How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Sales (Without Abandoning It)
Feeling stretched thin trying to do everything in your business? You're not alone. Many MSP owners ask how to remove themselves from sales, but that's the wrong question. Sales is the oxygen your business needs—you never fully step away from it. The real question is: how do you get your time back while keeping sales flowing? This episode breaks down the exact phases of promoting yourself through your sales organization, from doing everything yourself, to hiring your first SDR, to building a team where you operate as a true sales leader. Learn why each role funds the next, why abdication kills results, and how to build a self-sustaining sales machine without losing control of your company's lifeline.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
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lot of business owners ask me,
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how do I escape sales? Like how do I remove myself from from the sales process?
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I cringe a little because
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it's a dangerous question. And the reality is, is as a business owner,
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you basically never remove yourself from sales. You
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don't get out of sales,
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you evolve with it.
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So what I'm gonna do in this video is just reframe like, what is
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what is the real question that that you're asking and
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what's the answer? Let's dive in.
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right, so a lot of MSPs and business owners talk about like wanting to remove themselves from the sales process
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am a business owner. So I completely understand this. You're exhausted. You're you're juggling too many things. You're you're spinning all the plates. You're on the operations side.
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Maybe you're on the delivery side. You're, you know, helping with with all of the sales. You're like, it's just you're spread too thin. And I get that. But the reality is, is one thing that you want to accept up front
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until you are in a position where you are just an investor in your business, where you have a CEO or a president that's actually running functionally, like basically all the business.
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And frankly, not even then really
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You're always going to be in sales
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sales
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is the oxygen that you need for your business, like cash flow is everything.
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So you run out of that,
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then the business fails like so that's the one thing that you can't do in business is run out of money.
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So you never want to fully remove yourself from sales.
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But the question you want to ask is,
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how do I get my time back and keep sales coming into the business? In other words,
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what role do I play in the sales process as the business grows? Or what role do I need to play in order to make the business grow past me? Because maybe you're at this point, great at sales, but you're the bottleneck.
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the answer that is there are different phases. There are distinct phases that you will go through in the business life cycle. Okay. And early on you are all of it okay. You are like if you look at the sales organization and you say, hey, you know what?
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There's
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SDR, BTR, what are we going to call like somebody prospecting, doing cold calls, doing outreach, doing
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emails, whatever that is. They're doing like business development activity. You've got, you know, a salesperson, like a closer or an 80, like whatever you want to call them. You've got kind of like the sales manager, right? Like you're and you're all of it rolled into rolled into one.
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And at this stage in the business, man, it is tough like you are. It's it's chaotic. Like you're you're the person. It's like
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I'm going to the networking events. I'm responding to people on LinkedIn. I'm, you know, sending some emails. I'm hopping on the sales calls. I'm doing these proposals, I'm writing the proposals. I'm delivering the proposals,
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You just got a bunch of shit going on, right? Like, but that's that's how every business starts
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But then something happens. The dog starts to catch the car. Right? Like you actually start getting some sales and the thing starts growing
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you now, like, have the customers to take care of it. Now you've got the hiring to start doing, and now you've got the business evolving
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and you're trying to maintain that flywheel that got it going in the first place.
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But you now have other jobs that are, that are, that are adding up very quickly. And the more sales that you bring in, the more jobs that you create, the more jobs that you create. If especially if you're doing them, the more difficult it is to keep the sales going.
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you kind of like hit this not quite plateau, but you hit this threshold and you go, okay, I'm this isn't manageable. Like I can't keep on with with this. And frankly, you can't actually it's like a again like you, this is the sales activities driving all of the other stuff.
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And that's when people start asking themselves, all right, how do I get myself out of this sales machine? Right. Like I can't keep that going. This is now requiring a ton of my time on all the other stuff, and I.
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But I need the sales to keep going in order to fund and pay for all the other stuff that's happening in the business.
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and the answer isn't you remove yourself from that process entirely. The answer is you ascend through that process.
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Right. And here's what I mean.
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Step one promote yourself at a lead generation. Right? So if you look at a sales organization like picture yourself
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twice as big, right. So double your revenue. And let's assume that you've got the semblance of a of a sales team building, and you've got a BTR, like a business development rep who's doing outreach and doing lead generation, things like that.
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You've got an 80, like account executive or a close or somebody that's, that's selling like running discovery proposal. And then you've got a manager. Okay. Like let's, let's assume that those are the roles in the sales org.
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Well, the first thing you wanna do is promote yourself out of the Legion. Right. So what do you do. You you can systematize it.
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You can flip it to marketing. You can go hire a BTR or and CSR like whatever you or whatever acronym you want to give it. You can give somebody or hire somebody to bring them on board and start doing the prospecting for you.
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from a capital standpoint, it's the it's the lowest investment, you know, to to make, you know, if you just look at total comp of, of people in a sales organization, all that stuff, hiring an SDR is going to be the the lower capital investment that you have to make to hire somebody and replace the function.
