to sell the business. If you are the key or one of the key producers, the new buyer will want to reduce the price to take into account that you won’t be there to generate the deals or they will want to lock you in as a part of an earn out over a number of years. Being the boss is one thing, but selling the business and then having to now work for someone else is entirely another thing. If you weren’t unemployable before you started the business, then after years of being your own boss, you are likely totally unemployable now.

Going from a big component of the sales flow in the business to zero is a bad idea. Revenues will tank and then you have all manner of cash flow dilemmas. We have to wean ourselves off the star salesperson role. Like the successful athlete who has to move out of the limelight to being in the background as the coach, we have to make that adjustment. A lot of our ego can be tied up in the sales role and this can be hard to diminish. We can also enjoy the thrill of the chase and landing big deals and now we have to live that process osmotically through our salespeople.

We have to start handing off clients to our salespeople. This is painful, because they are “our clients” and maybe they like having the boss taking care of them, because that is tied up with their ego too. Another pain point is we now have to start paying our salespeople commissions for taking care of them and that is a cost we didn’t have before.

All of this thinking is small beer. We have to get our mind on the big picture. We need to be looking for ways we can add more salespeople and we need to be thinking “how can I build this business, so that it can run without me”. If you can get it to that stage, then you have something to sell, otherwise you will never get to sell the business. If you are planning to hand it all over to your kids, then keep going, but if they are not interested in being part of your dynastic ambitions, you can’t live forever and you will have to sell it one day. In this case, you need to get yourself out of the revenue engine and make sure others are doing that job for you.

When we are super efficient, we find we are doing things ourselves, because we are really good at them, but actually are we really being effective? Getting freed up from our selling activity to spend that time coaching, mentoring and driving our salespeople will provide leverage. I am a hard worker and I work 12 hours a day, so bully for me. However, if I have ten salespeople working for me, they are putting in 80 hours per day, so nearly seven times more than me. That is leverage, so the key point is to decide what I should be doing with my 12 hours a day, to make their 80 hours more effective?

We might think, “well they are on base and commission, so that is all the motivation they need to succeed”. I wish that were true. Invariably we all get into certain work habits and sometimes these habits are not helping us to be as productive as we should be. There may also be a sales manager between the sales team and yourself, so you might think, “I can concentrate on my sales because my sales manager is taking care of the sales team”. I wish that were true. Invariably, they could be doing a better job and they need closer supervision too.

Everyone loves it when you are busy selling, because you leave them alone and there is no close scrutiny going on. That is not as effective as when we concentrate on what the sales team and the sales manager are doing. Gradually, move your clients across to the sales team and become more knowledgeable about what your salespeople are doing all day long. The results will be insightful, if not downright scary.