Your business isn’t working. Close it. That’ll be $50K, thanks.
Sometimes a few months after being engaged to do a company’s sales we tell the owner that they should close the business and we expect a failure bonus.
A few sharp entrepreneurs get this immediately. Most founders look at me like I just showed a dog Chinese algebra.
“You mean I’m going to hire a sales team, you’ll not only fail to sell, you’ll come back in a few months and tell me to shut my business, and then want a bonus for it?”
Or: “You want me to fire my whole sales team, throw away our playbook and build a new product, team and process from scratch?”
Yes. Exactly that.
Because we stopped the bleed. It wasn’t working. There was no appetite. We saved you ten months of retainer still to come. We saved you another hundred grand in product development you were about to spend making the thing better. We saved you a hundred grand in marketing you were about to pour into something nobody was buying. We saved you five years of working from your savings while a team sat on their hands. We went into a cold market, ran a real sales process, and came back with the truth while you still had money in the bank and time to pivot.
Your business isn’t working. Close it. The bonus is worth it.
Overvalued
Every day founders ask us to sell their product on commission only. What they’re really asking is for us to bankroll their company launch. Pay the staff, the office, the laptops, and if we succeed they’ll throw us a few scraps of commission. We should be grateful for the opportunity.
“But you’ll make five hundred thousand a year in commission.”
Or the favourite: “If you had one percent of Facebook you’d be a multibillionaire.”
Or: “It’s a $37 trillion industry. If you capture four percent we’ll all be billionaires.”
Here’s the reality. A huge chunk of the cost of launching a business is in early stage sales when nobody knows your name, there’s no trust and no brand equity. It takes time, hard work and skill. You don’t want to pay us to do it?
We tell some founders straight. You undervalue our work and overvalue your own expertise. The sales function is ninety percent of launching a business. We could do the selling, contract out your part, and own the whole business ourselves. So why would we do the hard work in the fire for a fraction of a tiny revenue stream?
Every time we turn them down they look at us like traitors. They make comments like “obviously you can’t sell” or “if you had any skill you’d back yourselves” or “I’m trying to have a serious business partnership conversation with you.” The problem in this scenario has nothing to do with our ability as salespeople. It is about us refusing to buy into the delusion of their self valuation. As Adam Savage famously said: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
With thirty years of in the trenches sales experience we can look at a company, a product, or an idea and know with fair comparison what it would actually take to build that business and run an effective sales team.
A bloke once asked us to sell a subscription app for comparing car tyre prices. We asked who the hell was buying that and how we’d sell it. He thought we were the problem.
A woman told us she was investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a budgeting app for teenagers. We asked why a teenager with budget problems, would pay for her app instead of just using Excel. She had no idea but thought we were stupid for not seeing her vision. We asked what was already in the App Store. She hadn’t looked. There are five hundred similar apps. Four hundred and ninety seven of them have fewer than seven subscribers. Great, you’re offering us 5% of 7 subscribers at $10 a month. You value our work at $3.50 a year?
Our ability at sales is not the problem. Just because you value your idea highly, or you invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, or you spent five years building it, does not mean we should invest our team, our time, our expertise and our money into your conviction.
Start With the Sale, Not the Product
Steve Jobs said start with the customer, not the technology. We say start with the sale, not the product. Find out if there is appetite before you build the thing people are supposed to have an appetite for. A good cheap sales team to start is the lowest risk, highest chance chance to build a business. Stop looking at what we cost. Start looking at building your business through a team full of experts.
Before you ask anyone to sell your product, spend twenty minutes in whatever marketplace is relevant to your category. Do some Google and AI searches. How many competitors are there? What do they charge? What profit do they make? What are your actual points of difference? If there are five hundred versions of your idea and four hundred and ninety seven have seven subscribers, the market has already told you what it thinks.
Most founders don’t do this because they’re in love with their idea. They’ve been building and refining this mental image for so long that success feels inevitable to them. Just because you work hard does not mean you will succeed. The market doesn’t care how long it took. It doesn’t care how clever it is. It cares whether it solves a real problem badly enough that someone will hand over money to fix it.
We met one founder who had hundreds of documents prepared for his future business including a two hundred person org chart. Forget all that. Go and ask potential customers. Ring some competitors in another city. Work backwards from the sale. Forget the product. Start with sales.
When the product isn’t selling, pipeline is thin and conversion is soft, the founder has usually spent eighteen months and their savings on it, so stopping feels like admitting it was all wasted. So they hire another rep. Tweak the marketing. Throw good money after bad. That’s the sunk cost fallacy. The money already spent is gone regardless of what you do next. The only question that matters is whether the next dollar has a realistic chance of a return. The past is not a reason to continue. It is just a reason to feel bad about stopping. Those are completely different things.
Seek Out Failure, Not Success
We learn more from failure than success. When you’re working out the pitch, the objections, the right buyers, and the right language all at the same time, early results are noise.
We say in Australia that even a dog’s arse gets sunshine from time to time. An early yes can be a fluke. A sympathetic buyer. An enthusiastic salesperson’s first day. A beginners luck moment that doesn’t repeat. If you get a cluster of early wins from a half finished pitch you’ll build confirmation bias around something you don’t yet understand and keep replicating it until the fluke runs out.
Early failure is cleaner data. A no, or a specific objection, tells you something true about the gap between what you built and what the market wants. We can come back to a founder and say this is how you need to pivot. That is worth more than six months of false confidence. Sales needs to be comfortable with uncertainty.
A mate and I had a business idea. He spent a day building a prototype. I spent a day selling it. There was enough market signal that we each agreed to invest one more day. After four days total and zero dollars spent we did the numbers. There was genuine interest but the customer acquisition cost did not justify the lifetime value of the customers. We closed it and went back to the ideas board.
Two days each. Theorised, built, tested, drew a conclusion and moved on. This is why we say sales is science. That is how you bootstrap a go to market.
Find One Person Who Will Pay Before You Build
Find one person who will pay for it. Then find ten. If you cannot find ten people willing to pay at a price that makes the business viable you do not have a product problem yet. You have a market problem. And a market problem does not get solved by better product development, more salespeople, more marketing spend. They are all the opposite.
Kill the business, roll it over, go back to the ideas board. Successful entrepreneurs regularly say ‘my first six business ideas were failures’. Listen to the sermon.
This only works with a skilled sales operator doing the validation. Not a junior rep on a script. Someone who can read a market, qualify a signal, and tell the difference between a polite maybe and a genuine no. Someone who will give you an honest read of what the market is saying rather than what you want to hear.
Most salespeople will keep selling because that is what they are paid to do. The job security. The ones worth trusting will tell you when to stop. And if we tell you to stop after two months and save you two years of bleeding, that is worth a serious payday.
