Thread by @MatznerJon

When we first bought our SMB, sales were a mess.

Owner was the only one selling.

Tracking on a whiteboard.

No real sense of what we sold.

One year later, we’ve trained and are using 7 sales designers, and grown 400%.

Here’s what I’ve learned on the journey:

Before even growing our sales force, we had to put “piping “ in place. Meeting with our most experienced EE at 0600 was how I did my initial research on what was worth selling, and what wasn’t.

We also put probably 100 hours into building our quick books online, the right way.

That said, I wasn’t ready to “standardIze our products” just yet, I needed more data.

I gave some rough guidelines to our sales guy(1) at the time.

For example, if you see it on wayfair or Amazon, and the customer wants it, mark it up 150% and we’ll do it.

I didn’t want to lock into a set of fixed services prematurely.

I started tweaking our product mix for simplicity, margin, simplicity of sale and delivery, etc.

One example - we were carrying 50 SKUs of products that sold for $9. Fixed that. Now just best sellers.

I studied what was being sold, and over many months, landed on the right mix of high impact products to sell.

I focused almost exclusively on “will it sell” - before considering any operational limitations. I figured sales cures all and I was right.

One big lesson:

Our sales reps want us to be a service company (so they can say yes to everything). “Sure, we’ll do that!” Is answer to everything.

Management wants us to be a product company (we are now).

This took me time to learn.

More to come on recruitment, commissions, mistakes,