Entrepreneurship
Repeatable Sales Motions vs. Selling Success
Having a sales organization that consistently exceeds aggressive goals is the holy grail of growth-focused companies. A repeatable sales motion is often seen as the vehicle to make that happen. Unfortunately, few companies have translated salesmanship and the art of selling into the science of repeatable sales.
Often, one or two successful deals become the foundation for what is believed to be the repeatable sales motion. While there may be lookalike prospects you can focus on, that doesn’t mean there is real scale potential. This approach fails to address other independent variables, and often results in an approach that is neither repeatable nor scalable. Let’s take a more analytical look at what works and why, which leads to a better understanding of how to develop repeatability.
As the Roman philosopher Seneca is quoted as saying, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Preparation is more than understanding the prospect company, their competition and differences, the market they operate in, and what changes may be coming (technological, legislative, economic, etc.)—although that is often far more preparation than many Account Execs bring to a meeting. I’m always amazed at how unprepared many sellers are, and that is the quickest way to lose your prospect’s respect.
I’ve learned over the years that planning for the unexpected is planning for sustainable success. That can be as tough and nebulous as it sounds. You need to stay calm, unemotional, and in control while assessing the situation and adapting. Confidence definitely helps, as does logic. Composure is a key aspect of professionalism.
I like the Five Whys method of drilling into those statements or concerns to understand them. Sometimes it’s fluff, but sometimes it helps you close the deal faster because you uncovered something others missed. Other times, you qualify a prospect out quickly and move on to a better fit that develops into a closed-won deal.
Salesmanship includes:
- Being prepared
- Being likeable
- Relationship building starts with finding connections and common interests, then demonstrating your ability to help the prospect solve their problem (and at this stage they may be more focused on symptoms than root causes).
- Understanding the need. Why is this important to them? Document this, including their phrases and terminology, as that can have a huge impact on their acceptance of your proposed solution.
- Having value to add. This includes product knowledge, competitive knowledge, industry knowledge, and more. This allows you to have a perspective about their business that may not be 100% accurate, but will likely impress them and lead to deeper discussions about their needs and goals.
- Being respectful. This starts with respecting their time.
- Being focused on solving their problems. Without this, you won’t have a loyal and lasting customer base. To me, this is as much about reputation as it is about salesmanship.
- Learning from failures as much as success. Evolution is important.
These are all teachable/learnable skills. They also address the intangibles that fuel selling success.
So, which came first – the selling successes or the repeatable sales motions? To me, they go hand-in-hand. By developing a foundation of a high-performance sales team, pooling information gathered during sales discovery calls and other meetings, and focusing on unmet needs and associated messaging, it is possible to create and refine something that becomes repeatable. It takes more than one or two wins to prove there is a pattern.
Selling may not come naturally to a lot of people (it wasn’t for me), but it is a muscle that can be developed with hard work, practice, and a goal of improving each and every day. Your success may appear to be luck, but you will know better.
Playing to Win, versus Playing Not to Lose
Life is funny. There are always ways to justify nearly anything you want (or don’t want) to do. For example, “The timing is not right” (“We’re not ready,” “The market will be better soon,” “We need to save more,” “We need to staff up first,” etc.) Justifications often include things like “We had a bad experience once” or “We are a very conservative organization” – comments that tend to lean towards risk aversion or a lack of confidence.
I’ve seen this in my own business after a large investment failed to yield the desired results, when I was a regional sales and services leader at a “growth-oriented” software company, and as a consultant. The root cause always varies, but the net effect is that those companies play it safe.
Why is that a problem? It may not be. Being content may not be a bad thing. Sometimes the status quo is enough. Having a reliable schedule, manageable stress levels, sufficient funds, and doing something you like with people you like may be the goal. But not everyone is built that way.
Growth usually means stepping out of your comfort zone, taking on risk, recognizing the need to adapt to stay ahead of the curve, and being OK with uncertainty. It means bringing on people with different backgrounds, skill sets, and perspectives than yourself. It can be very hard – especially if you are used to being in control and having the answers.
For me, the solution was twofold.
- We had to accept failure as an inevitable outcome. I believe this is where a lot of people stop. If you view failure as negative, then everything that stems from it (loss of money, a hit to your ego, and other setbacks) becomes your focal point. Lesson Learned: When you view it as a learning and self-improvement opportunity (“cognitive reframing”), it just becomes part of the cost of getting better.
