When to Slow Down Startup Sales

For the first time in my senior living career, I have instructed my team to purposely slow down sales. We have available rooms; we have available staff. So why this directive? While we were awaiting full licensing for our second building, we had a bottleneck of deposits and customers on our waitlist. Once we received the license, we had consecutive, weekly move ins to our dementia care community - back to back to back to back to back. We also ramped up hiring to accommodate the influx of new residents. We are operating two buildings instead of one. There’s a lot of operational change at one time. Our established culture and protocol has been to dedicate our time and attention to new residents and their families - to give them our full attention and support during a difficult transition period. As a result, we choose not to move in multiple residents at a time, and we typically have spaced out new residents by at least 1-2 weeks. Because of this rare occurrence of a “backlogged” waitlist and a sudden increase in new employees who don’t yet know our methodology and care approach (it’s a 13-week training schedule), our moral obligation is to slow down and give them all our due attention. “Sales cures all ailments” is a deeply inbedded belief in the senior living industry. I have heard it my whole career. I have never ever been instructed to slow down sales, no matter the relevant situation at hand. 100% of the time, we were told “move them in. We’ll figure out the rest later.” That’s not good enough for us here. In this case, sales would diminish our ability to give our customers and our staff our best and dedicated service - to keep our promises. So even though we have the room, we are pausing our sales next month and will create a waitlist schedule that properly fits what those future residents, families, and new team members deserve, and that’s taking care of our current ones. Try explaining that to investors. 💜

Early-stage founders are constantly trying to sell too fast. I get it. Revenue is king, but it’s still possible to sell too hard, too fast and go for the close too soon. Here are a couple of specific examples…   1) Years ago, I became co-owner of a software development shop. I had 20 years of startup development under my belt, and when people called with their run-of-the-mill tech projects, I was quick to say, “yeah, we can build that.” Sometimes we got the gig, sometimes we didn’t. I brought a mentor into the organization and he soon flagged my behavior. “I don’t care if you *know* you can build it. You’re saying 'yes' too quickly. People all think they are unique, and if you don’t ask for details, they won’t trust you.” That flew in the face of everything I believed about selling. Move ‘em through the pipeline as fast as possible and ask for a close. But, hey, Tom was old-school sales and probably knew what he was talking about. I taught myself to fall back on this same phrase over and over: “That sounds like something we would be good at, but I don’t know. Every project is different and I can’t tell in a single conversation whether we would be able to build that for you. How about we set up a call with your whole team and really dive into what makes your software different?” We closed more deals (and better deals) by adding some friction into the process. 2) I have an amazing client, at the earliest stages of her business. Right now, it’s all about pilots. Test her product on a small part of someone’s business and if it’s successful, expand to the whole organization. Whenever she demos with an executive, they get excited and she’s like, “let’s go!” Makes sense. She wants to prove her business model out. She wants to learn. She wants to scale. These are natural (and necessary) business goals. Yet I am coaching her to slow down. We now know that people love her idea and we can get any pilot we want. The question is what happens next. It’s easy to assume that if the pilot is successful, there will be a full rollout… But what makes the pilot successful? Is it number of users? Engagement per user? Revenue generated? How will we measure the relevant KPI? Who's measuring? Us or them? Are there competing projects that might muddy the attribution? Does the sponsoring executive have complete budget authority or are there other decision makers? The list goes on and on. Don't get me wrong, we want pilots and at small organizations, damn the torpedos! Close! Close! Close! For large prospects, we should slow down and ask those questions. If the client can't take the time to walk us through their process, and just keeps asking "how much will this cost for a full roll out" (hint: we don't know yet), what are the odds we'll expand? Until we have a brand, we're relying on internal champions and champions invest time. Startup strategy is filled with counterintuitive lessons like this. What are you biggest unexpected lessons? #startups #sales

One of my old clients (from 2022) lost half his revenue in the last few month He went from 90k/mo to 40k/mo the core reason will probably surprise you... His sales engine was working TOO well and they didnt slow down When you oversell, you end up on the prisoners flywheel and stress/failures negatively compound Here is how scaling to fast negatively compounds. A- Sales come in very quickly and you say yes without fully assessing operational capabilities B- You begin to hire more, pay more, and staff up in anticipation of continuous growth C- Quality begins to drop because ops, training, management processes arent built well enough D- Fires begin popping up in several places inside your business E- Clients begin to churn F- You keep selling to avoid losing revenue & the cycle continues At a certain point, you stop proactively building your business and begin reactively solving the fires that come up. When this starts, its almost impossible to catch up to and often takes 12-24 months to be able to slow down to start solving things correctly again. Here is how to avoid this if you are able to selling like crazy: 1- Cap monthly sales Pick a conservative number that you can comfortably grow with. It will be less net new MRR than you desire, but it will create a sustainable process to build as you grow. Example: Agency A has the abilit to sell 10-15 retainers per month, they cap out at 5 2- Build Everything Everything needs to have a process Operations Fulfillment Customer Success Training Management Client calls Souring Hiring Interviewing Succession planning Data attribution Capacity planning & so much more If you dont have defined processes that are followed, sustained & continually improved, you arent ready for sustainable growth 3- Hold a Weekly Business Review & Monthly Business Review Encourage your team to learn how to make the business better & drive improvements via the weekly business review and monthly business review. If you dont know how to run these meetings, keep following my content so you can learn when i publish how! This seems simple, but trust me it is hard. If you want assistance learning how to scale through this, book a call on my profile or website!