Earlier this summer we built our very own telemarketing team from scratch.
Week 1 went great. 346 calls, 72% connection rate, 7 meetings booked. Everyone was thrilled.
So in week 2 we pushed harder. 664 calls, almost double the effort.
3 meetings.
We put in a lot more work but got worse results. That’s when we stopped and actually looked at what was breaking. It wasn’t the number of calls. Our phone data was bad. A lot of the numbers were switchboards and sales lines that don’t accept sales calls.
We were pouring more effort into a pipe that was blocked somewhere else entirely.
Every business has one of those, one thing that limits everything else.
Fix it and the whole business moves a lot faster. Ignore it and everything you add just piles up behind it.
The good news is there are only two constraints that actually matter in any business:
- Demand: not enough people who want to buy from you.
- Supply: you can’t deliver more than you already do.
Most owners assume it’s demand. It’s the easy answer, and there is always somebody happy to sell you more leads.
How to tell if demand is your constraint#
- Pull your inquiries from the last 90 days.
- Ask yourself honestly: if I doubled my installs next month, do I have enough people to sell to?
- If you’d run out of buyers before you ran out of capacity, demand is your constraint.
How to tell if supply is your constraint#
- Imagine 100 inquiries landed tomorrow morning.
- Ask what breaks first, not what gets busy but what actually stops.
- Whoever’s calendar fills up first is your constraint.
Most owners expect the answer to be the crews or the factory. Usually it isn’t.
It’s the one or two people who can price a job properly, do a good site visit and have the product knowledge, and everything in the business waits for them.
That’s why the first quote takes a week to go out. Because these people are the only ones who can do it, and there are 30 other quotes in front of them every day.
Here’s an action item for today:
- Write down how many inquiries you got last month.
- Write down how many jobs you could have installed if every one of them said yes.
- The smaller number is your constraint.
Then stop spending more focus and money on the other one until you fix your constraint.
If you want help figuring out which one is actually holding your business back, book a demo and we will walk through your numbers together.