Why your sales stopped growing (fix your B2B sales process)

The biggest reason why your revenue flatlines after some initial growth is not because your product is not good enough or your market is suddenly too small or you don't have product market fit yet. It's mostly because the way you got your first customers is physically impossible to replicate. And I've been there as a salesperson that has been asked to replicate it and now having built dozens of sales systems for startups and scale-ups, this is what I see. The first few customers usually come with the founder through their personal brand, through their network, or maybe they started the business built upon those first few customers. But at one moment, they run out of time, they run out of network, so they hire salespeople and experts to do what they have done successfully, just more of it. And unfortunately, it doesn't work. So we're getting stuck in the loop. We are hiring people, getting dissatisfied with them, hiring new people. It's endless process. without an actual sales process. So let me show you why it doesn't work and let me show you how to build a sales process step by step from scratch for a company that tries to escape a startup world and actually scale. The most important thing I would love for you to remember is that the way you want to sell your products and services does not matter. The only thing that matters is how your prospective clients buy. And that's why I really don't like frameworks like AIDA, which you may be familiar with, which is literally an over 100-year-old framework that describes a level of interest in your product from your prospect. It requires you to first get attention, then awake some interest, cause desire, and finally an action of a purchase. And while it's very straightforward and simplistic and makes sense, it doesn't really apply to what we're talking about here, which is high-ticket B2B sales. When contracts go into five, six, seven figures, first of all, if you look closely at it, you'll see that it's very you-focused. It's attention on our products, interest in our product. It completely ignores how customers think. And in a process like this, we know that there is rarely a single person with both the problem, the budget to purchase and solve it, the decision-making power and the technical ability to implement it. It's usually a whole committee and each person in this committee can be in a different stage of their awareness, decision-making process and so on. So let me show you a framework that I've developed and used and I think much better describes not the level of interest in your product, but the decision-making process that companies make and enterprises make before making a purchase. And the stages may look familiar to you. But when we are talking about the decision-making process and a sales process, in here, the most important things are two. Number one, it removes entirely the perspective of you. There is no mention of your product here. there is no mention of interest in your solution there is purely perspective of a customer making a decision and number two is your product and your service very often does not come into the picture until the consideration phase because the truth is that the decisions and the purchasing decisions in companies usually take place like this there is a problem and someone realizes it but nobody has any priority or incentive to actually do anything about it until one person experiences some pain or maybe a department or maybe there isn't some institutional failure that requires a fix and then everyone meets in a meeting room and ideate brainstorm a solution to that problem and what they usually brainstorm is not probably what you offer even though your solution would be the right one for them, they will think of whatever they have in their heads at the moment. They will look at solution and advice from people that they know from their internal network. They're not going to go on Google and search for those problems. Nobody's going to get educated out of their own free will. Maybe, maybe there will be one low-level manager that will be tasked, you know what, go and learn about our... options that we have and educate yourself and then present us those options and if you're lucky and you're well positioned and you have some connections or you send a cold email at this exact moment you will be one of those options that get considered it's it doesn't make it easier and i understand that frameworks like ida make it easier for us to realize how we need to communicate after all well if you have to get attention how do you get attention we send a cold email or make a cold call. And that is how we get attention. How do we get interest? Well, we get them on a meeting and then we make a presentation and show them a presentation or a demo that hopefully would get them to desire the product that you have. But the decisions are not made like that and are not simple as that. And we need to look at it. in a way that the companies actually make decisions. Because here we are focused on completely different questions. We ask ourselves, how do we make the company realize that they have a problem? How can we agitate that problem, show it to the surface, continuously make them aware of potential risk of it? How do we become a solution that they think of first when they sit in that boardroom? Those are the questions that we need to ask ourselves. And the answers to those questions are not that simple. And they mean that instead of one email, it has to be a whole account-based marketing scenario with multiple touch points. But unfortunately, that's necessary if we want to build a good sales process. Because of the size of the contracts and dealing with the committees, there are different people with different agendas, different goals and power that we need to be mindful of. Many of them are three that I think we have to remember and in our communication adhere to mostly. Number one is the champion. That is someone that has usually the person that feels the problem and that would practically use your solution in order to alleviate that pain. However, they don't have the money. They don't have the power to purchase from you. And for that, you need an economic buyer. more often than not even though you're trying to get to the economic buyer they're not going to take your meeting you need to get the champion to become your ambassador become your in essentially a salesperson within that company because they can go into the board meeting room with the economic buyer to get them to sign off on it and then we have the gatekeepers those are the people usually technical departments it departments though those that don't really need whatever you have to offer and all it does it gives them more work and more annoyance however if they are not happy they can derail the whole deal so when we're communicating with the company we have to remember that each of those people has different goals communicates in different languages completely different idea of what you offer and we need to match the communication to each one of them and the problem that we often experience is that the way we communicate is first of all uniform so we say things the same way to everybody because we have one communication channel we have one email or call script