Hey, 👋 Scott from The Sales Mastermind here.

Today’s edition only takes 2 minutes.

Incremental change will get incremental improvements. Every now and again, it's good to use events to force significant change to reap significant results.

Today we’ll cover:

• Storytime
• Something Old, Something New
• Take Action

Storytime

Recently, I expanded my remit with one of my oldest clients.

The founder and I have had a weekly meeting since 2023. It was an hour-long session where we would dissect the most important issue at hand.

In that time we'd:

• More than tripled revenue
• Dramatically increased the number and quality of leads
• Significantly increased pricing to raise the floor on client quality
• The first seller became successful, and
• Just hired a second seller

But it had been long enough, and the second seller wasn't showing up in the Closed Won deals or revenue.

Taking a sales team from 2 people (seller + founder) to 3 people (2 sellers + founder) was a step change that almost no business is prepared for.

So we expanded my remit to include reviewing processes and directly supporting both sellers.

We added a weekly Pipeline Review, moved from a single shared inbox (sales@) to each seller owning their own email, and are about to roll out a new set of CRM Pipeline stages.

Instantly (in the first month), we broke sales records and haven't slowed down since.

Every change we've made was easy to see once I got on the inside.

But they'd never been noticed before because everyone was looking at incremental improvements rather than the step-change that comes from doubling the number of sellers.

It was a textbook example of "What got you here, will not get you there."

Something Old, Something New

All businesses exist only because of what came before. And everything that has come before is also holding all businesses back from the next level.

Most of your processes are great, most of your workflows are exactly what you need to keep the business running, and until you have your step-change moment (in storytime, that moment was hiring the second seller), you don't HAVE to do anything.

But if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

And most founders I work with want this week/month/year to be better than last week/month/year.

Take Action

To make this real, pick one function, one department, one workflow, one task.

It doesn't really matter what you pick as long as you pick something.

Work out the KPI that would represent a step change. Double the output, halve the mistakes, something vast.

Some good sales examples would be:

• Double the conversion rate from lead to deal.
• Double the number of conversations per day.
• Halve the number of deals created (counter-intuitively, many, many, MANY sellers let anyone into their pipeline, and it costs them in the long run)

Next, assign your best employee who is not part of that team (or yourself if you have the mindset).

Tell them the process is broken; that it should be doubled (or halved), and you need their help to investigate and make suggestions.

Then, let them cook.

You'll be amazed by the results you see when you shine a light on a function, department, workflow, or task with semi-fresh eyes.

If you know something could be doing better, try a big change and see what happens. It's not hard to reverse most changes; it's much harder to look back and regret what could have been.

Until next week,
Scott Cowley

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