Saturday, November 07, 2026
Chasing leads on five channels at once is why your evenings disappear. The Bullseye Channel Framework helps SME owners find the one channel worth their full attention.
You’re not losing sales because your team isn’t working hard enough. You’re losing them because somewhere between the enquiry and the quote, speed to respond is losing to busyness.
“I’m not sure I can keep this up” — if that’s the quiet thought at the end of a long week of chasing quotes, the fix usually isn’t push harder. It’s respond faster, because speed, not effort, is what most buyers are actually grading you on.
Early in my agency career I worked on an account for a global insurer where the quoting process took around ninety minutes per customer, not because the calculation was hard, but because nobody had ever questioned why it took that long. We stripped it back to what actually mattered to the decision and got it under ten minutes. Nothing about the insurance changed. The speed of saying yes to the customer did.
Picture your own enquiry inbox right now. You know the one that’s sat there since yesterday afternoon, waiting for “a quiet moment” that hasn’t arrived yet. That prospect isn’t waiting for you to be less busy. They’re already getting quotes from someone else, and whoever answers first usually wins the job, not whoever eventually sends the most polished one.
That’s close to what Aaron Ross described in Predictable Revenue: most sales teams build their process around the seller’s convenience — batching quotes, waiting for a quiet moment, following up “when things calm down” — instead of around the one thing that actually predicts whether a prospect buys: how quickly and clearly you respond while their interest is still hot. Three steps to build sales speed this month:
“I have grown my business 5x since working with Kevin. Everything Kevin told me to do was the complete opposite of what I had been doing. Working with Kevin has truly been a complete game changer.”
— Richard, Chem Suppliers
Speed over busyness is exactly that kind of counter-intuitive shift — it feels like doing less, and it converts more. The execution gap is rarely the idea. Every sales team already knows fast beats slow. The gap is that “we’ll speed it up once things settle down” never actually arrives on its own; settling down isn’t a plan, it’s a hope. That’s where a second set of eyes on your actual process, not your intentions, makes the difference.
You can test this on yourself before you change anything. Pull your last ten enquiries and write down, honestly, how many hours or days passed before you sent a real quote. Most owners find gaps of two or three days hiding in there, and every one of those gaps is a sale you quietly lost to someone who simply moved first. You don’t need a bigger sales team to fix that. You need a faster first move, and a standard your whole team holds itself to, not just you.
This isn’t for you if you’re convinced your quoting process is already as fast as it can be without checking. It is for you if you’re ready to find out what’s really taking ninety minutes that could take ten.
If your sales process rewards busy over fast, that’s the first thing we’d look at together.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Before you spend another dollar on ads, staff or software, find the one step that limits your growth. Here is a one-hour spend-gate test you can run this week.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
ActionCOACH began in Brisbane, Australia. What does its story tell US owners about where good growth ideas come from, and how to test an outside idea in your own business?
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
SME owner confidence is climbing, but for most, revenue isn't following. Here's why time isn't your real constraint, and the three-step framework that finds the one that is.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
49% of business owners question monthly whether running the business is worth it, a US survey found. Here's what changes when someone else is asking that question with you.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Nearly half of NZ SME owners are planning Christmas trading changes, MYOB research found, and most of it is a discount. Here's how to build memory before you build the offer.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
46% of New Zealand business owners aren't paying themselves, Xero research found. Here's the Profit First fix that changes the order money moves through your business, not the hours you work.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
The share of businesses reporting serious dead stock has doubled since 2024, new research found. Here's why rising revenue can still mean tightening cash, and the three numbers that catch it early.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
42% of business owners named efficiency their top 2026 priority, a US survey found. Here's Michalowicz's Clockwork system for building a business that doesn't need you in every decision.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
B2B win rates fell to 19-21% in 2025. Here's why a quiet Q4 pipeline is usually a budget deadline in disguise, and the three moves that use it instead of waiting for January.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Chemical and industrial distributors rarely have a product problem. Here is how to find the real constraint, escape the price war and build a 90-day plan.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
97% of small business owners believe branding matters to their success — only 18% have an actual strategy for it. Here is the 3-question Brand Key test that closes the gap without a rebrand.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Roughly 90 percent of companies never achieve sustained profitable growth. Here's Jim Collins' Hedgehog Concept for telling which growth opportunities are actually worth chasing.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
68 percent of US Google searches now end with no click at all. Here's what that means for small business marketing, and the fix that doesn't depend on getting the click back.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Most strategic plans are tactics with better formatting. Here's the one-sentence test, borrowed from Sinek's Golden Circle, that tells you if yours has a real why behind it.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
A private, unwritten goal succeeds about 35 percent of the time. One with a weekly accountability check-in succeeds more than 70 percent of the time. Here's why that gap exists.