Your Company Is Too Big for This Nonsense
Once a company has employees, customers and something resembling an org chart, sales problems become more expensive.
They rarely introduce themselves as sales problems.
They look like a great customer, a special pricing exception, an owner stepping in to rescue an important deal, or a delivery team wondering what sales promised this time.
Revenue still arrives. That makes the problems easier to defend—and considerably more expensive to ignore.
The cats found five.
1. Every Important Sale Still Needs the Owner
The company has a sales team. The customer still asks for you.
This usually looks harmless because the owner is very good at closing important business. They understand the history, know what can be promised and can make decisions without waiting for permission.
So the owner joins one meeting.
Then another.
Eventually, every meaningful opportunity develops a mysterious need for the one person who was supposed to be building the company instead of personally selling everything inside it.
The sales team may be doing plenty of work, but the customer has learned where the real authority lives. Pricing exceptions, unusual requests and important decisions continue moving toward the owner.
The org chart says sales department.
The customer knows who has the can opener.
2. The Biggest Deal Can Be the Most Expensive Mistake
Large deals are easy to celebrate because the revenue arrives first.
The costs are less punctual.
They appear through special pricing, unusual payment terms, custom work, rushed hiring, implementation demands and promises that sounded reasonable before five departments had to deliver them.
None of this necessarily makes the deal bad. It does mean the size of the contract can hide whether the company should have accepted it on those terms.
A large customer can produce impressive revenue while consuming margin, capacity and attention that could have supported several healthier customers.
By the time the full cost becomes visible, the deal has already been announced, celebrated and added to a presentation.
Revenue arrived first.
The damage sent its invoice later.
3. You Have a Sales Process. Actually, You Have Five.
Every salesperson has found a completely different route to the customer.
One qualifies carefully. One sends proposals immediately. One negotiates before understanding the problem. Another keeps promising to update the CRM as soon as things calm down.
From a distance, this can look like individual style. Up close, it means the company cannot reliably explain how sales happen.
Customers receive different pricing, expectations and experiences depending on who answers the email. Forecasts become collections of personal optimism. Management can see activity without knowing which activity produces profitable business.
The company technically has a sales process.
It is simply recreated from scratch every morning.
The cats tried following it. They are now in five different meetings.
4. The Company Grew Up. The Pricing Stayed Small.
Many growing companies still price parts of the business using decisions made when the company needed every customer it could get.
The business changed. The team became larger. Delivery became more complicated. Customers expected more. The pricing remained emotionally attached to an earlier version of the company.
Old pricing survives because customers are used to it, salespeople know how to sell it and changing it feels more dangerous than continuing to absorb the difference.
Revenue can keep growing while margin quietly becomes less useful. More customers then create more work without creating the same improvement in the business.
The company is no longer small.
Its pricing is still trying to live inside the kitten box.
The cats have reviewed the margin. They would like more food.
5. Sales Sold Capacity Operations Never Had
The sale closes. Everyone celebrates.
Operations opens the contract and discovers the company has apparently agreed to bend time.
This happens when sales is rewarded for securing the business while delivery is left to absorb the promises that helped secure it. Unusual deadlines, custom features, additional support and optimistic onboarding dates become someone else’s problem after the signature arrives.
The revenue is visible immediately. The operational cost emerges through delays, overtime, rushed work and customers wondering why the experience does not resemble the sales conversation.
Sales may believe operations is being difficult.
Operations may believe sales has become a criminal organization.
The customer does not care which department was responsible. They bought from one company.
Sales rang the bell.
Operations heard an alarm.
What These Five Problems Have in Common
These are not simply lead-generation problems.
They involve authority, pricing, consistency, customer selection and the company’s ability to deliver what it sells.
That is what makes them difficult to recognize. The business can continue growing while all five are happening. Revenue provides enough evidence to defend the current approach, even when the approach is creating expensive exceptions behind it.
The company may not need more sales activity.
It may need to understand what its existing sales are asking the rest of the business to become.
Prefer the Version With More Cats and Fewer Paragraphs?
Download the seven-page presentation and keep it for the next meeting that could have been avoided.