Growth strategy
The quota starts in January. The pipeline starts in June.
Most first sales hires are judged dead in month seven: one month before the arithmetic would have let them prove anything.
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Pricing
The quote is valid for 30 days. The order arrived in week 11.
Every fixed-price quote is an option you have written for the customer, and the ones exercised late are the ones…
Operations
The dashboard has fourteen metrics. Thirteen of them are the past.
Most management packs report outcomes that were settled weeks before the meeting. Whether a metric genuinely leads is a testable…
Operations
The negotiation won 8%. The ledger shows 2%.
Negotiated savings and realised savings are different numbers, and the gap between them has a small number of predictable causes.
Pricing
The price is per seat. The value is per transaction.
Most pricing reviews argue about the number. The unit it attaches to is rarely questioned, yet it decides whether a…
Pricing
The discount assumed twelve orders a year. They placed five.
Volume discounts are almost always granted in advance and reconciled never: which means the customer's forecast becomes your margin risk.
Market analysis
The competitor list names four firms. The deal was lost to no decision.
Most competitive analysis studies the rivals you meet at bids, and ignores the one that wins the largest share of…
Pricing
Every lost deal is marked “price”. Half of them never got to a price.
"Price" is the most common loss reason in most sales records and the least informative one, and acting on it…
Marketing
The enquiry arrived at 9.40 on Tuesday. Someone called back on Thursday.
Weak inbound conversion is usually diagnosed as a demand problem or a sales-skill problem. Far more often it is a…
Operations
The terms say 30 days. The money arrives on day 58.
Most of the gap between your payment terms and your actual cash is created inside your own business, and it…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.