How to stay out of closing calls

[COLD OPEN]

You know what's funny about being a great closer? It's the thing founders brag about most and complain about most at the exact same time.

"I have to be on every single close call." That's the complaint. And when you ask why, the answer is usually some version of "because I'm the best one to do it."

And look, maybe that's true. Maybe you are great at closing. But here's what nobody wants to tell you: having to be there every single time isn't a sign that you're talented. It's a sign that the process was never built to work without you.

[Episode]

Welcome back. In this episode, I’m talking about cycle time in the Approve stage of your revenue engine— which is a fancy way of talking about why it takes so long to close deals and why you're still in the room for every single one of them.

And here's what I want to challenge today: the assumption that the founder being on most every close call is a delegation problem. Because it's not. It's a design problem. And the fix looks completely different depending on which one you're actually solving.

Here's the thing most sales consultants won't tell you: the goal isn't to find someone on your team who can close like you. Rather, we need to build a process where the close isn't really a performance at all.

When a deal reaches the Approve stage and still needs you in the room to land it, that usually means one of two things happened. Either trust wasn't built well enough before that conversation — and now you're doing double duty trying to close and build credibility at the same time. Or the process has no architecture. No documented structure. No clear next step. Just vibes and whoever's most comfortable in the room.

In either case, you're not the solution. You're the workaround. And as long as you keep showing up as the workaround, the process never gets fixed. Because it doesn't have to.

Now, most founders frame this as a people problem. They say, "My team just isn't ready to own the close." Or a trust problem like, "Clients want to talk to me directly." And both of those things can be partially true. I'm not dismissing them.

But when I look at why cycle time in the Approve stage is slow, the real culprit isn't the team and it isn't the client. It's that the stage was never engineered to run without the founder in it.

Think about that. If a stage was designed with you as a required component, removing you from it isn't delegation. It's deconstruction. You'd basically have to tear it down and rebuild it.

Let me just describe a scenario for a second and you tell me if this is familiar.

You have a deal in the pipeline that you’re excited about. The prospect has been engaged, the conversations have gone well, and your team has been handling it up to this point. And then it gets to that final call — the one where money gets talked about, objections come up, commitments get made — and somehow the calendar invite has your name on it.

So, you block out Tuesday afternoon. The call goes great. They sign. And you walk away thinking, "Yeah, that's just how it works." —Meanwhile, three other deals are sitting in a queue waiting for Tuesday afternoon to open up again.

Or here's the other version: your team gets to that same stage and they kind of just... stall. They're not sure what to say. They default to "let me loop the boss in on this." Which sounds like a reasonable handoff but is actually the process hitting a wall.

And none of this is about your team not caring. It's about a stage that was built around your presence. And when you're not there, the whole thing just idles.

The move most founders make when they feel this pain is they go hire a closer. Someone who's done quota-carrying roles, someone who can take meetings, someone who "can handle the close."

And then six months later they're frustrated because the new hire isn't closing at the same rate. So they step back in. And now they've got a salesperson on payroll and they're still on too many close calls.

The mistake wasn't the hire. The mistake was thinking the problem was personnel.

Because when a new person steps into a process that was never documented, never systematized, and was built entirely on the founder's intuition about what makes a deal close — they're not picking up a process. They're trying to reverse-engineer one person's brain.

And they can't. Nobody can. That's the point.

So they do their best, clients ask to escalate, the founder jumps back in, and everybody feels oddly bad about the whole thing.

The takeaway here is that a process has to exist before a person can follow it. Not the other way around.

With that said, I want you to ask yourself this question: If you were completely unavailable for three weeks — I'm talking truly unreachable with no calendar, no Slack, no contact what-so-ever — how many deals currently in your pipeline would close?

Not just move forward. Actually close.

And if the honest answer is zero or close to it, ask yourself: is that because your team doesn't know how to sell? Or is it because the decisions, the objections, the trust signals, the final nudge — all of it is still sitting in your head?

Because if it's the latter, that's not a team capability gap. That's a design gap, which means the information to close those deals exists - It's just stuck in one person's brain and hasn't been transferred to the system yet.

So let me walk through what I think are the three design decisions that keep founders locked into the Approve stage. Three things to look at first so you can actually understand why you're still in the room.

The first one is trust sequencing. If the close call is still doing trust-building work, the stage before it didn't finish its job. A well-designed Approve stage should have the salesperson walking into the room with trust already established. The prospect already believes your company understands their problem, that your team has done this before, that your process works. If none of that has landed before the founder shows up, the founder becomes the trust mechanism. And now you can't remove them without removing the trust.

That means the fix isn't to be better on the close call. The fix is upstream — what has to be true before a prospect gets to this stage?

The second one is undocumented architecture. Most founders can close because they've done it hundreds of times and they've internalized a pattern. They know when to go quiet. They know which objection is a buying signal. They know how to frame risk. They know what the prospect is actually afraid of.

And all of that is real skill. But it's tribal knowledge. It lives nowhere except your nervous system.

When that pattern doesn't exist in a documented form in a talk track, a framework, or a set of decision-tree responses to common objections — nobody else can run it. The process is you.

Documenting this doesn't mean scripting every word. It means capturing the logic so someone else can learn it, adapt it, and own it.

The third one is outcome ambiguity in the stage design. What does "Approve" actually mean in your process? What is the specific outcome this stage is supposed to produce? What does a yes look like? What does a no look like? What's the next step after each?

A lot of founders have never written that down. The stage doesn't have a clear definition. It's just "the part where we hopefully get a deal." And when a stage doesn't have a clear outcome, the person running it has no way to know if they're doing it right. So they escalate. To you.

So the answer here is to give the stage a defined outcome. Give your team the criteria for what moves the deal forward and what ends the conversation. That one change alone cuts you out of a huge percentage of the decisions you're currently making.

To help you fix this issue, I invite you to a reverse audit that should take you less than 30 minutes: Think about the last three deals you personally closed. The last three where your presence was the deciding factor. Where if you hadn't been in that room or on that call, the deal probably doesn't close.

For each one, I want you to identify the moment you knew the deal was going to close. Was that moment before you got involved? Or only after?

If it was before — the work was done upstream and your team just didn't have permission to finish it. That's a clarity and ownership problem.

If it was only after you showed up — the trust didn't exist before you walked in. That's a design problem in the stages that feed this one.

Either answer is useful. Because now you know which wall you're actually hitting.

The founders who get out of the close-call trap aren't the ones who hire better salespeople or coach their team harder on techniques.

They're the ones who got honest about the fact that the approve stage was never built to run without them — and decided to build it.

And that's not a massive undertaking. It usually starts with one documented pattern. One defined outcome. One conversation you stop having because the process now handles it. And those small shifts compound fast.

If you want a clearer picture of where your Approve stage is stuck, and what's actually upstream of it, I have created a free revenue diagnostic that will show you where your system depends on you most — and where the first fix lives. Just click on the link in the show notes to access the diagnostic. And I am going to ask you to do it right now, if you can - or at least make a promise to do it by the end of today. Because every day you spend thinking about fixing the things that are keeping you tied to your revenue engine is another step further away from becoming founder-free.