This article is written by guest contributor Ray Green, founder and CRO of MSP Sales Partners.
If you’re the CEO and the chief rainmaker for your business, you already know how overwhelming it can be.
You’re juggling strategy, and managing a team, operations, client success—and on top of all that, you’re also responsible for bringing in every dollar of revenue.
At first, it feels like a necessary evil. You know the business best, so who better to sell than you? But before long, you find yourself in the MSP owner’s sales trap:
- You’re too busy selling to focus on running the business.
- You’re too overextended to properly follow up on leads.
- You have just enough revenue to stay afloat, but not enough to justify hiring a full-time salesperson.
It’s easy to end up in the dreaded owner-led sales hell.
It’s a trap that stalls your growth, drains your energy, and keeps you stuck on a hamster wheel of endless “have-to-do” tasks.
The good news: Owner-led sales can also be your secret weapon—if you run it right.
Why Owner-Led Sales Is Necessary
First, it’s a fast track to real market insights.
There’s no better way to learn what your audience truly wants than by having a ton of conversations with them.
When you are prospecting, running sales calls, and closing deals, you quickly uncover the pain points they’re expressing, language they’re using, and objections they offer. This is a goldmine for refining your messaging, offers, and plans.
Second, it forces you to build systems.
You can’t survive by doing every micro-task forever, so you are forced to create templates, checklists, and automations. These become the exact tools you’ll hand over to your future salesperson, ensuring consistency and scalability.
Finally, you learn core sales fundamentals.
If you’re eventually going to delegate this, you need to know what a good sales process looks like—who to hire, how to measure success, and what’s truly driving (or killing) your deals.
Owner-led selling gives you a practical crash course you can’t get any other way. It also means that you’ll never be held hostage by an underperforming salesperson.
But it’s hard to execute when you’re also responsible for overseeing virtually every other aspect of the business.
So, how do you find the time to run sales and manage the responsibilities it inevitably creates when you’re successful?
7 Ways to Stay Sane (and Profitable) in Owner-Led Sales
1. Prioritize High-Impact Sales Activities
All sales activity is not created equally. So you’ve got to start each day by asking: Which actions are most likely to generate revenue quickly?
That means prioritizing everything that is “closest to the money” and working backwards.
Warm leads over cold leads. Active opportunities over new ones. Higher probability sales activity over lower probability ones.
Ask yourself daily: What’s the fastest path to revenue? Figure out what really moves the needle and don’t treat every to-do like they’re the same—focus on people who are closest to the buying pocket and work backwards.
2. Time-Block Your Sales Activity
Set specific times to do sales work—and treat it like a nonnegotiable appointment. If sales time isn’t scheduled, it won’t happen.
When I recommend this, most people say, “Yeah, yeah, I do that.” Then I look at their calendar and what’s missing? The sales activity.
Look, you’re a business owner, so your to-do list is endless. If you don’t put time on your calendar it will get crowded out by other activities. Good intentions don’t create opportunities. Real sales activity does. And you’ve got to create the time to do that work.
Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you your real priorities. Is sales on it?
3. Simplify Lead Generation
Streamline and systematize how you collect and qualify leads.
Consider checklists or simple workflows you repeat daily and look for any step you can automate or delegate while still staying effective.
For example, if you use LinkedIn, automate basic connection requests so you personally handle only actual conversations.
If you have multiple lead sources, create simple automations to pull all of them into a single channel in Teams that notify you when there’s activity.
4. Leverage Asynchronous Selling
You don’t always need a live call.
Use templates, recorded videos, or resources you can send prospects in advance. Have you authored a book? Do you have testimonials or case studies? Or any other marketing content you’ve created? Share all of that before qualifying or sales calls.
This “pre-selling” handles common objections or questions so you can invest less time on repetitive conversations.
5. Streamline Your Sales Process
If you’re guessing where a deal stands, your process is broken. Clearly define the buyer’s journey to understand where they are in the process.
For example, you may have these categories: lead in, interested, qualified, sales-qualified, proposal sent, and so on.
When each stage is clear, you can quickly see who is closest to buying and where you should spend your time. You can also create simple checklists or scripts for each stage, which makes eventual handoff easier. When your process is clear, it’s easier to track, improve, and eventually delegate.
6. Offload Admin Work Immediately
After a sales call, you may promise to email follow-up items or send calendar invites. Those tasks can often be templated, automated, or delegated to a junior employee, virtual assistant, or software.
Your time is too critical to invest in administrative tasks, so evaluate all the activity surrounding sales that doesn’t truly require you to execute and get it out of your hands.
Reserve your own time for high-level sales conversations and decisions.
7. Focus on High-Value Accounts
Selling a small deal requires roughly the same time as selling a bigger one, but the bigger deal has a larger payoff.
Even a modest increase in your minimum size can reduce your volume of clients, improve profit margins, and lower operational overhead. Larger clients often have better budgets and are easier to support long-term.
So, when you get to a point where you’re drowning in sales activity, raise the bar on who you’re targeting (or raise your prices).
The Bottom Line: Escape the MSP Owner’s Sales Trap and Scale Smarter
Owner-led sales can feel like a juggling act, but done right, it’s also your best path to a proven sales machine. You’ll know your market, refine your messaging, and build systems you can eventually hand off.
It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. After all, sustainable revenue without drowning in chaos is the name of the game.
I dive deeper into this very concept and the tactics above in a recent YouTube video you can watch here.
