Founders being indispensable is costing you and the business every single day. Remember that referrals and warm introductions will dry up at some point, particularly if you’re not building your network consistently and regularly. If every deal still needs to be signed off by you before it moves, that creates friction in the business. And if nobody else can run a discovery call, you’ve got an issue.
A predictable top of funnel isn’t a hack. It needs to be a system, ingrained in everything you do within the business.
So if I run through the engine end to end, there are really five parts to this system as far as I can see.
- is clearly defining your ICP: targeted and deliberate.
- is having a robust lead generation machine, a busy pipeline with lots of people who could potentially buy your services or products.
- is having a structured discovery process in place, and remembering that discovery is not a one and done. It’s an always-on process that needs to be readdressed as the deal progresses.
- is having pricing that fits your audience and the product you’re building. Price it with intent, and price it with ROI in mind.
- is forecasting. We need to be able to predict where the next deal is coming from and in what timeframe it’s going to land.
Get these five things right and you’re on the road to building a very valuable business, with a sales engine that runs without you in the room.
So let’s dig a little deeper…
“Remember that only 1–3% of people are in market for your product at any one time.
ICP: So having deliberate ICP curation, and choosing who to engage with, matters way more than how many you engage with. Chasing every single lead that flickers a sign of interest, having no criteria for what a good customer really looks like, going too broad because every customer looks like a good customer, these are recipes for disaster. Be very focused and very deliberate on who you approach.
Repeatable Lead Generation: Built slowly over time, embrace your inner snail. Remember that if only 1–3% of people are in market at any one time. Building pipeline across multiple channels using the phone, email, LinkedIn. WhatsApp of course has its place too, and getting out into the market to have face-to-face conversations with people is incredibly important. Do all of these actions consistently and persistently, and your pipeline will start to take care of itself.
Discovery: The discovery process isn’t a one and done. It’s an always-on process. It needs to be recalled, and conversations need to be had with your prospect to make sure that what was important to them at the beginning is still important to them. We need to understand what their budgets are, and whether their priorities have remained the same or moved. Every touch point you make with a prospect is an opportunity to learn something new, or to reconfirm what you already knew. Treat qualification as a live filter, not a box ticked once and forgotten afterwards.
Pricing: This is obviously very dependent on you and your product. Low ticket high volume, or high ticket low volume, either way they both require a consultative approach and really understanding what’s getting the person to buy on the other end. What problem is your product or service solving? Is it a time-based issue, a risk-based issue, or a money-based issue? Sometimes it’s a combination of all three. But making sure your price point is appropriate for the product is something that needs to be solved for as quickly as possible.
Forecasting: This starts with a basic CRM. If you don’t have one and you’re still running things from a spreadsheet, you should probably take a look at that. I’ve seen many more columns than this, but I think somewhere between four and seven is about right, ranging from discovery call, qualified lead, proposal, and then getting that proposal committed into a contract. Those four are the most basic columns, but depending on your product and your customer, you could go a little more granular than that. Either way, we need a very clear method of understanding where the next deal is coming from, and in what timeline it’s likely to drop.
What we’re really aiming for with all of this is revenue that survives without you being in the room. For every deal, founder-dependent revenue is a liability to any acquirer, or anyone potentially looking to invest in the business. Founder-independent revenue is an asset. That’s the first sign the commercial layer is actually working, and it’s the whole point of building this stuff early.
Here’s a question to ponder…
If a deal came in tomorrow, could it close without you in the room?
Simon
P.S. On Tuesday 21st July at 5pm UK, I’m joining Anthony Rose, founder and CEO of SeedLegals (credited by Wired as the man who saved BBC iPlayer), for a live session on exactly this: why founder-led sales stall, and how to build the engine that gets you past it. It’s for founders who are just starting out, or building toward their next raise. Here’s the link if you want to join: https://luma.com/d75ku0s9