that we use and we usually communicate the way we want to So if you're a founder that has been doing sales or is doing sales, you probably noticed that the way you talk is the way you know how to talk. A technical founder will talk technical stuff. They will communicate with technical people very well, but they're not going to talk business that well. You may be hands-on. You maybe had the experience, the problem that you're solving, you had it yourself before. So you communicate with the champion like equals and you have a great relationship. But again, you're missing the salesy, businessy side of side in order to make the economic buyer make the decision to purchase. So we need to be really, really mindful of how we communicate, to whom we communicate, and what do we say. Talking of founders, founders have superpowers. We talked about replicating the process, which is impossible if all the deals came from referrals and whatnot. But if a founder does sales and makes new relationships with cold leads, they have an advantage that any salesperson coming in will not have. Number one, that's status. It's essentially impossible to replicate by any SDR account executive or a full-stack salesperson, a status of a founder. They are not a CEO. They are not in the industry usually that long with such experience. Therefore, having the conversation with a C-level executive that usually is the final decision maker is close to impossible. If a founder reaches out to a founder or to a CEO, we have a matching status. If an SDR reaches out to CEO, well, that's clearly a pitch. they are very resistant towards pitches right so that's number one number two is the expertise oh how often i've heard that well we can teach the salespeople the business the expertise the knowledge that is necessary to sell however that usually takes months if not years if is successful at all usually a founder who's so embedded into the industry and the product that they're developing has unmatched knowledge And lastly, how they communicate this knowledge and their business is through excitement. And excitement sells, confidence sells. And you can learn this as a salesperson and you can be very good at expressing this excitement. But very often it's unmatched and not as believable as a founder on a mission with something to prove and to sell. If you're trying to replicate a process that has been completed by a founder, not only you will have problems finding the same network and using the same connections, but you will have much more tougher time developing new ones. We often underappreciate how much data and how much information we need in order to determine whether something works or doesn't. And we all do it. We get the first few customers in one market and we think, We can dominate that market. We have 10 demos and we get ghosted nine times and we think, well, clearly our demo is not good enough, even though it might have been the person we talked with was completely unqualified prospect. Or we send 100 cold emails and we don't get any replies and we think cold email clearly doesn't work. All of those conclusions are perhaps completely wrong, but we don't have enough data to know for sure. So what has worked before, what we have done, is a great starting point. But it's just a starting point of building a brand new sales process. Every company is different. Every market is different. Often every client is different. And it's very easy to... promise a solution. Here is a template for a sales process that you can use and it worked for a hundred other businesses and it'll definitely work for you. Most of the time it won't. And in fact, you should never listen to someone who, especially in high ticket B2B sales offers a plug and play system for anything. So how would I build a sales process that matches your company specifically? We start with analysis because What we have done before, what we have discussed, is, again, a very good starting point. So in order to start from that point, first we need to understand what worked, what things that we did brought an actual result. And then we will know what didn't work. But most importantly, we have to understand as fast as possible what is replicable. So the fact that something worked For example, for a founder, it worked to go on a stage and on a conference and give a keynote speech about your solution, your problem. But it worked because of the personal of the founder. Maybe they have personal brand that is already recognizable and that gave them a very, very good podium to talk and sell their product. A salesperson that you would hire would not have that comfort and maybe not have the skill, definitely not the personal brand in order to do it. So what can we replicate in order to get the new people doing it successfully, repeatedly, and on scale? Let's look at an example of a pipeline that is specific for expert-led B2B sales, somewhere where the decision-making process is long. And that's what we have to connect our sales stages to, the decision-making process that we have talked about before. We can use different terminology here, but essentially what we want to do is figure out a way our sales stages are ways for us to get in the decision-making stages as early as possible. So by having a lead, we make a list of potential prospects that in our opinion either have this problem, whether they realize it or not, or potentially could have this problem. If there is any opportunity in it for us, we need some signals. We either get existing signals, like look at investment that they collected, people that they try to hire, or we try to create signals with content or outreach. We try to get people agitated, their pain agitated, and get them thinking about the potential problem in our solution. Those we usually would call MQL, so marketing qualified leads, someone who is worth our time putting the content and putting the information in front of them. And if they are, that's where they become SQL, so sales qualified leads, someone that is worth talking to as a prospect by a salesperson and... try to get in front of them when they are thinking actively about the solution or about the problem that they have and try to find the solution to that problem. Because we're talking about a complex expert-led sales process, we rarely have a template at one page PDF that we can send to virtually everybody. It usually consists of multiple meetings, multiple emails, and multiple people trying to answer multiple questions. That's what we do when we prepare not even a financial offer, but a concept of a solution that we can provide, whether it's building a website or building a power plant or whatever it is. those things are usually custom the requirements are custom so we while asking questions we educate the customer about the potential solutions about the exact details of the offer that we have so when we go on to the meeting and we talk with the decision makers finally or maybe our champion talks to the decision maker because we never managed to get to that person happens the offer and the presentation that is there it's it's basically a yes or no type of decision and it's so custom that saying no would be ridiculous because if you get to this stage you know that they have a problem they express the problem to you they have been communicated with and