290: Work On Your Sales Not In Your Sales

<p>We have all heard that business advice to “work on your business, not in your business”.  When we are the owner of the business we can sometimes forget this, because we love doing the sales ourselves and spending time establishing relationships with our clients.  I know this a problem for me, because the successful sales process is like a drug and you want more of those dopamine hits when you land the deal. </p> <p> </p> <p>Salespeople like people and they like the personal elements of dealing with buyers.  To grow the business though requires scale and that usually means hiring, training and developing more salespeople.  If you are out there landing deals, then you cannot scale and will be stuck right where you are now.  Most small businesses are trying to bootstrap their growth, so you need deals to fund the growth.  This leads to a chicken and the egg situation, where you need to be in sales mode to land deals to generate the cash to expand.  If you stop selling, then the cash flow gets impacted and there isn’t the cash to hire more people.</p> <p> </p> <p>Another issue will arise if you ever decide to sell the business.  If you are the key or one of the key producers, the new buyer will want to reduce the price to take into account that you won’t be there to generate the deals or they will want to lock you in as a part of an earn out over a number of years.  Being the boss is one thing, but selling the business and then having to now work for someone else is entirely another thing.  If you weren’t unemployable before you started the business, then after years of being your own boss, you are likely totally unemployable now.</p> <p> </p> <p>Going from a big component of the sales flow in the business to zero is a bad idea.  Revenues will tank and then you have all manner of cash flow dilemmas.  We have to wean ourselves off the star salesperson role.  Like the successful athlete who has to move out of the limelight to being in the background as the coach, we have to make that adjustment.  A lot of our ego ca