Introduction

If you’re reading this book, chances are high you’re a CEO, an entrepreneur, or a sales and marketing head looking for a sales breakthrough. Any number of scenarios could’ve led you here:

• Perhaps your sales are heading in the wrong direction and you need to get things turned around.

• Maybe your sales aren’t declining, but they aren’t increasing either—they’re just stubbornly stagnant, despite all the effort and energy being invested in moving the needle.

• Maybe your sales are growing, just not at the rate you think they should be.

Whatever the case, you want to grow your business. You aren’t alone, and perhaps you’ve come to the right place.

I say perhaps because increasing sales in your business could be done in many ways. There are short-term solutions, long-term solutions, and an infinite number of options in between. This guide presents a framework for a very specific type of growth — sustainable and scalable growth. I’ll dive more into what that means later, but for now just know that if you are looking for shortcuts or cheap solutions, this is unlikely to be the guide for you.

How This Book Can Help You (And How It Cannot)

I created this book to provide other entrepreneurs and CEOs with an easy-to-follow framework to help think about growth. Those scenarios listed above? I’ve experienced all of them, and I wanted to create an asset that would have been invaluable to me when I was confronting those challenges.

What this book is not, however, is a step-by-step guide for long-run scaling. While it would be far better for my own business model if I could share a guide or a video offering you a paint-by-numbers template to grow your business, I have, alas, failed to discover that holy grail of sales. When I do, you can bet I’ll scream it from the rooftops and we’ll all swim in piles of money!

Because there are a near-infinite number of ways to assemble a company—accounting for variables such as people, structures, cultures, industries, business models, and operations—it would be impossible to create a single, one-size-fits-all sales growth manual.

Lastly, this book is not a comprehensive analysis of every subject we are going to cover. You can study sales and marketing for a lifetime without getting to everything. I sure as hell didn’t fit these subjects in a chapter.

That said, there are fundamentals of growth that are applicable to virtually every business or organization I’ve worked with, including nationally recognized brands and nonprofits, private-equity-backed companies, independent businesses, start-ups, and single-operator online stores. They were as applicable to my wife’s custom baby bedding business as they were a national advocacy organization. These fundamentals of growth will no doubt apply in some way to expanding your business as well, and this book presents a simple framework to apply them.

ABOUTME:

If you’re anything like me, you want to know who’s writing a guide like this before you commit to reading it. The source matters. (I take the counsel I receive on a daily basis from my kids differently than I do advice from my trusted mentors.)

My résumé is simple but, I hope, compelling: I’m an entrepreneur and executive with more than a decade of operating experience with full profit and loss responsibility, including as a CEO, and I’ve advised dozens of companies. All my experience has been in driving growth— meaning creating more of it, rekindling it, or discovering it.

I’ve started my own companies, one of which was a music promotions company that was acquired by another agency. Moreover, I co-led the turnaround of a family-owned business that required transitioning the business from a brick-and-mortar retail store to

an online, national retailer with a

fundamentally different business model. This small business was

eventually acquired by an investor group.

I transitioned from these ventures into sales, where I learned the

tricks of the trade in a number of ways: one memorable instance occurred when I was asked to sell cologne and perfume in parking lots for 100 percent commission, only to show up on payday to find an empty office. I remain impressed by how efficient they were!

After that, I joined a national sales team with strong sales leadership and learned from some of the industry’s best inside sales talent about how to work with gatekeepers, deliver compelling presentations, leverage keywords, and close, close, close. I was a consistent President’s Club producer and am still proud that for several years, I never once missed a monthly sales target. (That was an early lesson on the importance of how to design effective compensation plans!)

I went on to lead this exceptional inside sales talent as their manager, and from there, I expanded the team and began doing what seemed natural to me: systematizing an operation that required finding sales unicorns to perform successfully.

This process involved deeply analyzing the value proposition, presentation, scripting, tonality, and work habits—along with virtually everything else—that went into generating results. These efforts to create systems and repeatable processes led to not one, not two, not three, but four people effectively duplicating the long-standing top performer’s results, which had been until then simply accepted as an outlier.

I carried this systems-based thinking into all my roles as I went on to lead additional sales channels and teams. I have had the opportunity

to put my thinking into practice at the manager, director, vice president, and CEO level with strikingly similar results.

Most surprising to me was how applicable this approach was across very diverse sales channels and equally diverse product offerings. This included phone-based political fundraising, door-to-door ad sales, nonprofit memberships, strategic partnerships between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Fortune 100 companies, faceto-face sales offering highly exclusive products to Fortune 1000 CEOs, online sales for fully customized baby bedding, and many, many more examples.

Some of these operations had been performing at an acceptable level, but leadership simply wanted better results. Others were startups, enterprises, or business units that had become stagnant or were in desperate need of a turnaround after several failed initiatives to get them unstuck. Across the board, the framework I’m sharing with you right now was the key to getting on track, and I had the opportunity to implement it firsthand.

The Premise:

This framework has an underlying premise: the process of driving sales in your business should be treated like the process of getting more speed out of your car.

Both sales and speed are results of what a broader system is doing. The system comprises both components (e.g., fluids, fuels, and parts) and processes (e.g., maintenance and know-how). The entire system

works together to create results, and if all the elements of that system are running properly and have been optimized and maintained, you’ll reach top speeds. If not, no matter how well you drive, you’ll never hit maximum velocity.

The system you have in place is thus responsible for the capacity—or lack thereof—to get more results, which is why the maximum speed of every car is different. And the system is also the source of problems, which explains why two used cars can be so drastically different, despite being the same make, model, year, and color.

Now, you may be saying, “Wait, can’t I get more speed in my car by just stepping on the gas? And if speed is like sales, isn’t there a gas pedal that I can stomp on to get more sales?”

Maybe.

With both sales and speed, sometimes a quick fix can give you the boost you are looking for. Maybe stepping on the gas, changing gears, or adopting better driving habits will help you get more out of what you already have. Sometimes these simple solutions are sufficient to get you the desired output. This guide will help you identify areas where simple fixes can be employed to get better results immediately.

Simple fixes, though, shouldn’t be confused with shortcuts:

• Simple fixes, like stepping on the gas, are relatively easy steps you can take to get more output from the system’s potential.

• Shortcuts are steps you take to create more output than the system can reasonably sustain, with the intention of avoiding the heavy lifting that goes into actually creating more capacity.

A great example of this may be dropping nitrous oxide in your car. It’s something that can get you a quick boost, but it could also blow up your car. Either way, it won’t work for very long.

If your goal is to build a high-performance machine, sales and speed can be great indicators of how the machine is performing relative to its capability. And the primary objective of all the changes, engineering, and modifications is to create more output. But looking at outputs can be misleading if there’s no systemic diagnosis of what’s driving them. It’s critical that you understand the relationship between each and every variable that is impacting those outputs—lest you end up investing a lot of resources in modifying the wrong thing.

This guide is going to help you get that systemic diagnosis correct (and hopefully keep you from accidentally blowing something up).

For now, just know this: a Honda Civic can’t be expected to compete with a Formula One race car without a complete engine overhaul. When it comes to sales, that engine is what we call a growth system, which brings us to our next chapter.