they have actually helped you build the solution and the offer themselves the meeting where we present it becomes a formality so now that you have the template of your sales process and you know what worked before and what can be replicated you need to codify it you need to make it possible for someone to come in and execute and that's where sops come in my favorite corporate acronym standard operating procedures exact step by step of what to do how to do it with templates scripts where to click up to that level so people can come whether they are newbies or experienced and get the feeling of how you've done it before Importantly, please remember that this is all a moving living thing. Those SOPs are going to be changing and every person that comes in will test something new and implement something on their own and they have to live with the company. Now I can show you actually what I'm building recently for our customers. You can see the stages above and for each stage we have KPIs and we have processes that need to be implement it and execute it and each of them let's say connection request is an SOP that says exactly what needs to be done what software to use and how to automate the software and how to actually make this work and that is what you need to have for your business as well just please one important thing don't just try things create SOPs for things that have worked even if they are not perfect and don't If you lack some knowledge, do one of two things. One, hire an expert in your industry, in your field that has done it before. And number two, hire a sales expert like myself in order to get your industry expertise and our sales expertise and make it work together. Don't grab little tactics and little hacks and try them for three months and be surprised that they don't work because they usually don't. Okay, now that you have those SOPs and you give a task to people and you know what they should do, at least at the start, you need to track it. That's where, love it or hate it, a CRM, a customer management system comes in. You can use anything from Excel, don't recommend it, Notion, good for small collaborators, and something like PipeDrive, not a fan of HubSpot personally, so I would stick to PipeDrive, but... Importantly, we talked about the pipeline before and CRM is a way for you to track the stages and the progress of the deals and some metrics that help you understand whether it's going in the right direction. But again, what happens here very often is that CRM looks like we have a lead, then we have a call, or we're in contact, then we have a meeting. And that describes essentially what the sales process is. I don't want to repeat myself, but I will say one thing. This can be a valid CRM and pipeline stages in general. If your sales process is incredibly mature, if you only have calls with people that are pre-qualified, if you only have meetings with qualified prospects and you'd never waste time, then it makes... Some, I'm not saying I'm not a huge fan of it, but it then makes some sense that if you're doing 100% the good job at each of those stages and you know you have SOP that describes the criteria and what it has to be, then it's not a ridiculous sales process. But if you're just at the beginning, if you're just building and creating something that has to grow and improve, much better way to create CRM and to create stages is to be Just be descriptive. You know, like for example, lead is qualified. And only if lead is qualified, they end up in that particular stage of the CRM. And you have a list of what does it mean to be qualified and what criteria need to be met in order for the lead to be there. Instead of just saying a call, say that the situation was identified. So you know in what kind of situation the customer is, which means that you either exchanged emails or had a call or had a discovery or maybe they wrote themselves an A4 page describing their situation, doesn't matter. But you know their situation now. That probably means that you found a champion, someone with a problem, someone that is looking for a solution, right? You don't need to have those stages. one by one, problem, agitation, solution, you need to understand what is the qualitative progress of the deal. Next stage would be, for example, that the client received a concept. So we talked about it before, right? That we understand someone's situation and then, especially in this expert process, we create a special concept. And then the concept is validated. So when concept is validated, someone with a decision-making power says that we like how this looks like. They still may have objections, they're still negotiation, but you've built this process with them and you get them to it. It's a very rudimentary pipeline that I have created here, but it's better than focusing on our actions to focus on outcomes. CRM as a whole should represent an outcome of the deal and the progress of the deal, rather than what has been inputted into that specific deal. Because we don't want to treat CRM as an exchange for evaluating performance of salespeople. For that, we have KPIs. So while your CRM tracks outputs, the performance of your team should be evaluated based on their inputs. And That's where KPIs, so key, that is not how you write KPIs, KPIs, the key performance indicators, are coming in handy. Depending on maturity of your process, the same as with the pipelines, it may be viable to evaluate based on meetings scheduled or demos given. However, that assumes that, again, every meeting is qualified and quality meeting and every demo is given perfectly and with the right skill and the right assets that are delivered so we have to consider what kind of inputs the salespeople routine does and evaluate that because while the better the inputs the better the outcome is going to be so in late stages and very mature sales process you can think about meetings booked or demos given, early doors, you should focus on things like number of calls or number of LinkedIn conversations. And then the most important thing is what is the quality of these actions? So whether we have SOPs of how to do it successfully and we track the progress in CRM and we have the KPIs that control the inputs, what very often is missed is the quality of the actions that are taken. So how the calls actually look like, what do we say on those calls? What kind of conversations do we have on LinkedIn? Because more often than not, the success of a given action is not in the quantity of that action, but quality. So for example, what we usually measure is the, not number, but percentage of replies. And when we send cold emails en masse, we can expect 0.5%, 1%, maybe 1.5% of replies. Not even positive replies, replies in general. But good salespeople that are pro at prospecting, they will send 10 times less cold emails, but they will get 50 or 60% reply rate. And the number of messages sent doesn't matter that much. The percentage of reply also doesn't matter that much. What matters is what was in that message. What was the quality? And that's actually my favorite part of my job is to evaluate and improve the communication that we do with our clients. So if you need that, schedule a call. We can go through both your process and your communication. And I hope it's been helpful. See you in the next one.

