How do I stop being the only person who can sell in my company?
A founder usually outsells everyone because they carry authority, know every past project and can change the offer in the room. None of that transfers by hiring a salesperson. What does transfer is the work before the meeting: finding the right firms, researching them and opening the conversation. Hand that over first and keep the closing meetings.
Why nobody else sells like you.
You can say yes in the room
A buyer talking to you is talking to the person who can move the price, the scope and the start date. Anyone else has to go away and ask, and buyers notice.
The pitch lives in your head
Your best lines, the client stories, the objections you have heard a hundred times: none of it is written down. New salespeople get a deck and a login and are expected to absorb the rest.
You do the cheap work as well as the expensive work
Closing needs you. Finding firms, researching them and chasing replies does not, but it fills the same diary.
What it is costing you.
Add up the hours you spent on selling last month, including the searching, the chasing and the proposals. Split them into time in front of someone who could say yes, and everything else. For example, if selling takes 60 hours a month and 20 are in real meetings, 40 go on work somebody else could do. Multiply by what an hour of your time is worth to the firm.
Check it yourself in ten minutes.
Four small jobs that show how much of the selling only you can do.
- 1
Highlight every sales activity in your calendar for the last four weeks. Mark each as a meeting with a decision-maker, or as preparation and chasing.
- 2
List the last ten deals won, with who opened the conversation and who closed it. Count how often your name is in both columns.
- 3
Record your next sales call, with permission. Write down the three things you said that moved it forward.
- 4
Ask the second-best seller in your firm what they would need to win without you in the room. Write it down without arguing.
What we would do in the first 90 days.
We would not try to replace you in the meeting. We would take everything before the meeting off your desk.
- Week 1
A Growth Review with a founder, then a conversation about how you sell: who you win with, what you say, which objections come up.
- Weeks 2 to 4
Month one is warm-up. We agree the criteria, then research each firm and each person. A person writes and approves every message.
- Months 2 and 3
80 to 120 approaches a month. Meetings arrive in your diary with the research behind them, and you do the part only you can do.
Pipeline That Fills costs £1,500 to set up, £1,000 to £1,500 a month to manage, and £500 to £1,000 per meeting held, excluding VAT. No meeting, no meeting fee.
How Pipeline That Fills works ↗The short answers.
Perhaps, in time. A sales director hired into a firm with no written pitch and no steady supply of first meetings has to build both before selling anything, on a senior salary. Get the meetings flowing and the pitch written down first.
Not if the approach is a good one. Every message is written and approved by a person and has to name something true about the firm that is not on its homepage. When someone agrees to talk, they talk to you.
Most of it is at the start: agreeing who you want to meet and what counts as qualified. After that your time goes on the meetings themselves, plus a one-page report on the first Monday of each month. If it starts eating your week, it is not doing its job.
Founders who said this also said these.
Pipeline is feast or famine.
Pipeline swings between feast and famine when selling only happens in the gaps between delivery. The people who sell are the people who deliver, so prospecting stops whenever the firm is busy, and the hole appears one sales cycle later. The fix is a small, fixed amount of outbound activity every week that carries on however busy delivery gets.
Pipeline That FillsIf I took a month off, sales would stop.
Separate the parts of selling that need the founder from the parts the founder merely happens to do. Finding prospects, first approaches, follow-up and proving the firm's credibility can all run without you once written down and owned by someone. Closing the largest deals may stay with you for years. The aim is conversations that keep arriving while you are away.
Growth Team programme
Bring this one to the call.
Thirty minutes with a founder. We look at your site, two competitors and what Google and ChatGPT say about all three beforehand. You leave with three fixes in writing.