Private session resource
Your company has a clearer process for a sandwich than it does for the things that make you money.
In the room I held up a tuna sandwich and a receipt and asked what happens when an employee buys lunch for a client. Every one of you answered in under ten seconds. Receipt, form, approval, reimbursed.
Nobody built that process because it was brilliant. It runs every time, whoever's doing it, good week or bad. That's consistency over brilliance.
You systematized the sandwich. This page is about the four places you left the eight-million-dollar relationship to whoever happens to remember.
Section 01
Your 90-Day Number
In the room you wrote down a guess. How many quotes, proposals or conversations did you open in the last 90 days that nobody has formally closed? Not won. Not lost. Nobody knows. Put that guess in dollars.
“Noah has woven together memorable examples, detailed common sense and an innate understanding of what makes a business thrive.”
Seth Godin, AuthorSection 02
The Four Killers
The four places the process is least clearly defined. You recognized at least two of them in the room.
The Problem
You created the opportunity. A quote, a proposal, a conversation. Then it went quiet. Not because they said no. Because nobody on your side had a defined next step.
The Proof
A CEO called wanting a $250,000 ERP system. When we dug in, he was sitting on $60 million in quotes and engineering drawings nobody had followed up on. He wanted software. It was a process problem. What he needed was one page: day 12, somebody follows up. Day 18, it escalates to sales management. Still unanswered, it lands on the CEO's desk. He never fixed it.
A $400M building supplies distributor in BC did. Fourteen hundred unconverted opportunities in the system. Follow-up on fewer than half. We added one rule: three structured touches before any opportunity is closed won, lost, or deferred. $2.3 million recovered in 90 days. None from new customers. None from new products.
How did 1,400 pile up? One man, thirty years with the company, had become the process. Nothing written down. His philosophy: if they want it, they'll call us. He wasn't lazy. He was brilliant. And the whole business depended on him remembering.
The Tool: The One-Page Follow-Up
Day 12 follow-up. Day 18 escalate. Still open, CEO's desk. Three touches before anything is closed won, lost, or deferred. No software.
The Problem
That one costs you deals you already created. This one costs you customers you already have. Nothing going wrong isn't the same as warm.
The Proof
A $4.2 million account. Seventy percent of that customer's business was with us. The account manager moved on, so we set up the handoff call. And the customer said: who's Alex?
The Tool: 90-45 and MMP
Every customer gets meaningful contact within 90 days. Your top 10% within 45. Meaningful means meaningful, memorable, personal, because otherwise you'll count your newsletter.
At scale
Twenty thousand customers doesn't make this impossible, it makes it three rules. Top 10% get a human from your leadership team. Next tier gets their account owner. Everyone else gets a system, and this is where AI belongs: the machine tells you who (went quiet six months, just placed their biggest order, had a service issue last week). A person makes the touch. Nobody's memory decides who.
The Problem
A guy who runs an association told me that when he started, he called every new member personally. Every one. He doesn't anymore. Nobody decided to stop. It just stopped.
Every time you grow, you consume capacity. The first thing consumed is the activity that got you here. That's the growth tax. It's not a failure. It's predictable, which means it's preventable.
The Proof
Jesse Cole owns the Savannah Bananas. Sold-out stadiums, waiting lists. In the early days, he and his wife made 100,000 phone calls. He didn't stop when it worked. That's the whole difference.
The Tool: Pick-3
About as unglamorous as it sounds. Every person picks three tasks a day off a list. Call three customers you haven't heard from in six months. Follow up on three quotes. Send three handwritten notes. Drop in on three clients. Five to twenty minutes. Three things, today, written down, and somebody looks at the sheet on Friday. Three a day across fifteen people is 225 customer touches a month that weren't happening before.
Make it a non-negotiable, not a priority. Priorities get reshuffled the minute things get busy. Non-negotiables don't. And not just sales. You. The CEO on Undercover Boss wasn't a bad guy. He just hadn't made three phone calls in five years.
The Problem
Three ways the gap costs you. The fourth is the one you're currently spending money to make worse. Automation doesn't fix an undefined process. It makes it faster.
The Proof
An $8 million account. Critical equipment failed at the customer's site. It got handled, technically. Logged, assigned, resolved. Nobody picked up the phone. The CEO found out days later, flew out unannounced, and barely saved the relationship. The $30 million expansion they'd been planning together died quietly.
Nobody automated that failure. A human missed it. Now imagine that missing judgment wired into a system, running at scale, every day, without anyone watching.
The Tool: The One-Page Test
If you can't describe the process on one page, you're not ready to automate it.
“Working with Noah the past seven years has proven to be one of the wisest investments our companies have made. His innovative & result-driven techniques have not only greatly improved our bottom line but has transformed our approach to business and our ongoing relationship with our customers.”
Troy Loop, CEO, Loop Group of Companies (7-year client)Section 03
The Tools
One per killer. Use them here, print them, take them to your leadership team.
Section 04
Your Execution Score
Four questions from the room. Answer them honestly.
Section 05
Your Worksheet
The worksheet from the session, so you can run it again with your leadership team. Same four sections, same questions, one page.
PDF coming shortly
The Ask
In the room I said this once and then stopped talking, so I'll do the same here.
Thirty minutes. Your killer. Where your biggest area of impact actually is. Not a presentation. A working session with your real numbers.