Your best rep just asked you to join the call. Again. The prospect is big, the rep is nervous, and you're the only one who knows how this deal really gets closed.

So you join. You close it. And next month the same thing happens, because the way you sell lives in one place: your head.

That's the ceiling. Not your skills. Not the market. The fact that nobody else can run the play without you.

I talked this through with Zorina Dimitrova on Grownlearn (February 2025). Listen to the full conversation: Grownlearn with Simon Severino

The question I took for a walk

I used to be the delivery. A founder would call: can you help me double revenue? Sure, I'm coming. Every deal and every client ran through me.

"So the biggest bottleneck was how do I get Simon out of this process?"

When I have a big problem, I pick one question and go for a walk. So I walked through Vienna with that one question and no answer. Then I passed a McDonald's near the subway station and stopped.

Nobody in that building is a bottleneck. Anyone can open one in any city. So what do you actually buy when you buy a franchise?

"You buy brand and checklists."

The brand is the yellow sign everybody recognizes. The checklist is how much lettuce goes in the Big Mac. Written down. Every step. That's the whole secret.

🐬 If a burger can run without its founder, your sales process can too.

Write the cookbook (yes, it's boring)

I ran home and started writing. How do we do marketing? How do we do sales? How do we do operations? It became our business cookbook.

"It was a bit boring to do this. I have to admit." Not the tasty part of running a company. It took me one summer. And once it was done, I had something I could scale.

For sales, the cookbook starts with the playbook. We use the 8 Steps of the Repeatable Sale, in order. For each step, you write down three questions you feel good about asking.

The highest win rate comes when you talk about 30% of the time and the buyer talks the rest. Strong questions get you there. A new hire with your questions in front of them doesn't have to guess.

Then record the calls and watch them. I've recorded my sales calls for 22 years. Messi still practices. Brady still watched the tape. If you want to stay in the top one percent, "you always watch your tapes."

Every process gets an owner who isn't you

Here's where most playbooks die: they get written, then the founder keeps running every step. Nothing changes.

Every process in the cookbook opens with two lines. The owner's name. The date of the last update.

And the owner should not be you. "If you're the owner of the company, make sure you are not always on top of that." Hand each process to someone on the team. Let them own it and report to you.

We did it bit by bit. Michelle took the first processes. Then Lou. Then Abby. It takes months, maybe years. You have to start practicing.

🐯 Owning the process is control. Being the process is a cage.

The most important process is the review

Zorina asked the right question: processes are a snapshot of one moment, so how do they keep up with a market that keeps moving? Left alone, a written process goes stale fast.

My answer: "the most important process of all processes is the review."

Every 14 days, each process owner gets 60 minutes with me. They don't report activity. They walk through four questions:

1. What can we simplify to make it easier for the client?
2. What can we simplify to make it easier for us?
3. Is it bringing in the right people for the right things?
4. What's needed to make it even more easy and fun?

"Sometimes four months, nothing changes." Then, in one review, something shifts. Lou owned the process that got me on podcasts. He could walk in and say: Simon, everybody only wants the AI topic right now. Fine. We adapt the process.

So change still happens. It just lands in one place, with one owner, every 14 days.

Why this puts you back in control of the sale

When the play only lives in your head, every deal needs you on the call. Your calendar becomes the pipeline. You show up tired to the big one, rush to the price, and the buyer feels it.

When the play is written down, owned and reviewed, your rep leads the conversation in the right order. Frustration before deliverables. Cost of inaction before investment. Starting date before the Statement of Work. You join a call because you want to, not because the deal dies without you.

🌴 And you get the time back to work on the business instead of inside every deal.

Start this week

1. Pick one process. The one that most often needs you on the call. Usually the discovery call.
2. Write the checklist. Every step, plus three questions per step of the 8 Steps.
3. Add two lines on top. Owner's name, date of last update. Put someone else's name there.
4. Record the calls. Watch the tapes together with the owner.
5. Book the review. 60 minutes every 14 days. Four questions. Change one thing or nothing.

🐬 Step 3 is the hard one. Write the name anyway.

This is the work we do with founders in the 90-Day Sales Acceleration: the playbook written, the owners named, the review on the calendar, so a new hire can run the sale without you.

Picture a Thursday afternoon a few months from now. A big prospect is on the calendar and you're not on the invite. Your rep runs the questions from the cookbook (your questions, in their voice), lets the buyer name the cost of doing nothing, and books the starting date. You hear about it at the Friday review. Then you close the laptop and go for a run. That's Sprintlife: control in sales, and the time freedom to live the life you built the company for.

Listen to the full conversation with Zorina Dimitrova: Grownlearn with Simon Severino

Grab the free tools and join the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