Desperately seeking coffee.

In last week's School of the Possible open call, open call, an ad hoc group formed around the topic of sales for fractional or consulting work. Nobody in my circles has figured this out—and I know plenty of people trying. Not the solo consultants, not the design studios, not the engineering boutiques. Listening to my fellow Possibletarians, I realized why we keep failing: we're calling five different jobs by one name, then acting confused when we can't do any of them.

That's part of the problem.

Sales—as most of us generally use the word, and as was the case in the School of Possible conversation—is actually multiple roles and jobs to be done. Before any of this work can happen, you need market research to figure out who actually needs what you do, what problems they'll pay to solve, and where to find them. Without that foundation, everything else is guessing.

The actual work of "sales" is to successfully turn a qualified lead into a signed deal. A qualified lead comes from doing the work of business development, which has its own tasks that include validating a marketing lead that can come from multiple sources: lead magnets, event registration—a trigger that typically, but not always trades a thing for contact information. The work of business development is to follow up on the marketing lead to develop it into a qualified lead, generally by validating the interest in the product or service as tied to problems, challenges, needs, opportunities, or all of the above. To generate leads requires creating something to trade that often comes in some form of thought leadership, as I've already mentioned. Advertising is another way to generate leads either by promoting the lead marketing campaign or potentially skipping that phase and creating a lead on its own.

But the work doesn't end when someone signs. Account management is what keeps clients happy, gets them to hire you again, refer others, and not become the kind of problem that drains your energy or tanks your reputation. Miss this piece and you're constantly hunting for new clients instead of building on relationships that already work.

Each of these activities requires different skills and practices in order to successfully move from one phase to the next. We typically can't jump from a blog post to closing a sale. I mean, I've seen it happen, but there are a string of dependencies that if done right will form the flywheel that tiny, independent businesses need.

So, when we're using the word "sales" what we're really talking about is: market research, content creation or thought leadership, marketing, business development, sales, and account management. Looking at it this way it's easy to see why people who haven't performed these roles have difficulty. And if we parse out the process in this way, it's also easier to identify why our "sales" process isn't working out.

Looking back, I can admit to having difficulty with…well, everything: validating market research (it looked good to me), marketing (keeping at it even as no new leads are coming in), business development (giving away too many ideas or solutions for free), sales (I keep hoping to one day win the set of steak knives), and account management (I keep forgetting that we're not friends). Yet when I had my own studio our annual sales were millions of dollars. The problem that we didn't realize back then is that we were one of the top providers of services in the world at the time. We could write a blog post that would turn into a heavy six-figure contract in a very short amount of time.

At Airbag and Happy Cog we didn't know it back then but our skills and work were commoditized back then and, unlike now, the price per barrel—so to speak—was very high. Today, with millions of people without a W2 and the markets working towards Minimum Viable Humans, fractional leaders and consultants have little choice but to take "sales" seriously or consider getting into a completely new line of work (hey, ship engineering sounds pretty cool).

The market has turned people into interchangeable parts while expecting them to market themselves as premium individuals. That tension—that contradiction—is what makes "sales" so impossible for most of us. We're supposed to be commodities and unicorns at the same time.

Over the years I have collected marketing materials, curriculum, and books on these topics. They helped, but the results weren't what I'd hoped for. Most of them treated sales as a single skill rather than the compound system it actually is. And now that I've stepped back to see a big part of the problem, I'm building a no bullshit framework for myself and anyone else tired of wondering why their "sales process" keeps failing. What am I missing?