How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Sales (Without Abandoning It)

Speaker A: 00:00:37

A lot of business owners ask me, how do I escape sales? Like, how do I remove myself from. From the sales process? I cringe a little because it's a dangerous question.

And the reality is, is as a business owner, you basically never remove yourself from sales. You don't get out of sales. You evolve with it. So what I'm gonna do in this video is just reframe. Like, what is. What is the real question that.

That you're asking? And what's the answer? Let's dive in. All right, So a lot of MSPs and business owners talk about, like, wanting to remove themselves from.

I am a business owner, so I completely understand this. You're exhausted. You're. You're juggling too many things. You're. You're spinning all the plates. You're on the operation side.

Maybe you're on the delivery side. You're, you know, helping with. With all of the sales. You're like. It's just, you're spread too thin. And I get that.

But the reality is, is one thing that you want to accept up front until you are in a position where you are just an investor in your business, where you have a CEO or a president that's actually running functionally, like, basically all the business, and frankly, not even then, really, you' going to be in sales. Sales is the oxygen that you need for your business. Like, cash flow is everything. So you run out of that, then the business fails.

Like, so it's the one thing that you can't do in business is run out of money. So you never want to fully remove yourself from sales.

But the question you want to ask is, how do I get my time back and keep sales coming into the business? In other words, what role do I play in the sales process as the business grows?

Or what role do I need to play in order to make the business grow past me? Because maybe you're at this point great at sales, but you're the bottleneck. And the answer to that is there are different phases.

There are distinct phases that you will go through in the business lifecycle. Okay? And early on, you are all of it. You are like, if you look at the sales organization and you say, hey, you know what?

There's sdr, bdr, whatever you want to call, like, somebody prospecting, doing cold calls, doing outreach, doing emails, whatever that is they're doing, like, business development activity. You've got, you know, a salesperson, like a closer or an ae, like, whatever you want to call. You've got kind of like the sales manager. Right?

Like you're, and you're all of it rolled into, rolled into one. And at this stage in the business, man, it is tough. Like you are, it's, it's chaotic.

Like you're, you're the person that's like, I'm going to the networking events, I'm responding to people on LinkedIn, I'm, you know, sending some emails, I'm hopping on the sales calls, I'm doing these proposals, I'm writing the proposals, I'm delivering the proposals. You just got a bunch of going on, right? Like, but that's, that's how every business starts. But then something happens.

The dog starts to catch the car, right? Like, you actually start getting some sales and the thing starts growing.

You now like have the customers to take care of and now you've got the hiring to start doing. And now you've got the business evolving and you're trying to maintain that flywheel that got it going in the first place.

But you now have other jobs that are, that are, that are adding up very quickly.

And the more sales that you bring in, the more jobs that you create, the more jobs that you create, especially if you're doing them, the more difficult it is to keep the sales going. You kind of like hit this not quite plateau, but you hit this threshold and you go, okay, I'm, this isn't manageable.

Like, I, I can't keep on with, with this. And, and frankly, you can't actually, it's like a, again, like you, this is, the sales activity is driving all the other stuff.

And that's when people start asking themselves, all right, how do I get myself out of this sales machine, right? Like, I, I can't keep that going. This is now requiring a ton of my time on all the other stuff.

And I, but I need the sales to keep going in order to fund and pay for all the other stuff that in the business. And the answer isn't you remove yourself from that process entirely. The answer is you ascend through that process, right? And here's what I mean.

Step one, promote yourself at a lead generation, right? So if you look at a sales organization like, picture yourself twice as big, right? So double your revenue.

And let's assume that you've got the semblance of a, of a sales team building and you've got a bdr, like a business development rep who's doing outreach and doing lead generation things like that.

You've got an AE, like account executive or a closer or somebody that's, that's selling like running Discovery proposal and then you've got a manager. Okay, like let's, let's assume that those are the roles in the sales. Org.

Well, the first thing you want to do is promote yourself out of the lead gen, right? So what do you do? You, you can systematize it, you can flip it to marketing.

You can go hire a BDR or an isr like whatever you, whatever acronym you want to give it. You can give somebody or hire somebody to bring them on board and start doing the prospecting for you.

From a capital standpoint, it's the, it's the lowest investment, you know, to, to make.

