Nine Principles Of Building A Sales Machine While most of this book is about “what” you should do to create predictable revenue through a sales machine, “how” you do it is just as important. Here are nine fundamentals about how, day-to-day, you can be much more effective in the way you build your sales machine: 1) Be PATIENT. Developing a sales engine that predictably generates revenue can take 4-12 months or more, depending on the state of your company. Even a single new program (such as a lead generation campaign) in business-to-business sales can take months and months to be defined, make your first mistakes, fix‘em, see revenue, and become integrated and habitual. 2) Experiment. With everything. Constantly. A/B test. Try two different phone scripts or emails with 50 prospects, and measure which one works better. And apply this idea to everything you do. Test and see what works. 3) Don’t take on one-off projects. (Unless it's an experiment to learn something for the future). If it's not intended to be repeatable, it's not worth doing. One-off efforts, even for a quick payoff, are a distraction from focusing your energy on sustainable efforts. 4) Get out of Excel! Create a rule that if “it” (an opportunity, order, client, etc.) doesn't exist in your sales force automation system, then it doesn't exist. For example, salespeople should only be compensated based on the deals and data that are in your sales system. Reports must be run as much as possible from within Salesforce.com (or whatever your main metrictracking system is), rather than in Excel. 5) Sketch out how things work and what your processes are on a flow chart. What is your lead generation or sales process? Can you sketch it out simply, on paper or a whiteboard? If not, that's a problem. I am not a fan of complex flow charts—I am easily confused. Even laying out a process in 3-7 high level steps is useful to everyone involved. Start with defining the desired outcome of a process or team. What does the process have to look like to lead to that outcome? Is this function being done ad