How Should Delivery Leaders Transition into CEO/Founder Roles
One of the biggest challenges in many Delivery leaders transitioning into CEO /Startup founder roles is that they often believe that sales is someone else’s job.
They ‘intellectually’ understand the importance of Sales & Marketing; but invariably avoid the hurly burly of lead generation/ cold calling. The biggest reason for CEO turnover /startups going belly up – is the lack of sales. Now pipeline not closing can be remedied but pipeline not being generated can’t be remedied by anyone other than a CEO with a detailed understanding of sales & marketing.
Here’s my 5 point tipsheet for Delivery leaders turning CEO/Founder:
- Devote atleast 25% of your time to Sales; another 25% to Marketing.
- Make atleast 30 minutes of cold calling & 1 prospect – ( not customer or closing meet) visit a day.
- Sit with the marketing team for min. 3 hours a week and understand how campaigns are performing.
- Use a CRM – to review Sales performance. In particular analyse the deals dashboard. Trust but measure – use action & notifications tied to CRM to measure progress.
- Do stuff like mapping all sales+marketing processes & use newer stuff like Social Selling to reach out directly to prospects.
Agree? Disagree? Would love to hear your views!