What if the biggest thing holding your business back isn't your
product or your marketing, but the fact that you're still doing all
the selling yourself, and you have no idea how to build a team that
can do it without you? In this episode of The Grown Up Business
Podcast, Paul Avins sits down with Adam Davies, founder of Sales
Chief, a fractional sales management company that runs sales teams
for established agencies, service professionals and scale-up
businesses. Adam shares the unfiltered truth about why most
entrepreneurs give up on salespeople too early, why "fix the
system, not the team" beats another hiring round every time, and
why the businesses that struggle most with sales are the ones that
never properly documented what actually works. Adam unpacks his own
path into sales, from a self-employed, commission-only start in a
boiler-room environment in his late teens, to building Sales Chief
into a business that interviews over 70 candidates for every single
role it fills. He explains why most business owners only ever
interview three people and then wonder why their sales team
underperforms, why hiring the right people matters more than volume
of outreach, and why a salesperson who's good but in a rut usually
just needs the system fixed around them, not replacing. Paul and
Adam dig into the mechanics of a proper sales process: acknowledge,
isolate, handle, re-close. They talk through why "I need to think
about it" is rarely the real objection, why two-call closes can
lift conversion from 8% to 27.5%, why tracking cost-per-lead and
offers-per-day matters more than gut feel, and how AI-trained call
analysis is changing the way sales teams get coached. Adam also
opens up on the emotional side of sales: why buyers are liars (not
deliberately), why salespeople need to be matched to the income
level and demographic of who they're selling to, and why the best
sales managers are often the mediocre salespeople, not the top
performers. What you'll learn: Why stepping away from the phones
without a documented process can cost you 60% of your sales
overnight. Why the average business only interviews three people
per sales role, and why Sales Chief interviews over 70. Why hiring
mums on flexible contracts, or matching a salesperson's income
level to their buyer's, changes conversion rates. How a two-call
close process took one client from 8% to 27.5% conversion. Why "I
need to think about it" is a smokescreen, and how to acknowledge,
isolate, handle and re-close a real objection. Why cost-per-offer
and offers-per-day are the metrics most businesses never track. Why
listening back to your own best sales calls breaks a slump faster
than any pep talk. Why the best sales manager is rarely your
top-performing salesperson. Why documenting your own sales process
is step one before you ever hire. Why recruiting two salespeople at
once beats recruiting one. Why "fix the system, not the team"
should come before another round of hiring. Apply this: Document
your own sales process before you hire anyone. Ask AI to interview
you about what you do well, then turn it into a playbook. Don't
judge a salesperson on one bad month. Track daily data and look for
patterns before making any decision. Handle objections in sequence:
acknowledge, isolate, handle, re-close. Most reps skip the isolate
step and lose the sale. Get your team listening to their own best
calls, not generic training content, to rebuild confidence and
momentum. Match your salesperson to your buyer. Income level,
demographic and life experience all affect whether they can build
trust. Hire two salespeople at once if you can. The training cost
barely rises and you get built-in redundancy and competition. Know
your numbers inside out. A grown-up sales team can define a good
month, a bad month, and find its bottlenecks within days. About
Adam Davies Adam Davies is the founder of Sales Chief, a fractional
sales management company that builds and runs remote and fractional
sales teams for agencies, service professionals and scale-up
businesses. He started out in commission-only sales in his late
teens and has spent over two decades in sales and sales leadership,
including as head of sales for Andy Harrington, before launching
Sales Chief to help entrepreneurs fix their sales systems rather
than just their headcount. Connect with Adam on Instagram:
@adamdaviessales Connect with Adam on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-davies-b95a52b1/ Visit Sales
Chief: https://saleschief.co Scale with Paul Avins Connect with
Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulavins/ Book a call with Paul:
https://www.paulavins.com/book-a-call Subscribe to the Scale Up
Newsletter: https://www.paulavins.com/newsletter-opt-in Level Up.
Team Up. Scale Up. Fire Up.
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