I design and build  sales systems for enterprises and startups organizations across Asia Pacific. So I’ve heard a lot of expressions from business owners, founders, and high performing sales individuals.

Many of these expressions are said in  heated moments. However, they are often said by founders who are desperate to scale the business and are a cry for help. I’m going to break down a few of these expressions. I can offer some ways to scale a founder out of a sales role.

Imagine you’re able to distil customer creation into a  handful of interactions. For an internet startup, customer creation might look like three emails, two videos, a telephone call, and a shout out on Twitter. For a medical practice, the line up might look like one messenger chat, one online booking, one interaction at an unmanned reception and one feedback form. A sales system decodes the process of making a customer.

A sales system spells out the ingredients or formula to make a customer, in a clearly understood sequence.

A sales system will tell you the precise number of interactions to make a customer. If you serve small businesses, this could be 15 interactions. If you serve enterprise firms, it could number 25 or more interactions before a customer is created.

In 2016 we conducted a friction test on a sector called cross border payments. When we interrogated the salespeople operating the telephones, online chat, and email, we were sold a different version of the product. Getting on the same page about what we are selling improves the customer experience and reduces friction because we are ☝ tempering the customer’s expectations early.

It is important to define who you do not serve. When customer inquiries are coming thick and fast, the salesforce 😓 need to make split-second decisions about who they ought to serve. By trying to serve everyone, your salespeople risk dropping customers who really need you today.

If you serve the wrong profile, you will be forced to eliminate these customers later, employ public relations professionals to mop up the bad press and unwind features which are not relevant. This customer profile is a liability.

Time is an important dimension to making a buying decision. Every customer goal has an expiry. If the goal is not achieved in the time frame, the customer is highly likely to drop-off and abandon their buying decision. This explains why companies with inferior products 👏 make sales over companies with superior products. They win based on speed.

The next time your salespeople complain the competitor has a better product, remind them they can win business by serving faster.

You hire Jack. Jack sits next to you, follows you on the road, meets you after work, and has coffee with you and your family in the morning having spent the night on your living room floor. Jack is doing all the 👍 right stuff. But Jack never sells more than you do. Why? Because Jack is not a chef, he is a cook. Jack can bake a cake, not write the recipe to bake the cake. If Jack could write a recipe, he’d be a founder of a startup too.

Each time a customer arrives at your shop front they are treated differently. You catch yourself and the salespeople writing email from scratch. A great deal of time is lost writing bespoke email that is 👎 inaccurate, untested and lacking zest. When customer expiry is counting down, there isn’t time to design a customer flow. The words and pictures need to be prepared in advance otherwise the interactions will be slow.

Future-selling is when you commit the startup to build a feature tomorrow, in order to make a sale today. The startup makes the sale contingent 🤔 on a feature that may not have been specified, costed or the feature thoroughly tested with the code-base. Because the feature is unspecified, the precise date of the release is hard to predict, making the sale a moving target.