LAPS: Leads, Appointments, Presentations, Sales
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
A four-stage weekly sales rhythm and tracking dashboard. LAPS stands for Leads, Appointments, Presentations, Sales — the four states a potential customer moves through, tracked on a simple spreadsheet or physical board. The mechanism is cadence: great salespeople run laps of this cycle every week rather than working deals ad hoc, and the guest is explicit that entrepreneurs launching something need to do exactly the same. Because each stage is a discrete, countable commitment — a name, a booked meeting, a delivered proposal, a yes or no — the pipeline becomes diagnosable. If sales are flat you can see whether the failure is at lead generation, at booking, at presenting or at asking. It requires no CRM and no software; a dashboard, digital or physical, is enough.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Build the leads list
Write down who your leads are — the people who might buy. This is the top of the dashboard and the raw input for everything downstream.
Pro tip Keep it in a little spreadsheet; a good salesperson's dashboard can be digital or physical.
- 2
Book appointments
Get each lead's actual commitment to a conversation. An appointment is a real booked slot with agreed focus, not a vague intention to catch up at some point.
Pro tip The value is in getting their commitment to focus, which is a qualification signal in itself.
- 3
Deliver a presentation
Present them with a solution — either a formal presentation or a genuine structured conversation where you lay out what you think they need.
Watch out A meeting where no solution is put forward isn't a presentation and shouldn't be counted as one.
- 4
Ask for the sale
Ask whether they would like to go ahead or not. This is the fourth discrete step and the one most commonly skipped, leaving presentations to decay without a decision.
- 5
Run laps on a weekly rhythm
Repeat the full cycle every week rather than treating each deal individually. Great salespeople do a rhythm of weekly LAPS, and entrepreneurs launching something need to do that as well.
Pro tip Reviewing counts at each stage each week shows you exactly which stage is starving the next one.
In the wild
Ali summarises the zero-to-10K path back to the guest: come up with a concept you can charge roughly 2K for, and find a way to land five clients a month through a sales process. The guest confirms and then adds LAPS as the operational answer to 'how'. For a founder selling a 2K monthly content or web package, that means keeping a running spreadsheet of possible buyers, booking a set number of appointments each week, delivering proposals, and explicitly asking each one for a decision — repeated as a weekly rhythm rather than chased opportunistically.
→ A countable weekly pipeline that makes five monthly sales a tracked activity target rather than a hope.
Common mistakes
Never asking whether they want to go ahead
The fourth stage is a distinct action and the most commonly dropped one. Founders who are uncomfortable with sales tend to present well and then wait, leaving deals stalled in the presentation column indefinitely because nobody ever put the decision to the buyer.
Working deals ad hoc instead of in laps
The framework's power is the weekly rhythm — laps, laps, laps. Handling opportunities as they happen to arise produces bursts and droughts, whereas a repeating weekly cycle keeps all four stages populated at once so sales arrive consistently.
Counting soft intentions as pipeline
An appointment requires the lead's actual commitment to speak; a presentation requires a solution actually put in front of them. Logging vague interest at these stages inflates the dashboard and destroys its diagnostic value, which is the entire reason to track the four stages separately.
From the transcript
“you need to learn how to do laps leads appointments presentations sales so you just keep a little spreadsheet who are your leads who are…”
“great sales people do a rhythm of weekly laps they do leads appointments presentation sales”
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