Over the last year, I’ve done a lot of selling. Somedays, it feels like it’s all I do.

There’s a lot of selling that goes into running a business. It’s why so many people say you have to be a good salesperson to succeed as a business owner, because nobody else is going to do this stuff for you.

Even in cases where I’m not “selling” in the traditional sense, I’m still “selling” the key ideas and beliefs of my businesses.

But no matter how I spin it, I’m sellin’ somethin’ almost all the time. And what I’ve found is that the best things a founder can sell are multiplicative, not additive.

It’s also why many product launches lose steam. Founders go back to chasing 1:1 sales instead of lining up multipliers. I unpack that more in my piece on stalled launches, but the TL;DR is that multipliers are what keep momentum alive.

If I can get a single person who talks with decision makers that I can sell to, they may potentially create multiple opportunities for me that turns into business for my company.

This is how most freelancers find success. If you ask where they get their work, most of them will say “my work comes from referrals.” Hah! Of course it does! They are focused on multiplicative sales.

With Siren, instead of going out there and trying to find any website that needs an affiliate program, I mostly have focused on finding products with which siren integrates well, and launching my integration in-partnership with them. This allows me to borrow their microphone, and in return they get to show value to their customers using an affiliate link.

Our WaaS website for campgrounds, OnCamp takes a different approach. We created an offer that doesn’t require a meeting to convert, This makes it really easy to recommend us. We designed that entire product around making it frictionless for multipliers to recommend us. Once the customers are in our ecosystem, we usually find opportunities to provide more valuable services to them after showing and delivering consistent value over-time.

In all of these cases, my sales are multiplicative. The prospecting, meeting, talking, and selling process goes through finding the decision makers who can create this favorable deal with me that leads to me getting dozens, or hundreds, of customers from one successful deal.

Once you start thinking in terms of multipliers, everything looks different. You’re not just chasing customers anymore.

• You see more value in 1:1 calls with vendors who serve the same clients.
• You’re seeing “irrelevant” folks in your industry as key players.
• Trade shows and networking events stop feeling like a slog and start looking like opportunity maps.

In all of these cases, however, I have always focused my efforts around prospecting for multipliers, not customers.

It’s why I believe so strongly in Siren, really. I think software like that allows business owners to create creative incentive programs that sells to the type of people that I actually am talking to instead of talking directly to my customers. It hits that sweet spot of what I’m best at selling, and what I think the most-effective business owners sell.

Stop chasing customers. Start chasing multipliers.