What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from The Sales Acceleration Formula
Most founders build their first team the way they build everything else early on: fast, on instinct, with whoever's already in the room. You hire the friend of a friend who "seems sharp," close every early deal yourself because only you can, and judge the month by the bank balance rather than anything that predicted it. That works until the moment you need a second and third person to do what you do, without you standing over their shoulder.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
0 of 5 selected
The core lessons, applied to you
Hire the Résumé You'd Actually Bet Money On
It's tempting to hire your first few team members on chemistry alone, especially when you're moving fast and every candidate seems to say the right things in an interview. But a good conversation and a track record of the specific behaviors your role needs are different things, and only one of them predicts what happens after the offer letter is signed. Before you post a role, write down the two or three things a person must have actually done — not claimed to be good at — that correlate with success in your business specifically.
A founder falls for a candidate's confident energy in a first-round call and skips reference checks because "we clicked." Three months in, the hire is likeable and hardworking but still can't close a deal, because the one skill that actually mattered never came up in the interview.
Before your next hire, write down the three specific things you want evidence of, then design one interview question or exercise for each — no criterion gets skipped just because someone was charming.
Get Your Own Playbook Out of Your Head
Whatever is working right now in your business is probably working because you're the one doing it, which means it will stop working the day you're not in the room. Codifying it — writing down the actual steps, the language, the sequence — turns your instinct into something a new hire can pick up in their second week instead of their second year.
A founder closes every enterprise deal personally and never writes down how, assuming "they'll pick it up by watching me." The hire brought in to take over spends months reinventing an approach the founder could have handed over in an afternoon, and two good prospects go cold in the meantime.
Record yourself doing the task at its best — a sales call, a customer onboarding session, a pitch — and turn it into a short numbered checklist someone else can follow without you in the room.
Watch the Signals, Not Just the Scoreboard
Revenue and growth numbers tell you the score, but they arrive too late to fix anything. The behaviors that lead to those numbers — how many qualified conversations happened, how fast a lead got a real response, how consistently a hire follows the process you handed them — show you the same story while there's still time to act on it.
A founder only reviews monthly revenue and is blindsided when a new hire's numbers collapse, only to discover the hire had quietly stopped following up on leads a week earlier.
Pick two or three behaviors that reliably precede a good outcome in your business and check them weekly, not monthly.
Adjust as You Grow, Don't Just Repeat
What got your first ten customers won't automatically get your next hundred, and the hiring bar, the process, and the metrics that made sense for a two-person team need honest revisiting as the business changes shape. Treat every one of these as a working draft you're willing to rebuild, not a formula you set once and defend forever.
Writing down criteria and process can feel like a luxury when you're pre-revenue and every hour spent documenting is an hour not spent selling. The practical fix is to keep the first version deliberately small — a one-page checklist and three metrics — rather than skipping it entirely because the full version feels too heavy to build right now.
Name one thing, honestly
What's one thing your business currently depends on you personally doing well, that nobody else could do if you disappeared for a month?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
0 of 3 selected
Run this for seven days
Pick two or three behaviors that reliably precede a good outcome in your business and check them weekly, not monthly.