You know, if you just look at total comp of people in a sales organization, all that stuff, hiring an SDR is going to be the, the lower capital investment that you have to make to hire somebody and replace the function. Second reason is the payback period on that role because the ROI and the sales cycle of the person doing that job is compressed.

Like they're, they're generating leads, they're getting you bookings, they're getting you appointments. I know within 60, 90 days whether somebody's doing really well. I can also see results and actually get ROI from that position within 60 to 90 days.

Okay, so like that person sets one appointment for me. If you're selling like MSP services, lifetime value of a deal, huge, right? So just run the math on this.

Say, okay, that person gets me one or two bookings in the first three months. Like cool. Like, then we're, we're fairly neutral on the expense potentially.

Whereas, you know, if you start with like an OSR type of role, sales cycle, and that's longer, you know, it's more expensive to hire that person. You know, it takes them a while to, to ramp up even before the sales cycle kicks in.

So I promote myself at a lead generation and I'm now primarily the ae, the account executive and the sales manager, right? So I've offloaded that. Now as the ae, as the salesperson, I'm going to run these deals.

I'm going to make sure that this function on, on the SDR side is, is operational and that it's working the way that I want. Now what I want to do is figure out how do I promote myself out of the outside sales rep role. Okay?

So now I'm going to hire somebody to go to fill those shoes. Now the other thing about this strategy is one pays for the other. Okay?

So when the SDR starts setting appointments and I start going on those appointments and start closing some deals, it now Gives me more capital, gives me more cash to hire the next role, right? So it's like hiring this thing paid for the next thing, right? So the next thing, hire the outside sales rep.

So I'm gonna go find somebody that can run really good discovery, somebody that can actually close deals, and I'm gonna look for a way to promote myself out of this role, and I'm gonna do that properly, right? I'm gonna hire the right person. I'm going to give them a training plan, I'm going to ramp them up, like all those things at that point.

Now what I have is I've got somebody in the lead gen function, the str. I've got somebody who's capable of closing deals and in running things as the osr. So guess what that makes you.

You've now promoted yourself to sales manager.

Because those two people, unless you hire somebody else, which I wouldn't recommend, and in this process anyway, at this point, you're now the sales manager. They report to you. And now you're running the weekly meetings. You're, you know, checking out the scorecards, you're listening to some calls.

Still takes time, by the way. Like, don't abdicate it. Don't say, like, hey, I'm hands off. Like, you guys got this. Cool. I'm gonna go like, work on all the operational stuff.

That's not, that's not the effective way to promote yourself through the process and get where you want to actually get to long term. You assume the sales manager role, right? So you've now promoted yourself into sales management.

At which point, of course, you can hire a sales manager or, or fractional sales management program. If, like, if you just have, you know, an OSR and an SDR may make more sense to go get somebody that's, that's fractional, by the way.

If you're looking for fractional sales management, we can help. But, or, or you hire a sales manager, whatever that is. What you don't want to do is just like, let those two functions fly, right?

Because I, I promise you that if you're not doing a weekly meeting, if you're not looking at the activity metrics, if there isn't accountability, if there's not ongoing coaching in both of those roles that they will diminish. You will see the turnover there. You won't get the results that you want. Like, all that will happen.

So you're still spending time, but you're spending significantly less time than you would have trying to do all of these things. Now. At that point, you may get somebody to fill that role.

And you then become kind of like the VP of Sales or the Chief Revenue Officer, however you want to look at. But at each stage you're just getting to the next level, right?

And you're assuming different responsibilities for the sales Org all the way up until the fact that you have. You know, like even as a CEO, when I had a CRO, I'm still involved in sales. I'm just involved at the CEO level now.

That is my answer to how do I remove myself from sales? You don't. You change the role that you play in the sales process as you build the machine.

And if you want to build a self sustaining business, if you want to build a self sustaining MSP and a sales flywheel that's capable of running without your direct immediate involvement in the lead generation, in the closing of sales, in the, even the management of the salespeople, like the direct management, that's the reframe. Like that's the mindset to look at.

This is you get the freedom that you're really chasing because that's what you're really asking is not how do I remove myself from sales, but like how do I get my time back, right? Like as a CEO and a business owner, how can I get better leverage on my time? This is the process. This is how I've done it.

This is how I'm doing it right now with, with MSP Sales Partners. I've done it before and done it with several other sales organizations. So I hope this has been helpful.

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