No Sales Process? No Harvest: The other morning I caught my dog, Loki, sneaking green beans out of my garden. While chasing him off, I noticed some beans had already withered because I hadn’t picked them in time.
That moment reminded me of a hard truth: sales is a lot like gardening.
If you don’t have structure, the opportunities you’ve worked so hard to grow will rot on the vine.
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The Founder’s Trap
Founders juggle everything—product development, marketing, team building, and customer support. With so much on the plate, sales often slides to the bottom of the list.
Or worse, founders ride the “sales rollercoaster.” They generate a burst of leads, get busy with other tasks, and then fail to follow through. The result? Dried-up pipelines, lost opportunities, and stalled growth.
No sales? No growth. No process? No harvest.
Why Conversations Are the Lifeblood of Growth
What many founders don’t realize is that the quality of their sales conversations determines so much more than revenue.
When you listen with intention, dig into buyer insights, and ask the right questions, you uncover the information that fuels everything else:
- Marketing: what messaging resonates
- Product development: what features buyers actually need
- Customer experience: what frustrations must be solved first
It’s not a battle for your time—it’s about integration. Sales conversations are the lifeblood of your company, and everything else flows from them.
Too Many Steps, Not Enough Structure
Another mistake I see? Founders with either no sales process—or one that’s eight to ten steps long (and feels more like a board game rule book).
If your process is so complicated you can’t follow it consistently, it’s broken. On the other hand, if you don’t have a process at all, you’ll never know what’s ready to be harvested.
The solution? A simple, flexible structure.
Just like I bend my garden fence so the beans can climb where I can see them, your sales process should support opportunities to grow—and help you spot the low-hanging fruit.
From Garden to Growth
The lesson is clear: structure isn’t optional. It’s what turns leads into customers and conversations into long-term growth.
Because sales isn’t just another task—it’s the trellis that supports everything else you’re building.
✍️ I’m Carole Mahoney, sometimes called the Sales Therapist. I help founders and teams create buyer-first sales strategies that grow revenue and strengthen relationships.
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CAN YOU IMAGINE SPENDING $250K ON RECRUITER FEES AND NOT HAVING THOSE SALES HIRES WORK OUT 6 MONTHS LATER?
Or losing your next round of funding due to missed sales targets?
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With 75% of sales hires failing and 33% fired in the first year, odds are you may end up with a poor fit sales hire.
Maybe you have felt that sting already, or heard about it happening to others. Now you need to hire a salesperson (again)- how do you avoid hiring the wrong fit?
Join us on Wednesday, October 22 at 11:30 EST
In this interactive session, Carole Mahoney, Author of Buyer First and Harvard Business School Entrepreneurial Sales Coach, and Ben Tagoe, CEO of Objective Management Group, will share what they have learned about what it takes to have a successful sales and hiring process to avoid the costly mistakes so many make.
