week 51: my CRM is my whiteboard

hard facts

thank you to over 11,000 of you who read this weekly and share with your friends and family for behind the scenes on building a million dollar business from scratch and beyond. i also include a personal note in the end so i am grateful that you let me do that without judgement.

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as we are closing in on a year of starting GTM Partners, i am jumping back into heavy sales mode - at least 60% of my time.

what i mean is that initially i delegated sales too early and we have to realize that we are still in the problem market fit state of the business.

my mistake is not delation but the timing of it.

this is a chart from my MOVE book that outlines how companies move between problem, product and platform-market fit stages of the business.

very interestingly, even though we are in a problem market fit stage, we have been able to renew and expand almost all the customers we do want to continue to work with and see both parties to benefit from it.

this tells me that may be for certain productized services, we are in a product-market fit stage but not for all.

but the market is still volatile, which requires everyone in the company to have a “sales” mindset.

so as i think about a set of accounts to focus on, i literally wrote them on the whiteboard next to me and told my team so that’s my CRM.

well, of course the team laughed and now that’s a running joke and here’s the point.

at the stage we are in, we don’t need to close 100 accounts.

we literally need to close 2-3 deals a month and if we run a proper go-to-market process, we should be able to focus on 8 to 10 deals in the pipeline and convert them.

for that, i don’t need an elaborate nurture program or a full blown CRM.

what we need is to focus, go deep in the account, make connections, set right meetings, do 1:1 follow up that are authentic and relevant and let the magic happen.

we went from close to nothing to close in March to close to $400K in proposal in April.

that was a focused team effort on a few deals.

the difference was not DO MORE.

but difference was DO BETTER.

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on a personal note, as we returned from a mission trip, our hearts are still heavy.

we saw a world that is broken, children that are looking for hope and families that are struggling for the basic needs.

strikingly, the answer to these challenges is not DO MORE.

if it was, then all the money that is gone to support the poor just in this century should have abolished poverty all together.

my mind wonders, if what we need is to DO BETTER.

so as a family, we are mission to find that out for ourselves.

we don’t have answers and may be you can comment below and suggest a few.

but the choice is no longer, DO NOTHING for us.

as family, leader or a business, check in with you team if they are in the DO MORE or DO NOTHING stage.

what we all need to do is clear.

leaderpoint: DO BETTER.