A founder called me last year about a sales problem. Revenue had been flat for eighteen months despite a hard-working team. I spent the first two sessions not talking about sales at all.
The situation
The numbers looked contradictory. Activity was up, the pipeline was full, conversion rates were fine, and revenue would not move. When the obvious inputs are healthy and the output is stuck, the problem is almost never where the pain is. It is one layer down.
How I read it
I do not start with the presenting problem. I start with one question: what in this business would make these exact results predictable? Flat revenue with high activity is not a mystery. It is a signal that effort is being pointed somewhere that does not move the number.
The working
The business had three product lines. We put the team’s time against the margin each line produced, and the picture resolved immediately.
| Line | Sales-team time | Margin | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line A | ~20% | High | Growing fast |
| Line B | ~45% | Low | Flat |
| Line C | ~35% | Low, service-heavy | Declining |
The team was spending four-fifths of its time on the two lines that could not move the company and one-fifth on the line that could. They were not underperforming. They were optimising for the wrong thing, because the incentive structure rewarded activity, not margin. The structure was pointing them at the wrong work, and they were responding to it rationally.
Improving sales output without fixing the incentive would have trained people to work harder in the wrong direction.
The move
We changed what the structure rewarded, so the team’s rational choice and the company’s interest finally pointed the same way. The structural change took about three months. The sales trajectory turned in the first quarter after it landed.
That is what diagnosis actually looks like. You do not treat the symptom the client names. You find the structure producing the pattern, and it usually sits one quiet layer beneath the place that hurts.