“I just need someone to come in, look at the sales guys and their performance, and tell me if I’m paying them for nothing,” is what our new client told us when we took his first briefing.

The owner of a very successful 35-year-old Australian manufacturing business, this client had decided a few years earlier to expand into a new vertical.

One of his top technicians had been sent to an international conference, chatted to a popular machine manufacturer, and struck up an opportunity to effectively drop-ship machines worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to factories across Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Asia.

The business owner had done everything right, as far as he could see. Smart contracts that didn’t leave him paying for and holding inventory, no shipping costs, healthy margins, and a new sales team that had almost covered their annual salaries for year one in the first few months.

So what was going wrong? How, more than six months into year two, hadn’t they sold a single machine since? How was he left paying an exclusivity fee to the machine manufacturer, plus three wages, vehicle, and travel costs for people who couldn’t seem to get a lead, much less an actual run on the board?

The answer needed some digging.

Treating the cause, not the cough

When this client came to Write Way Up, we knew that while lost sales revenue could feel like ‘the’ problem, more than likely, it was just a symptom of something bigger that was also causing dramas elsewhere in the company.

With more than twenty years supporting established businesses who’d found themselves feeling a little stuck, we’d seen it before.

What we’d experienced is that a lot of established businesses only stop in their tracks when something serious starts to affect their revenue or growth. 

They see symptoms like falling sales, high-performing employees abandoning the business en masse, marketing dollars spent with no return, or compliance issues popping up left, right, and centre, and they immediately look to stem that bleed without digging deeper for the real injury.

They often don’t see that by connecting the dots and following the symptoms, they can find the real source of the problem and just how widely it is impacting their business.

Identifying the core problem

So that’s where we start. Rather than coming in, kicking off a Meta campaign unrequested, and moving on (ie, throwing money at the problem), we work to identify it.

In this case, we followed our manual diagnostic (these days, part of our digital toolkit). We rapidly audited their operational foundation, their systems, and their history, we conducted interviews with key team members and quick surveys with others, then we added it all up, and the maths was clear.

This client had a sales symptom, but it had a leadership problem.

The leader of the business had inherited the company, already successful, from his father and to his credit, he had kept it successful. But every few years (sometimes even more frequently) he saw opportunities to stamp his mark on it, to evolve it, so he leapt into new projects and often new verticals.

All admirable. For a business to survive that long, it needs to evolve. His natural curiosity and passion for innovation were tools that could serve him very well as the visionary for a company that would soon face change from more advanced automation and AI.

What he didn’t do was explore those opportunities methodically before taking the leap. He didn’t set up the systems and processes to cope with them, or take the wider team on the journey with him. Like so many of us in these situations, he was focused and had his eye on the prize, meaning he missed what was happening in his peripheral vision that probably could have helped him set a smoother course.

In approaching this new vertical, he’d done a lot of the right things on one level, but his business had never been a sales business before, and it wasn’t set up to be one.

He hired a good coalface sales guy to head the small team, and early on, he reaped the rewards of their close industry network.

But once their connections were tapped out, sales started to decline. 

Why? 

Not because they weren’t doing their best, but because they had no foundations for this business: no brand awareness, no differentiation, no consistent key messaging and objection handling to build from. They had no database and no way of building one except with their own two hands. They had no system to capture leads in, and no process to track leads so they could optimise their sales approach over time, understand their sales cycle, and zoom in on the right people faster.

Basically, they were thrown in the deep end with a pair of arm floaties that were deflating fast.

When we looked around the business, we could see other initiatives like this that had been started and were being dragged along. We saw some disgruntled key performers who didn’t mind the odd joke at the boss’s expense behind his back. We saw cycles of big investment for no return. All symptoms of a leader with a good vision but maybe not the right focus on execution and follow-through.

Solving the problem and getting back on track

So, we started at the bottom, because if you don’t build a solid base, everything on top of it falls over.

We worked with the office, floor, and sales team to introduce the structure, systems, and processes the business needed for growth, and ensured they talked to each other efficiently.

Next, we spent some time on strategy with the leadership team. Marketing positioning, differentiation, and channel mix, to start creating awareness and guiding buyers through the funnel to the waiting sales team.

We supported sales strategy development, so the team could deeply understand prospect behaviour, continuously examine the length of the cycle and the customer journey, and optimise their approach for efficiency.

Then came action plans that told them exactly what to roll out, how to monitor it, and how to learn from it to really make it work for them.

Finally, we provided one-on-one coaching to the owner, and we spent time with the people now accountable on paper for the rollout of all of this work, for implementing this change, and for assessing every new opportunity methodically. We supported the owner and his leaders as they drove a more considered approach to ops and growth, and worked with the people getting their hands dirty turning plans into reality.

At the end of the process, they’d treated a sales symptom and started bringing in and nurturing leads, but more importantly, they dealt with the issue really causing it. 

Paving the path to sustainable success

For this business, like most, the path to success started with identifying the big obstacle in front of them, systematically removing it, and making sure it didn’t pop up again.

That’s what sustainable success is all about when we say it. Not quick wins that get you past a hump but lead straight back to the same monsters, but creating a clear view from where you are to where you want to be, with nothing in your way that your business and leaders aren’t equipped to handle.

*Identifiable details in this article have been changed to protect client confidentiality.