Sales Expert: The Two-Call Close Strategy That Scales Your Sales - Adam Davies

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.