From your team’s perspective, if everyone is as focused on the journey as you are on the outcome, people tend to view challenges logically rather than emotionally (thereby controlling fear). Success truly is a mental game. - We developed a structured approach for future investments (read more about it here). We treated each new venture like a project. It was focused, analytical, and unemotional. With this approach, speculative investments became easier each time. It’s amazing how that distance also helps switch the focus from risk to reward.
This understanding led to a presentation I gave that helped relaunch a company, helped several clients critically assess the risks and rewards of their plans, and may help someone consider whether they are focused on winning or simply on not losing.
As Richard Branson wrote in his book, Screw It, Let’s Do It: Lessons in Life, “If you opt for a safe life, you will never know what it’s like to win.” So, are you ready to play to win?
Acting Like a Startup
Over the years, I have heard comments like, “We operate like a startup,” “We act like a startup,” and “We are an overnight success that was 10 years in the making.” These statements are often euphemisms for “We are small and not growing as quickly as we would like.”
There are numerous estimates of startup and failure rates in their first few years. One of the best descriptions I have found is from Failory. Investopedia and LendingTree have similar but differing takes on the statistics and root causes. The net result is that failure is much more common than success, especially over time. So, “acting like a startup” is not necessarily good, even when true. Instead, you want to “act like a successful startup!“
Understanding the various causes and the data on success and failure should become significant inputs to business plans focused on long-term success. As a Founder, there are several points that I believe to be key to success:
- You have specific expertise that is in demand and would be valuable to an identifiable number of prospective customers. How would those customers use those skills, and how would they quantify the value? That understanding provides focus on what to sell and to whom.
- A detailed understanding of the market and key players is needed to hone in on a niche to succeed.
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses, then hire the most intelligent and ambitious people who complement your weaknesses and strengths.
- Understand how to reach those potential customers and the messaging you believe will compel them. Find a way to test and refine those assumptions as necessary – before you go all in. Remember, Marketing and Lead Generation are very important but also expensive, so it pays to get this right the first time.
- Have a plan for delivering on whatever you sell before you get your first sale. A startup needs to develop its track record of success, beginning with its first sale.
- Cash flow is king. It is far too easy to run out of money while looking at an excellent balance sheet because of receivables. Understand what matters and why.
- Founders need to understand the administrative side of a business – especially the financial, legal (especially contract law), insurance, and taxes. Find experts to validate your approach and fill in knowledge gaps.
- Consistency leads to repeatable success. You standardize, optimize, and automate everything possible. Wasted time and effort become wasted opportunities.
- Finally, there needs to be sufficient cash on hand to fund the time it takes to find and close your first deals, deliver and invoice the work, and then receive your first payments. That could easily be a 3-6 month period.
Those are the foundational items that are reasonably tangible. What is not as concrete but equally as important are:
- Having or developing the ability to spot trends early and identify gaps that could become opportunities for your business.
- An agile mindset allows you to pivot your offerings or approach in order to refine your business model and hone in on that successful niche. Don’t fall into a sunk-cost fallacy.
- Foster a sense of innovation within your business. Always look for opportunities to deliver a better product or service, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business, and create intellectual property (IP) that adds long-term value.
- Focus on being the best and building a brand that helps differentiate you from your competition.
- Become a Leader, not a Manager (lead people, manage processes). Create your vision of success, set expectations for each person and team, and help eliminate roadblocks to their success. Trust your team to help you grow and replace members quickly if it becomes clear they are not a good fit.
Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” To grow, you need to choose the best people you can afford, guide them, and trust them to perform in the best interest of your company. That is true in any size organization.
Winning is hard, so focus on the journey. Making your customers’ lives easier and allowing your employees to be creative while doing something they are proud of will lead you to your destination. But when things start going well, don’t sit back and convince yourself you are successful. Instead, feel the pressure of the competition – they are out there – and continue to focus on ways to improve and grow.
Success means different things to different people, but longevity, growth, profitability, and some form of contributing to the greater good should be dimensions of success for any vision.
Innovations “Iron Triangle”
The concept of an Iron Triangle is that each side of the triangle represents an item constrained by the other two sides. In Project Management, this is often referred to as a triple constraint. This identifies the fundamental relationships (such as Time, Cost, and Scope in Project Management) without addressing related aspects such as Risk and Quality. It provides a simple understanding of both requirements and tradeoffs.
Yesterday I spoke with Dave Mosby, an impressive person with an equally impressive background. He related Innovation to Fire, noting that in order to create fire, you need fuel, oxygen, and heat. He added that they must be in the right combination to achieve the desired flame. What a brilliant analogy.