Is your revenue flatlining after initial growth? It’s usually because the way you got your first customers—through founder network and personal brand—is physically impossible to replicate. Many B2B founders and sales managers find themselves stuck in a loop: hiring people, getting dissatisfied, and replacing them without ever building an actual sales process.

In this video, we break down why traditional frameworks like AIDA fail in high-ticket B2B sales and how to build a system based on how prospective clients actually buy.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

* THE FOUNDER TRAP: Why "Founder Magic" and personal networks eventually run out and can't be replicated by new hires.
* THE BUYING COMMITTEE: How to communicate with the Champion, the Economic Buyer, and the Gatekeeper who can derail your deal.
* THE AIDA PROBLEM: Why 100-year-old frameworks ignore the complexity of 6 and 7-figure B2B deals.
* OUTCOME-BASED PIPELINES: Moving from "action" stages (like calls) to "qualitative" stages (like situation identified).
* QUALITY OVER QUANTITY: Why a 60% reply rate from 10 targeted emails beats a 1% rate from 1,000 cold blasts.

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RESOURCES FOR SCALING B2B BUSINESSES:

If you are a founder or sales leader looking to build a professional sales organization that doesn't rely on you being in every meeting:

🔗 Schedule a Strategy Call: https://cal.com/meetfilip/signingclients-offer – Let's evaluate your process and communication.

Keywords: B2B Sales Process, Founder-Led Sales, Scaling Startups, High-Ticket B2B, Sales Management, CRM Strategy, Sales SOPs, Account Based Marketing.