There are four jobs, and the order isn’t optional#
- Write the sales process down.
- Put numbers on it.
- Hand it to someone else.
- Work on yourself.
You can’t do the third without the first. That’s the whole reason people hire salesperson after salesperson and watch each one flounder — they’re being asked to pull a process out of someone else’s head, which isn’t a job anyone can do.
Selling by ear#
Most small-business selling is improvised deal by deal. It works, in the sense that money arrives. It just only works while you personally are running it, and it makes you the ceiling.
Writing it down means mapping every step someone goes through, from first hearing your name to paying the invoice:
- How they find you, and what turns them from a stranger into a lead.
- The questions you ask that frame their problem and put you in the middle of it.
- What happens after a good call.
- What happens when someone goes quiet — which is most of them.
The target is a straight line of steps, written clearly enough that somebody hired next month could start driving revenue with it, instead of spending the usual three to six months absorbing it by osmosis.
You can’t fix what you can’t see#
Running sales on instinct is like driving fast at night with no speedometer, no fuel gauge and no headlights. It feels fine until it doesn’t.
The numbers that matter aren’t complicated:
- Conversations per week.
- Leads that turn into discovery calls.
- Deals sitting at the decision stage.
- Close rate.
- Total pipeline value.
Under about a million a year, a spreadsheet does this fine. A CRM is nicer, not necessary. The point isn’t the tool — it’s replacing a feeling about the month ahead with something you can look at over a coffee.
Feast and famine gets blamed on the market. Usually it’s just not being able to see what’s coming until it’s already here.
The plant and the pot#
There’s a version of this where you build the whole thing correctly and it still stalls, and the reason is you.
A plant only grows as big as the pot it’s in. The business is the plant. The skills, habits and beliefs that got you to where you are now aren’t necessarily the ones that get you past it.
One case worth sitting with: an engineer selling high-tech services into aviation, stuck around fifty thousand a year for roughly a decade. His belief was that every client needed a completely bespoke approach. That belief alone made each deal take about ten times longer than it needed to. Nothing was wrong with his product or his market. The bottleneck had a chair and a name.
The job that looks like filler#
Working on yourself sounds soft next to “build a documented process.” It’s the one that decides whether the other three survive.
A useful question to ask on a regular schedule: how am I currently holding this back? The honest answers are usually unglamorous — refusing to stop doing delivery work, avoiding the numbers because they might be bad, or a belief you’ve never said out loud that quietly undoes any system you build.
A few small things to try:
- Write down the last five deals you closed, step by step, and look for the shape they share.
- Pick three numbers and track them weekly. Start with conversations, close rate, pipeline value.
- Name one task you’re doing that a documented process would let someone else do.
- Answer the “how am I holding this back” question in writing, once a month.
