The sales process: discovery, research, selling

A few months ago I started a new business that's nothing like what I usually do. It's low-cost, high-volume, in an industry I didn't grow up in. Hotels. Maintenance and craftsmanship work, repair and restoration for general managers and the owners who hold portfolios of properties. I went in with a value proposition that made all the sense in the world to me: we can do this work for ten cents on the dollar of replacement. We can save you money.

I sold almost nothing. Or rather, I sold a little. Enough to know the business worked. But not enough to know why it wasn't working better. That was until I stopped trying to talk and started actively listening for the words my clients were saying.

The language that unlocked the door

What I kept hearing in my early calls were two acronyms I didn't fully understand: FF&E and CapEx. So I asked. "Tell me more about your budget process." "Tell me what CapEx means in your world."

The answers reframed my approach. CapEx, for an owner, is the asset-value side of the sheet: what they show a bank, an investor, or a buyer. FF&E (furniture, fixtures, and expenses) is a different beast: a 3–5% line drawn from room revenue, treated as the rainy-day fund for the day-to-day maintenance budget. There's a quiet tension built into the structure: the GM wants to dip into something to keep the property running well, the owner wants to protect the asset side of the balance sheet, and the GM rarely has enough room in the FF&E line to do what they'd actually like.

The moment I learned that, my pitch changed. Not the work, not the cost, not the team. The language. "Ten cents on the dollar of replacement" became "for every dollar in your FF&E budget, you can restore three dollars' worth, and stretch the lifespan of your fixtures by two to four years."

Same business. Same cost. Same buyer. It's already there, and all you're doing is unlocking it with a different key.

Yes, no, and the maybe that kills you

I think many of you will agree that discovery can be uncomfortable. You ask for a meeting, you walk in, and a lot of the time you get politely shown the door. That's fine. It's par for the course. The thing I keep reminding myself is that I need a yes or a no, not a maybe.

Maybes do feel good in the moment. "Oh, this sounds great, send me something in a month." You leave the room energized. You tell your team you've got something brewing. Then the month passes, the follow-up gets dodged, and three months in you're staring at thirteen open accounts in the maybe column and no idea which of them are real.

A maybe is the most expensive answer in your pipeline. It costs you energy, attention, and the mental space you should be spending on the next conversation. So I work them toward a yes or a no. And if they're a no, I move on without burning calories on what might have been. A no isn't the end of the relationship either. It could be that something might materialize in the months to come. But a no provides clarity right now, and that's what you need in sales and successfully running a business.

Turning nuggets into sales assets

The second thing that's changed for me is what I do with the information I pull out of those discovery conversations. I take the words I learned, like FF&E, CapEx, room revenue, the GM/owner tension, and I bring them to Claude. I ask for three one-pagers, one for each persona: the GM, the owner, the chief engineer. I ask for a couple of social posts that would go alongside them.

Five years ago this would have taken me months. Pretty documents and brand-aligned formatting are my kryptonite. I'm a builder, not a designer. But more important than the speed is the inference: AI can pull connections between disparate ideas I wouldn't have stitched together on my own. It hands me a sharper conceptual map of the industry I'm trying to sell into. And then I take those one-pagers back to the maybes I haven't given up on, and back to the nos that might just have been the wrong frame. Some of them turn into yeses.

Sell before you can do

This is the harder, scarier discipline, but it's the one I think makes the most difference. I call it, sell before you can do.

Here's what I mean. If you're going to take on a $300K country club remodel, the wrong move is to hire a ten-person crew and then go looking for the work. The right move is to walk into five country clubs with an idea, get four nos, find out from the fifth what you didn't know, take those words back to your research, refine the pitch, and sell it before you've built the team. Then build the team to deliver what you sold.

The worst case is that you learn more about your industry, your product-market fit, and where the real demand lives than you ever would have from the comfort of your desk. The best case is you sell something new. Either way, you've moved.

You could call it failing upward. But I'd push back gently on that framing. It's not failure for the sake of failure. It's the OODA loop. Observe, orient, decide, act. You have an aim. You engage so you can learn. You learn so you can move.

Keeping the engine running

Sales is the engine. Most of you reading this are very good at it, you wouldn't still be running your business if you weren't. But the engine has to be maintained. The pitch that got you from one million to eight won't get you from twelve to twenty. The product-market fit you nailed five years ago isn't permanent.

The work is to keep listening, keep translating, and keep selling things before you're entirely sure how you'll deliver them. That's not recklessness. That's how you stay alive at the next bend in the S-curve.