Matt Vaadi argues entrepreneurs need to spend 80% of their time on sales to grow. He shares how he structured his week with dedicated call blocks, field visits, and networking, and compares sales discipline to a diet: you can't lose weight eating fast food.
Here's the point that should have been at the very front of the podcast. This was a pretty terrible miss on my part. 80% of your time should be focused on sales. You have no clients. Quit making excuses about moving a widget around on the website. You know, oh, this document has to be filed with this agency. Oh, I've got to do this. I got— like, nothing happens until somebody sells something. So get comfortable being uncomfortable with the sales conversations. Like, your success in life is going to be directly related to the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have, and that never ever shines truer than in entrepreneurship and building a business. All right. So how do you do that? How do you spend your time there? Well, I'm gonna go back to my old sales days when I was carrying a bag, carrying a quota. I literally had my week structured where I knew what I was doing on each day. So I knew on Monday afternoon I had a call block, you know, on Monday morning I was doing cleanup, follow-up, et cetera. Tuesday I was in the field. If I didn't have meetings, I was going by places. I was going to networking events. I was doing cold drops and stops at people's offices that were, industries that I was trying to target, just bringing in a slick, asking who the decision maker is, who, who, you know, are they here right now? Can I talk to them? Can I get their business card? Like, you've got to go out and make it happen. They're not going to come to you. So, so block your calendar. Know those days that you're going to be doing sales-related stuff. And like I said, there should be a direct correlation. There should be a very high percentage of your time that is related to sales. If you do not have enough clients, it's just the bottom line. Going back to that dietary reference, like, you are not going to lose weight eating McDonald's 5 days a week. It just doesn't happen. So make sure that then you start to understand the sales process and how that works. So you're going to have an initial meeting, you know, you're going to prospect, you're going to finally get in the door, you're going to have that initial meeting. If they're interested, then you're going to go into a demo proposal phase, then you're going to go into some form of negotiation back and forth, then you're going to go into closing and onboarding. And you can lump that up, and we've got a little bit better defined in our internal processes, but Just make sure you've got the time blocked to actually make things happen and stop coming up with excuses.
