Manage sales as a solo founder by shrinking it to three commitments: a 45-minute daily block where follow-up comes before new outreach, one pipeline with five or fewer stages, and a weekly review of real numbers. Consistency beats intensity. The founders who win are the ones whose follow-up never depends on memory or mood.
Five rules. Everything else is optional until these are running.
Accept that sales gets an hour, not an afternoon, and make the hour non-negotiable instead of heroic. Three outreach touches a day feels like nothing; sixty a month compounds into a real pipeline. The killer is not low volume, it is zero-volume weeks when delivery swallows everything.
Protect the follow-up half of the hour most fiercely. New outreach feels productive, but the fastest revenue is almost always sitting in deals already in motion: the unanswered proposal, the quiet thread, the meeting that needs booking.
Automate the remembering and the drafting. Keep the judgment and the relationships.
You do not need a sales team. You need a system that never forgets.
Orbit gives a solo founder one AI assistant, Hiro, for the back office. Ask it to draft follow-ups for threads quiet 3+ days, nudge unsigned proposals on day 3 and day 7, chase overdue invoices on day 3 and day 14, brief you before each meeting, triage your task inbox, and give you a Monday summary of meetings booked and money collected. Every output is a card you approve. You stay the closer.
About an hour a day, every working day, with follow-up handled before new outreach. An unbroken daily hour outperforms occasional all-day pushes because pipelines reward presence: deals move when you touch them, and stall when you vanish into delivery for two weeks.
One pipeline with five or fewer stages named after buyer actions, a value and close date on every deal, and a rule that every open deal carries a next task with a date. That setup takes an afternoon and surfaces the only daily question that matters: what needs a touch today?
Take it off memory entirely. Use fixed timing rules, like a bump after three quiet days and proposal nudges on day 3 and day 7, and have the drafts generated for you to approve each morning. Busy weeks then cost you minutes of review, not weeks of silence.
When the calendar is genuinely full from a process that already works: meetings booked, proposals out, a conversion rate you know. Hiring someone to find a process for you rarely works. Until then, automation covers the clerical work for a tiny fraction of a salary.
Four cover almost everything: conversations started, meetings booked, proposals sent, and money collected. Reviewed once a week, they show exactly where the funnel is thin: not enough at the top, leaks in the middle, or cash stuck at the bottom in unpaid invoices.
Orbit's AI assistant Hiro drafts, chases, briefs, and reports while you keep every final call. Free CRM plan, AI comes standard on every plan, with monthly credits included.
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