The “a-ha” moments that can transform a clients business is one of the most satisfying parts of this job.
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Some of the most satisfying moments in this line of work are when a client has an “aha” moment.
Sometimes it’s something they’ve known and subsequently forgotten. Sometimes it’s something they’ve never known but realise is fairly obvious once it’s staring them straight in the face.
During the earlier stages of working with founders, I try to understand the elements of the business that are creating bottlenecks as it relates to sales. From there, we begin to build a commercial layer that allows them to free themselves up to work on the business instead of in the business.
A common theme is understanding deal flow and where leads are ultimately coming from.
As they say, “a healthy pipeline cures all ills”.
If you’ve got a team of salespeople or account managers struggling to fill pipe, and as a founder you’re sat there with a wealth of knowledge, historical contacts, and relationships that have either never been approached or were approached in the early days and haven’t been touched since, then this is often an area that yields some quick wins and, dare I say it, low-hanging fruit.
This has happened on a number of occasions recently, but it reminds me most of the time I was working with Simon Wardropper at Realtime Agency. Simon hired me to come in and reduce the bottleneck and reliance on his personal contribution to sales.
Simon has a wealth of contacts from his well-documented history in the marketing sector. People and brands across telco, banking, insurance, consumer businesses. A real black book that most people would kill for.
During my first few sessions with him, we looked at a strategy to unpick his contacts and build a soft outreach approach that would engage people in meaningful, warm conversations rather than just pitching.
That led to a pipeline of contacts genuinely interested in learning more about the agency’s services, and in some cases, ready to procure. Over the following six months, we generated over £2 million in new pipeline. Hidden inside his head, his WhatsApp, and his LinkedIn profile.
So I put it to you… When was the last time you looked at your own contacts and put together a sequence of events to reconnect with people you’ve worked with in the past? Ex-colleagues, ex-bosses, ex-partners, ex-employees — many of whom will have stepped up the career ladder and are now in more senior roles.
If you haven’t done this in a while, here’s what I’d recommend. Download your LinkedIn contacts, filter by sector and industry, scan through them with intention, and build a meaningful, systemised outreach approach. Involve one of your more trusted salespeople. As the conversations and relationships start to rebuild, hand them over to that person to nurture and follow through into new business. Stay close as a guardian, but let your team do the heavy lifting and the closing.
These are the kinds of projects I genuinely love getting involved in. The pipeline was always there. It just needed someone to go looking for it.
Let me know if any of you decide to put this into practice over the coming weeks. I’d love to hear the results.
How I Help Founders:
I specialise in working with founders running businesses of between 2 and 50 people. They’re quite often in the technology, AI, software, and agency spaces. The common theme is that they’re all looking for support on growing their businesses and developing the commercial layer beneath it, freeing up their time.
There are a few ways I support founders…
Strategic Revenue Partner — There are a three models to this, and it really depends on where you are as a business and what you need. More information can be found here
The Revenue Room — A closed virtual roundtable designed for founders and senior leaders to have open, honest, frank conversations about the challenges they’re facing and receive support and advice from a group of experts just like you. Egos are left at the door, along with any pitch decks…
The topic for each Revenue Room session evolves. We’ve covered M&A, investment, what to do when the pipeline dries up and how to squeeze more revenue from existing clients.
RR will continue to evolve based on feedback from the community. They’re free to attend. If you’d like to read insights from our most recent session which covered M&A, you can find more details here
I only work with a small number of businesses at any one time. The work is on 1-2-1 basis, highly personalised, and always focused on driving an increase in revenue and company valuations.
If you’d like a no-strings-attached conversation about what’s going on with your business and how you can unlock more revenue without increasing your workload, then reply to this email, (it goes directly to my inbox), or pick a time from my calendar
Look forward to hearing from some of you.
Have a fantastic week ahead. Simon