What is the most important job the business owner or leader must do? Feed the beast!
Feed the beast means filling the sales funnel.
I’ve worked with many clients over the years who have looked at countless ways to structure the operation so that other team members had responsibility for contributing leads and new customers to the sales funnel. These owners and leaders are surprised and disappointed when other team members don’t meet goals and expectations on new leads and new customers and are often upset that their team members don’t seem to care as much about the success of the business as they do.
Guess what? The team is unlikely to ever care as much as the owner or leader!
The business belongs to the leader. It’s his or her baby, and it’s usually carrying a significant amount of personal investment from the leader.
My advice is almost always the same: offload all the operational tasks you possibly can to the team and spend your time filling the funnel. If the team is equipped with the tools, skills, and autonomy to run the daily operation, the leader is free to be in the field building relationships with referral partners and prospective customers to fill the pipeline.
No one else will ever feel the pressure to keep that funnel full that the leader with the 50,000-foot view does.
In my experience, if the leader doesn’t feed the beast, no one will!
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