Your sales messiah isn’t coming.

So build a business that doesn’t need one.

HOW YOU MAKE IT

At some point, your business had a founder. Either they were

• Naturally, luckily pretty good at selling

• Willing to struggle and ask for help until they GOT good at selling

• Able to hire someone right out of the gate to do the selling

Either way, two things were true:

Your company got sales (it wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t)

and

Whoever got those sales for you was, or became, or came to be viewed as, kind of a superstar.

Essential. Central. Irreplaceable. That’s the place of money to a business, and so that’s the place of the money-getter, the revenue-creator, the rainmaker, in the business.

That’s a problem, though.

HOW MAKING IT UNMAKES YOU

Somewhere north of $1M in annual revenue, most organizations need sales help.

Maybe it’s sooner. Maybe it happens well past $1M. But it happens.

If you grow enough, you need a second salesperson, then a third, and so on.

And what you find is your superstar, your first salesperson, outsells all the new folks. You can’t duplicate that first success.

Overall, your sales get worse.

You hit a slump. The instinct is to seek a silver-bullet hire, a hero, a messiah of moolah to come work for you and save you.

That first salesperson crushed it, after all. If these new people can’t, they must be the wrong people! Surely there’s another person out there who can rock the top line; you just need to find them.

That’s what you think.

Most companies try this, and most seasoned sales directors will tell you how often “miracle hires” end up creating miracles: Roughly zero percent of the time.

Your people aren’t your problem.

Your problem is: Your company DNA’s not built to scale. In business there are things that first salesperson, who is usually the founder, does that no one else can do – and not because they’re great at sales. Because they’re first.

When you grow, and your second and third and fourth salespeople can’t do those things that first person did, you start to notice gaps in strategy – gaps that didn’t matter with one person, but they really do with five. Gaps that slow sales for everyone who’s not the founder.

Here is why that happens, what those strategy gaps are, and how you can diagnose them.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARLY

Your first salesperson was the founder – or was authorized to more or less behave as if they were.

They had three superpowers:

• They could change your offers on the fly, without saying “let me get back to you.”

• They had personal ownership of your work because they’d been “there from the beginning.” Clients felt that.

• They were doing market research live, in real time – hearing from clients and perfecting language on the fly until they found what works.

All this adds up to one thing:

Your first salesperson authored your positioning.

Your positioning is your company’s answer to two questions:

1️⃣ What business are we really in?

2️⃣ What sets us apart there?

Your positioning is the heart of your whole business strategy. Not just marketing, not just sales – all of it.

At first it’s a moving target.

But the more you hear from clients about what matters, the more you can fix positioning in a way that helps you win.

Your first salesperson did that, probably for years.

That work lived in their head.

Where no one else could get it.

OUT OF MY HEAD

A company of any size will struggle if positioning lives in someone’s head.

You have to pull it out, put it on paper, and choose consciously into it.

You have to make sure it lines up with the other parts of strategy – with your vision of success, with your unique strengths and with the systems your business runs on.

Going through this exercise, pulling positioning out of people’s heads and talking through it and agreeing on it, will probably change it in the same way turning an idea about a whale into Moby Dick changed that idea. It’s not a rebirth or a rebrand exactly, but it is creative.

You are naming what your company is, and you are choosing what your company should be. You are owning your success – not merely hoping for it.

This takes courage.

And it’s fun.

And when you’re done, when you’ve named where you stand and what you stand for and how you will make the change your company’s here to make – someone can turn that into messaging.

And then everyone can say the same thing. So they can sell consciously the way that first salesperson sold unconsciously.

1. REALITY GAP

I think of strategy as a tower; when the bricks don’t line up everything you do gets wobbly.

If your business has some wobble, check for gaps.

The first gap to look for is a gap between positioning and strengths – in other words, between how your company thinks about itself and how it actually gets things done.

Reality gaps are common in a company with a dreamer at the helm. If you’ve got one, you’re like one of those big dogs that believes it’s a small dog. You knock things over. Sometimes people, too.

You won’t know if you’ve got this gap.

But you’ll see symptoms:

• Sales performance is all over the place

• You negotiate a lot on price

• The question “what do you do?” gets a different answer every time

When salespeople sense that what the company talks about isn’t what their prospects really care about, they write their own script. Results vary.

2. SYSTEMS GAP

Maybe your company knows what it’s about – but lacks the tools to live it out effectively.

• Clients like you, but prospects don’t see the value

• You track revenue; you don’t track the actions that produce it

• Referrals never seem to happen

The company with a systems gap is doing the right things in the wrong way; it’s got bad habits or a broken CRM or an online presence it’s embarrassed by.

Salespeople are ill-equipped – or there’s no feedback loop to tell you how equipped they are.

You don’t know how you’re doing.

3. CULTURE GAP

Most people think of strategy as a thing for leadership to do. That isn’t right.

A culture gap means your sales team

• Sees mission and vision as irrelevant

• Resists offering new products or ideas; they stick with what works

• Can get clients to trust them, but not trust the company

This is about more than communication; it’s about your people owning what they’re part of. Culture will embody your identity – or resist it.

Sales will show you symptoms, but the challenge is bigger.

If you’re interested in seeing how these strategy gaps show up in other areas of a business, try this Broken Strategy Bingo card.

If you could use some outside insight – you know where to find me.