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Second reason is the payback period on that role, because the ROI in the in the sales cycle of the person doing that job is compressed, like they're they're generating leads, they're getting you bookings, are getting you appointments.
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I know within 60, 90 days whether somebody is doing really well, I can also see results. And I actually get ROI from that position within 60 to 90 days.
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Okay. So like that person sets one appointment for me. If you're selling MSP services lifetime value of a deal. Huge, right? So just run the math on this. Say okay, that person gets me 1 or 2 bookings in the first three months. Like cool. Like then we're we're fairly neutral on the expense potentially. Whereas, you know, if you start with like an LSR type of role sales cycle and that's longer the, you know, it's more expensive to hire that person, you know, takes them a while to, to ramp up even before the sales cycle kicks in.
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So I promote myself at a lead generation.
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And I'm now primarily the AA, the account executive and the sales manager. Right. So I've offloaded that now as the AA, as the sales person, I'm going to run these deals. I'm going to make sure that this function on on the SDR side is, is operational and, and it's working the way that I want.
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Now, what I want to do is figure out how do I promote myself out of the outside sales rep role. Okay, so now I'm going to hire somebody to go toe to, to fill those shoes. Now, the other thing about this strategy is one pays for the other.
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Okay. So when the SDR starts setting appointments and I start going on those appointments and start closing some deals, it now gives me more capital. It gives me more cash to hire the next role. Right. So like hiring this thing paid for the next thing. All right. So the next thing hire the outside sales rep
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somebody will find somebody that can run really good discovery. Somebody that can actually close deals.
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And I'm going to look for a way to promote myself out of this role. And I'm going to do that properly.
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Right? I'm going to hire the right person. I'm going to give them a training plan. I'm going to ramp them up like all those things.
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at that point, now, what I have is I've got somebody in the lead gen function on the SDR. I've got somebody who's capable of closing deals and and running things as the LSR.
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So guess what that makes you? You've now promoted yourself to sales manager because those two people, unless you hire somebody else, which I wouldn't recommend in this process anyway, at this point, you're now the sales manager. They report to you.
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now you're running the weekly meetings. You're, you know, checking out the scorecards.
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You're listening to some calls. Still takes time, by the way. Like don't abdicate it. Don't say like, hey, I'm hands off. Like, you guys got this. Cool. I'm going to go, like, work on all the operational stuff. That's not that's not the effective way to promote yourself through the process and get where you want to actually get to long term.
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so you assume the sales manager role right. So you've now promoted yourself into sales management. At which point of course you can hire sales manager or fractional sales management program if like if you just have, you know, an officer and an SDR may make more sense to go get somebody that's that's fractional.
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By the way, if you're looking for fractional sales management, we can help. But or you hire sales manager whatever that is. What you don't want to do is just like let those two functions fly, right? Because I promise you that if you're not doing a weekly meeting, if you're not looking at the activity metrics, if there isn't accountability, if there's not ongoing coaching in both of those roles, that they will diminish.
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You will see the turnover there. You won't get the results that you want. Like all of that will happen. So you're still spending time, but you're spending significantly less time than you would have trying to do all of these things.
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now at that point, you may get somebody to fill that role and you've then become kind of like the VP of sales or the chief revenue officer, however you want to look at it.
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But at each stage you're just getting to the next level, right?
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And you're assuming different responsibilities for the sales work
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all the way up until the fact that you have, you know, like even as a CEO, when I had a CRO, I'm still involved in sales. I'm just involved at the CEO level now.
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That is my answer to how do I remove myself from sales. You don't
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you change the role that you play in the sales process as you build the machine.
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And if you want to build a self-sustaining business, if you want to build a self-sustaining MSP and a sales flywheel
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that's capable of running without your direct, immediate involvement in the lead generation, in the closing of of sales in the even the management of the sales people, like the direct management.
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that's the reframe. Like that's the mindset to look at this is you get the freedom that you're really chasing because that's what you're really asking is not how do I remove myself from sales? But like, how do I get my time back? Right. Like as a, as a CEO or a business owner?
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How can I get better leverage on my time?
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This is the process. This is how I've done it. This is how I'm doing it right now with with MSP sales partners. I've done it before and done it with several other sales organization, so
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I hope this has been helpful. But if it has, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Hit like would really appreciate that. And we have a really popular newsletter. I get a ton of feedback on it. You can jump on that. We send something out every single week on sales growth, business mindset. Again, linking in the description.
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And if you're an MSP, check out MSP sales toolbox.com. That is a resource that we drop templates and playbooks and all sorts of stuff in. We updated every single month. We add new content and what it is, is stuff that we're using with clients and elsewhere.
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Like if it's a forecasting model that we think somebody else may be able to, to leverage, like, but we'll, we'll drop it in there.
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You have lifetime access, completely free, specifically for MSP. So thanks again. Audience.
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You.
