Hey, 👋 Scott from The Sales Mastermind here.

Today’s edition only takes 3 minutes.

When in doubt, ask Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

Today we’ll cover:

• Storytime
• Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?
• Example

Storytime

My customers in 2026 have had a common theme: not knowing what to do next to move closer to their desired goal.

One coachee runs an education business for a professional service. The kind that requires individuals to complete continuous professional development, or CPD hours, to maintain their accreditation.

After seeing great success in allowing individuals to self-serve and buy education and training, my coachee decided they wanted to sell to businesses and teams. Meaning they would sell 100 licenses to a single customer rather than 100 customers.

But there is no single activity or playbook to go from 100% self-service clients to running discoveries, building internal stakeholders and champions, and managing procurement cycles within traditional professional services firms.

Another coachee, running a marketing agency, recently hired their first seller. And the seller is experienced, he is good.

The seller needs to generate 50%-ish of his own deals, but he is struggling to decide what to do each day:

• Should he try to find partners who can refer business?
• Should he book more trade shows and networking?
• Should he start cold calling? If yes, who and how?

Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

In response to this trend, I am referring to the framework from the book of the same title, Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?

Popularised by Ben Hunt-Davis, it’s a framework he and his teammates used to win the Rowing Men’s VIIIs at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

The framework relies on having a crazy goal and then asking for any action or activity:

Meaning, will doing that action actually get me closer to, or further away from, my crazy goal?

Ben mentions two specific examples:

• Getting on an ergometer (rowing machine) for a 70min session, will it make the boat go faster? Yes - do it.
• Going out for a curry and beer, will it make the boat go faster? No - don’t do it.

(Obviously, this is a simplification; read the book if you want more.)

Sales Example

Let’s use the example of:

On the surface, this is a great business.

Yet anyone who has been in this situation knows that the owner/CEO/founder/Director will lose sleep worrying about losing clients and not being able to replace them.

To begin the Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? Framework we start with a crazy goal - let’s say:

Next, we need to break it down into a manageable goal. For ease of math, let’s assume starting today, an average contract value is $50,000, a 20% close rate and a 2-week sales cycle - so the goal is:

• 20 new clients in 4 months ($1,000,000/$50,000 = 20)
• 100 introductions (20 clients / 20% close rate = 100)
• 15 weeks (2-week sales cycle means the last initial meeting must be before June 16th)
• 7 meetings per week (100 intros / 15 weeks = 6.6666*, I rounded up)

Now that we know the weekly measure of success, we need to work out the activities that will make the boat go faster.

Most sellers jump to marketing activities, such as Ads or content, to generate 7 meetings per week.

However, it will probably take more than 15 weeks to generate 100 meetings, as marketing is a slow process to start from scratch.

Instead, given that the agency has been around for a decade, is profitable, and is well known and respected, we can assume they have a significant number of past clients and past introductions that didn’t result in work.

The past is the first place to start finding new clients. It’s the fastest but the least scalable.

So the action item becomes:

• Create a list of anyone the agency has ever spoken to
• Stack rank these by the likelihood of a new meeting
• Write the email template/call script
• Smile, dial, and follow up with emails to book meetings

And we can ask of each of the activities above:

Assuming that we get 3-4 meetings a week, we only need to find another 2-3 meetings.

Now it’s your turn - reply with how you would use Will It Make the Boat Go Faster To find another 2-3 meetings per week over the next 15 weeks.

Or if you're in a similar position to the agency owner above - not know where to start finding new meetings, what to say when you speak to buyers, or even who to contact - drop me a line as this is exactly the problem I solve.

Until next week,
Scott Cowley

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