Act as if your pipeline were zero

A coaching client asked this question last week. We can do things that put us in position to win a deal, but never when “we have to”.

As soon as you need something, you lose.

This question prompted one of my favorite emails from 2021. H/T to one of the best sales coaches out there, Noah Gee.

I want you to imagine I came into your office and asked to look at your CRM.

You pull up your deals, tell me a little about them.

Some are hotter than others.

Some are at the finish line.

Some are clearly dead, but you can't give up the ghost.

I say, "Hmm that's interesting...." then I press "Select All" and "Delete."

Let's get past the first 45 seconds of speechless shock and maybe you lunging at me and reaching for my throat.

What would you do?

How would you react?

Work expands to fill the time allotted and I guarantee for every deal you had in there, most of the time you spent on them was wasted. Not every second, but most of the time.

The hot deals were probably going to move themselves across the line, the dead stuff... sorry still dead. Maybe you could move some stuff in the middle but let's face it, what you have in there wasn't a full time job to manage.

So if I pressed "delete," chances are I'd be doing you a favor, liberating ridiculous amounts of time for you to spend on new opportunities.

We are often very self-important, feeling like the things we do have tremendous amounts of impact on moving deals.

I'm a believer that for many, perhaps most things in life-- from business to friendships to romantic relationships-- the acceptance or rejection is there from the beginning.

You just have to uncover it.

"Every battle is won before it is ever fought," as Sun Tzu said.

There's little you can do to change someone's predispositions and predilections. Or, at the very least, it's certainly true that those are far more powerful than anything you can create.

So why swim against the tide?

What you CAN do is get in front of enough of your ideal prospects to get them to consider your offering.

In that sense, getting in front of MORE people is the most powerful thing you can do.

You are going from Zero to One, as Peter Thiel says, creating somethingness from nothingness.

Everything else... more often than not... is working on the margins.

Look, I'm not saying don't work to create value for your prospects or ask for the order too soon.

What I am saying is when in doubt, getting in front of someone new has a larger return on effort than many things you can do to massage your current opptys.

So why not imagine they don't exist, for at least part of the day?

Imagine I pressed "delete" and you had to start from zero.

Now imagine doing that every day.

Your calendar would be stocked in a week, you'd be chock full of opportunities in a month.

You need to act with urgency and, yes, a little desperation.

Try that and generating opportunities will become such second nature, such rote work, if someone ever did press "delete" you could just say:

"Sounds good. Just another day at the office."​