Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

Quick update: Yes, I didn’t send a newsletter last week. I had too many things on the go and my brain couldn’t churn out anything useful so I decided not to waste your time.

I started building a small side project that searches your email/calendar/call notes and automates my follow up fridays tactic. I’m building it for myself because, while there are great AI CRMs out there, it’s only me selling. I just want something that nudges me to follow up on 5 old deals a week.

Seattle panel: speaking of AI CRMs, Patrick from Clarify and I speaking on a panel about early growth at the Madrona Ventures offices next month. You get a free copy of my book just for showing up, isn’t that cool? Save your seat here.

Onto the newsletter…

Most founders I talk to flinch at the word "sell."

Something about it feels gross*. They picture the used car lot, the pressure, the manipulation. They think good people don't do that.

Good. You shouldn't do that. You also don't have to.

The job isn't to sell anyone anything. The job is to help someone make a buying decision. That's it. You're not here to convince, push, or bend anyone toward your product. You're here to run a process that helps them figure out whether working with you actually makes sense.

Think college case study, not Best Buy floor.

*Did you know I’ve sold used car? Yes, singular, it’s a good story and you would know it if you bought my book. My mom says it’s pretty great and that you should pick up a copy.

Behind every buying decision there's a model. Sometimes it's sitting in a spreadsheet. More often it's floating around in their head. Either way, the question it's trying to answer is always the same: does moving forward with this make sense?

Your sales process is the thing that helps them build that model. You're not presenting a conclusion. You're co-authoring one. Which means the process has to be collaborative, and it has to stay as objective as you can keep it. Including objective about when you're not a fit.

I know that sounds like leaving money on the table. It isn't. Clients who shouldn't have bought from you are the ones who churn, write bad reviews, and tell their friends you're not worth it. Short-term revenue, long-term tax. Your reputation is the only thing you have that compounds. If you have to bait-and-switch to close someone, you've already lost the deal. You just don't know it yet.

One more reframe before we get tactical. If you actually solve the problem, the color of your product doesn't matter. I've watched founders obsess over demo polish while losing deals to competitors with worse UIs and clearer value props. The demo is a crutch. The real work is diagnosis.

When you get on a call, run it in three parts.

Context is where they are today. What's relevant about their situation, their team, their last twelve months? Don't jump to solutions. Don't pitch anything. Ask about their world and actually listen to the answers.

Progress is the specific job to be done they want help with. Not "what's your pain point" in the tired consultant sense, but the actual thing they're hiring a solution to do for them three months from now, six months from now. If they can't tell you, they're not ready to buy, and no amount of pitching or showing your demo is going to change that.

Impact is what that progress is worth. To them, to the business, to their week. If they can't articulate an impact, you're probably not solving a real problem, or at least not one they're ready to pay for.

You'll notice this isn't a pitch structure. It's a diagnostic structure. By the end of the call, you and the prospect should both have a clearer view of whether moving forward makes sense. Sometimes that view is yes. Sometimes it's no. Both are good outcomes. The bad outcome is ambiguity, where neither of you really knows but you keep meeting anyway because nobody wants to be the one to say it.

Never, and I mean never, end a call without defining the next action. "I'll follow up" is where deals go to die. Before you hang up, get something on the calendar or explicitly agree there's no next step. Ambiguity is the enemy.

After the call, save the next action and the next action date somewhere you can sort by date. CRM, spreadsheet, notebook, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you can open it on Monday morning and know exactly who you need to follow up with and when. Your pipeline is not a list of logos. Your pipeline is a list of dates.

This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it.

Every call ends in one of three places. The first is a booked next step. Good. Do the next step. The second is "not right now." They're interested but it's not top of mind. This isn't a no. Put it in your CRM with a follow-up date a few weeks or months out and move on. The third is what veteran sellers call a FOAD, which politely translates to "leave me alone and perish." They are never buying from you. Thank them, close the loop, don't chase. Chasing FOADs is how founders waste months of their life pretending they have pipeline when they don't.

David Allen writes about getting to a "mind like water" state. The idea is that when every commitment, every task, every follow-up is captured in the right spot at the right time, your brain stops having to remember any of it. It can focus on the conversation in front of you instead of the sixteen you had last week.

This is what a well-run sales process actually gives you. Not more deals, at least not directly. More mental RAM. You walk into the next call without carrying the previous twelve on your back. You're present. You're sharp. You're actually listening to what this person is saying instead of running a spreadsheet in your head about the deal you had yesterday.

That's when you start closing more.

None of this requires being a "salesperson." None of it requires being charismatic, aggressive, or even particularly extroverted. It requires curiosity, honesty, and a boring level of discipline about next steps.

If you're a founder who flinches at the word sell, good. Stop trying to sell. Start helping people make better buying decisions. The ones who should buy from you will. The ones who shouldn't won't. And you'll sleep better either way.

Where in your last five sales conversations did you fail to define a next step?

Collin

PS - Hit reply and let me know you’d be interested in the follow up fridays tool. I’m rolling it out to my current clients first and then will be looking for early users willing to give feedback in exchange for a good deal.

PPS - One neat constraint… it’ll be a Claude Code interface - this thing is for non-salespeople so I’m trying to meet them where they’re at. Bad idea? Cool? Going to blow up in my face? Hit reply and roast my idea.