Midlife MavericksI asked a client last week how many sales calls she’d had that month. She said “loads.” I asked her to actually count. She went quiet, scrolled her calendar, and came back with three.
Three. Not three a week. Three that month. She’d spent four weeks feeling busy: tweaking her website, redesigning her logo, writing a lead magnet nobody had asked for. All of it felt like work. None of it was a sales call.
I wasn’t annoyed with her. I recognised her completely, because I’ve done the exact same thing, more times than I’d like to admit.
Quote of the Week
“Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”
Peter Drucker
Busy is the disguise fear wears best
In twenty-five years of raising capital, I have never once closed an investor with a logo. I’ve never closed one with a beautifully formatted PDF either, although I have made plenty of those to avoid making a phone call I was dreading.
Here’s the thing about a sales call: it can be declined. A website cannot reject you. A logo has never once told you it’s “not the right time.” So we build the things that can’t say no to us, and we call the avoidance “preparation.”
I still catch myself doing it. I’ll tell myself I need one more version of the deck before I’m ready to pitch. One more slide. One more edit. The deck was ready three drafts ago. What wasn’t ready was me, picking up the phone.
The number that actually matters
Every business, at every stage, comes down to one question: how many real conversations did you have with a real person who could actually buy from you, this week?
Not “engaged with your content.” Not “opened your newsletter” (although hello, and thank you for being here). A conversation. Voice or video, in real time, where you asked for something and a human being had to respond to you directly.
Most people who tell me business is slow have never actually tracked this number. They’re guessing. And when you finally count, the truth is almost always smaller and more useful than the vague dread you’d been carrying around instead.
What twenty-five years in capital markets taught me about the phone
Institutional investors are busy, sceptical, and thoroughly unimpressed by decoration. You cannot out-design your way into their portfolio. You get in front of them, you make your case clearly, and you ask directly for what you want. Every fund I’ve ever helped raise capital for got there through calls, not collateral.
The collateral matters. It supports the call. It is not a substitute for it. I learned this the hard way, more than once, spending a week polishing a data room while the actual investor meeting sat unbooked in my inbox.
The businesses I watch struggle are rarely short on ideas or polish. They’re short on the uncomfortable, unglamorous habit of asking someone for the sale, out loud, on a call, and sitting with the answer.
Counting is not the same as chasing
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not telling you to cold-call strangers into submission. I’m telling you to be honest about your own number, because you cannot fix what you refuse to measure.
If your number is three a month and you want more revenue, that’s not a mindset problem or a marketing problem. It’s an arithmetic problem, and arithmetic problems are the easiest ones to solve. You don’t need a rebrand. You need five more calls next month than you had this one.
Your move this week
Open your calendar right now and count. Not “roughly.” Count the actual sales conversations you had in the last thirty days, the ones where you asked for something and a real person answered you directly.
Write the number down. Don’t judge it yet. Just get it out of the vague, comfortable fog of “I’ve been so busy” and into a number you can look at.
Then tell me: what’s your number, and what have you been building instead of making the call? I read every reply.
See you Wednesday,
Claudia
