In the Now: Bruce Eckfeldt

If you’re a founder who can’t let go of taking a personal lead on sales, listen to this insightful conversation with Bruce Eckfeldt, founder and CEO of Eckfeldt & Associates, who cautions CEOs to standardize the sales process. 

Read the interview snapshot and listen to the full conversation here. 

Nowspeed: Hi, my name is Dave Reske and welcome to this edition of In the Now where we focus on uncovering the myths and misunderstandings of marketing leadership with some of the world’s most interesting people. And my guest today is Bruce Eckfeldt, founder and CEO of Eckfeldt & Associates. He will be talking about scaling and growing a business. 

Bruce: Thanks, I appreciate it. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Nowspeed: Bruce is a strategy and business coach and former Inc. 500 CEO. That’s a big deal. And he’s also had several successful podcasts and specialties including using growth systems such as scaling up and creating blueprints that clearly define the structure for success for your clients. So Bruce, we’ve got a lot to talk about. 

As you know, I like to start these conversations with what I call a mythbuster question. And, you know, as you and I have talked, sales is near and dear to the hearts of many founder CEOs who are usually really good at it. So, I want you to bust that myth that when the founder CEOs are looking to staff up and find salespeople to help them grow and scale their skills, they need to help find salespeople who sell like them, in order to be successful. 

Bruce: This one comes up for me a lot. I find I work a lot with these groups where you’ve got a very strong founder, growing the company, building out a leadership team, and starting to surround themselves with senior folks in these functional areas. And sales is always challenging because up until that point the founder is often either the lead salesperson or is at least the closer on a lot of deals. The role of a founder early in a company is to drive sales and they can be quite good at it. 

And oftentimes, they’re bringing in the lion’s share of the revenue. And they do it in a very particular way. And a lot of it has to do with their role and their understanding of the business and the products and services they offer. And a lot of times what I find happens when they go to expand the company and its sales capacity, they start looking for folks that can sell like a founder. I just need to find two or three other people that can sell like that and we can build a funnel. The challenge is that a founder can sell in a fairly unique way because of their history, their knowledge, their power, right? They can cut deals at a close, they can give a discount, or change the service or the product or add something to get the prospect to say yes, which is great when you’re at that size, but when you become larger, meeting more people to really broad scale the company, it’s really kind of impossible to find folks who can sell like that. And it’s impossible to really set up a sales system and sales process that’s going to support that style of selling, if you’re cutting deals, doing discounts. 

Modifying the product, adding things to your solution, at the last minute, it’s going to just wreak havoc on the rest of your operation and delivery process. So, I really encourage founders who are looking to scale to shift from trying to find people that sell like them to really figuring out how to standardize the selling process, and then find people that can support and excel in those various stages. 

So, you may find people that can work on a lot of it, but oftentimes you’ll find we really need to separate out marketing, there needs to be a different person or a different set of efforts that are driving, developing awareness, prospecting, finding qualified leads that we can then put into a sales process. And then I have people who might be really good at doing qualification. And helping do assessments particularly for complicated technology things, doing the work that it takes to even qualify a prospect versus the actual closing process versus the onboarding process. All of those things might be separate with separate people in charge. 

And until you get that, you’re going to run into a challenge, right? You’re just going to keep having to step in to drive sales and close sales. And that’s going to ultimately be a really hard model and a really hard ceiling for the company in terms of the growth process. 

Nowspeed: Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much to unpack there. I made all those mistakes easily in the first 10 years of running and scaling my company. So maybe I should just highlight all of the mistakes I made and give you a chance to react to them. But I think going back and I see this with our clients, I’ve done this myself, because one of the issues is you feel like you can go cheap so you don’t hire the right quality or you get somebody to just do a presentation or they just do prospect, a little piece over here, and then I can do the rest. Is that common among your clients? Or are they different from me and they get the right kind of people and it’s more of a process issue?

There’s more to learn. Make sure to watch the full conversation for all the insights here.