Dave stated that for Corporate Innovation to succeed, you need the proper balance of Innovation, Capital, and Entrepreneurship. I found this enlightening because his description substituted “entrepreneurship” for “culture” in my mental model. While the difference is subtle, I found it to be important.
As noted above, simplified frameworks do not provide a complete understanding. But they help understand and plan around the foundational items required for success. Mapping this to past experiences, I gained a better understanding of things that did not move forward as desired and what I could have done differently to be more effective.
One idea was to create a fault-tolerant database using Red Hat’s JBoss middleware. We had a Services partner willing to create a working prototype, tune it for performance, document the system requirements and configuration, and package it for easy deployment. They wanted $10K to cover their costs.
I didn’t have a budget at the time, so I created a purchase request supported by a logical justification. It modeled potential revenue increases for database subscriptions based on the need for a failover installation and growth from potential expanded use cases. This was a slam dunk!
In my mind, this was simple as it was “only $10K,” and I had funded many similar efforts when I had my own company. But that’s the rub. I viewed these efforts as investments in understanding, lessons learned, and growth. Not every investment had a direct payoff, but nearly each had an indirect payoff for my company. It was an entrepreneurial mindset that accepted risk as something required for rewards and success. I now see, many years later, how reframing my proposal as a way to foster innovation and entrepreneurship within the company could have been far more effective, since training is usually a budgeted item that is much easier to justify.
It is never too late to gain new insights and lessons learned. A slightly different perspective on an important topic provided the understanding that should help position projects for future success. This came from a discussion with an interesting person who has “been there, done that” many times.
Are you Thinking About Starting a Business?
The last post on Starting a Business was popular, so I wanted to share a key lesson I learned and link to previous posts that offer insights as you launch your own business. If you have any questions, just post them in the comments; I’d be happy to reply.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a great deal of uncertainty and opportunity. For many, now is the ideal time to explore their dream of starting a business and jumping into entrepreneurship. That can be exciting, fun, stressful, financially rewarding, and financially challenging, all within the same short period of time.
Being prepared for that roller coaster ride and having the ability and strength to continue pushing forward is important. Something to understand is that “Things don’t happen to you. They are the Direct Result of your own Actions and Inactions.” That may sound harsh, but here is a prime example:
When I was closing my consulting business down, I trusted my Accountant and Payroll company to handle all of the required Federal, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Colorado filings – something they stated they would handle, and I accepted at face value. Both companies had done a great job before, so why would I expect any less this time?
About nine months later, I started receiving letters from Ohio and Colorado about filings due, so I forwarded them to the Accountant and Payroll company. I thought this was “old business” and was being handled, plus I had moved on. It was probably just a timing error, something easy to explain away.
Skipping forward nearly three years, I had been threatened by the IRS and the revenue departments in both Ohio and Colorado. I started with a combined total of nearly $500K in assessments. Slowly that dropped to $50K, and then to $10K. I spent countless hours on the phone and writing letters explaining the misunderstanding. It wasn’t until I finally found a helpful person in each department willing to listen and tell me specifically what needed to be done to resolve that situation. My final cost was around $1,000. I was relieved that this fiasco was finally over.
I blamed both the Accountant and Payroll Service for these problems for the longest time. Ultimately, I realized that it was my business and, therefore, my responsibility to understand the shutdown process – regardless of who did the work. I would have saved hundreds of hours and several hundred dollars by gaining that understanding earlier.
I was not a victim of anything – this situation directly resulted from my own inaction. It didn’t seem very important at the time, but my understanding of the situation and its importance was wrong, and I paid the price. Lesson learned. It was my business, so it was still my responsibility to the very end.
Below are the other links. You don’t have to read them all at once, but it’s worth bookmarking them and reading one per day. Every new perspective, idea, and lesson learned could be the thing that helps you achieve your goal a day, week, or month sooner than expected. Every day and every dollar matters, so make the most of both!
- Comments on and a link to an article on Curt Culver about Entrepreneurship.
- Comments on and a link to an HBR article about Start-ups and Entrepreneurship.
- Innovation, Intelligent Failure, and Failing Productively.
- Acting Like an Owner – Good Preparation for Becoming an Owner.
- Profitability Through Operational Efficiency.
- What Are You Really Selling?
- Continuous Improvement and a Growth Mindset.
- The Value Created by a Strong Team.
Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 