THE SOVEREIGN SELLER ISSUE #32

"Elon's Algorithm" Applied to Selling

Sunday April 12th, 2026 | Indianapolis, IN | 7:11 AM

I know you have opinions about Elon Musk.

So do I. Set them aside for five minutes.

Whatever you think of him politically, personally, or otherwise - the man has built more category-defining companies than anyone alive.

PayPal. Tesla. SpaceX. Neuralink. Starlink. He runs them simultaneously, across industries most executives wouldn’t dare enter, with a consistency of execution that borders on irrational.

That’s not luck. That’s a system.

Walter Isaacson documented it in his 2023 biography. Musk calls it The Algorithm. He developed it at SpaceX after watching engineers pile requirements on top of requirements, add steps to already bloated processes, and then try to automate their way out of the mess they created. He formalized five steps and made them mandatory - in that exact order - across every company he runs.

The five steps are:

Question every requirement. Delete every possible step. Simplify and optimize. Accelerate cycle time. Automate.

Here’s why the order matters: you cannot automate a step that should have been deleted. If you skip to step five - which is what most salespeople do - you don’t save time. You just fail faster, at scale.

Run through these with me.

1. Question Every Requirement

Most sales activity is inherited habit, not strategy.

You cold call because that’s what salespeople do. You attend internal meetings because someone put them on the calendar. You work from a list because someone handed it to you. You build a custom proposal for every prospect because that’s how your manager was trained.

Question all of it.

Does your list actually contain verified ideal prospects, or is it just a list of names that vaguely fit? Does that internal Monday meeting help you close deals or does it just make leadership feel in control? Is cold calling the highest-leverage use of your first hour, or is it just familiar?

Musk famously told his engineers: if you haven’t questioned a requirement recently, you haven’t earned the right to keep it. The same applies to your daily prospecting routine.

2. Delete Every Possible Step

Here’s a question most salespeople never ask: how hard is it to do business with you?

The single biggest tollbooth between a B2B company and its customers is the requirement to speak with a salesperson before a prospect can learn what you offer, what it costs, or whether it’s right for them. Most companies force a meeting before they give out any useful information. That meeting - for many prospects - is friction they won’t tolerate.

Delete the meeting requirement for basic education. That’s what a well-built website does. That’s what a clear package with visible pricing does. That’s what a lead magnet does.

If your prospect has to earn the right to understand your offer, you’re losing deals before the conversation starts.

3. Simplify and Optimize

The 80/20 principle applied ruthlessly to your pipeline: 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your prospects.

Which means 80% of the people you’re chasing will never close.

Stop optimizing for activity. Optimize for quality of prospect. The more precisely you define your ideal customer - industry, company size, trigger event, decision-maker title - the less time you waste on people who were never going to buy.

More time with qualified prospects. Less time chasing people cold. That ratio, shifted even slightly, changes your numbers.

4. Accelerate Cycle Time

Speed is a weapon most salespeople never pick up.

Research from Harvard Business Review found that companies responding to inbound leads within one hour are seven times more likely to qualify them than companies that wait even a few hours. The average response time across B2B companies? Over 42 hours.

The same principle applies to your entire pipeline. The proposal you send the same day the meeting ends closes faster than the one you “put together over the weekend.” The follow-up call you make within 24 hours beats the one you send after three days of deliberation.

Every waiting period in your sales process is a place where deals go to die quietly. Find them. Compress them.

5. Automate

Now - and only now - automate.

There is software that will find a prospect’s verified email address in seconds. Platforms that let you pre-schedule an entire multi-touch outreach sequence. AI that will help you write, personalize, and test messaging at a scale no individual rep could match alone.

The tools are real. They are genuinely powerful.

But if you automate a bad process, you don’t fix the process. You just broadcast your inefficiency to more people, faster. Do steps one through four first. Then automate what’s left.

What This Means for You

If you’re an individual salesperson, run The Algorithm on your own prospecting process this week. Not the whole thing ... just one pass. Question one requirement you’ve never questioned. Delete one step that exists out of habit. You’ll find at least one of each.

If you’re a sales leader or business owner, the question is whether your sales process has ever been audited against these five steps in order. Most haven’t. Most have been built by accumulation - step added on top of step - without anyone ever asking whether the step before it should exist at all.

Musk does this continuously, not once. The Algorithm isn’t a one-time audit. It’s an operating posture.

The companies that build their sales process the same way Musk builds rockets don’t just close more deals. They do it with fewer people, less wasted effort, and compounding efficiency over time.

To your success,

Shane

P.S. Here are 11 of Elon's Company-Building Principles ...