Sales cures all. We’ve all heard this before. It means that if you can hire a great sales staff, you’ll be ahead of the game.
The phrase, however, never really had meaning for me until I almost lost my business.
Flash back to the first year of JAKT (my consulting business). Things were going great; we had two pretty solid, stable clients. One was a Fortune 100 company, the other a 3-year-old profitable business. We had a couple of other small clients as well, but those two were the big ones.
I was working 16-hour days to service these projects and was overbooked. I thought there was no need to look for more work because we were making more money than we’d ever imagined in our first year.
Then the tide turned. First, the Fortune 100 company decided it was ending funding for the project we were working on (not due to anything we did). In the same week, our other client reduced its monthly spend by 50 percent.
Boom. In that one week, we felt as though we’d lost everything. One minute we were cruising along; the next minute, everything was gone.
The problem: Because we were so booked, we hadn’t thought to look for any other work. As any entrepreneur knows, when the s—- hits the fan, you have to react.
And so I did. I ended up getting through that down period, but it wasn’t easy. Not in the slightest. But here’s the thing: From every low point emerge a few lessons to be learned. This is what I discovered.
Rule 1: Always have a full sales pipeline.
You must always have a full sales pipeline. It’s better to say no to work than to not have any work to say no to. Because if something happens, the way it did to me, you won’t…