You’ll never be able to focus on the big picture if you’re stuck on the small details
Why isn’t my business scaling? This is something pretty much every founder has contemplated at one point or another.
If you’re frequently asking this question, there could be a variety of answers. Perhaps you don’t have clear goals? Maybe your marketing is misdirected? Could it be due to a lack of automation?
You might want to start by looking in the mirror. While you are your company’s biggest champion and want it to succeed more than anyone, you may actually be bringing it down.
The founder’s conundrum
When you first launched your business, there’s a good chance that you – and any partners – had to do everything. You probably didn’t have a huge budget to work with, so not hiring a team made financial sense. This means it was up to you to knock on doors (figuratively or literally) to raise awareness for your products or services and to sell your offerings. Hopefully, once you developed a loyal base of customers and the business began to grow, you brought in salespeople to take the reins. If, however, you refuse to relinquish your grasp on them, you have a pretty clear answer to that “Why isn’t my business scaling?” question.
When should a founder step away from sales?
Handing control of any aspect of a business – especially one as important as sales – to other people can be difficult. But, it’s important to always remember that you need to work on your business, not in it. This is why, at a certain point, you need to step away from day-to-day activities so you can focus on strategy and growth.
When things are up and running, it’s time to delegate tasks, including sales. Of course, this is easier said than done, especially if you’ve been instrumental in landing customers. But, once your business is established, this is precisely why you need to bring in designated salespeople.
4 reasons founders need to stop selling
Even when you hire salespeople, you may still be tempted to hop on calls or plan pitches. Don’t. You need to stop selling for four main reasons:
1. You’re not a salesperson
Let’s start with the obvious one. Sure, you may have had to take on the role of salesperson, but this isn’t who you are. You’re somebody who recognized a problem and came up with a vision to solve it. And even if you’ve gotten pretty good at selling, you will never be as good as people who’ve dedicated their lives to doing it.
2. You’re leaving a bad impression
Can you imagine Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos sitting in on a sales presentation or on the phone talking to a prospect? Sure, maybe early on, but once their companies were thriving, that sounds ridiculous. If you’re the one constantly pushing your product, it can undermine what you’re trying to accomplish.
3. You’ll be seen as a micro-manager
Hopefully, by now you know that you can’t do everything yourself. This also means that, once you bring people in, you have to get out of their way. Giving up selling may be tough at first, but if you don’t do it completely, you’ll end up hovering over your sales team and they won’t be as productive or successful. They also may not stick around for very long.
4. You’ve got more important things to do
This gets to the heart of the matter of why you shouldn’t be selling. If you’re too focused on day-to-day activities like sales, this is just going to distract you from the bigger picture. How could you possibly work on a long-term plan for growing your business when you’re bogged down with things like monthly sales goals?
How to get off the hamster wheel of founderitis
Trying to do everything yourself is a clear sign of founderitis. And if you stay on this path, not only will your business not get where you want it to go, it may never go anywhere. Instead, you need to:
Hire smart and provide the right training
Perhaps the most important thing you can do is hire the right people. That whole “get out of their way” thing we mentioned earlier is a lot easier when the folks selling for you are smart and talented. You also need to make sure they have training that incorporates the right components to build a great sales team.
Monitor performance
Just because you’ll no longer be involved in the daily details doesn’t mean you have to check out completely. It’s important to keep track of how your sales team is performing, and you can do this by putting a monitoring system in place.
Redefine your role
When you first planted the seeds for your business, you may have known exactly what you wanted your role to be. But, once you got involved in the actual running of the company, that may have gotten murky. Now that you no longer be involved in selling, it’s time to reevaluate what you should be doing to make the best use of your time.
If you’re reluctant to stop selling because you haven’t found the right salespeople, MetaGrowth Ventures can do something about that. With our proven formula, we’ll help you create an exceptional sales team, make sure they’re well-trained, and keep an eye on them. Get in touch to learn more about what we offer.
