Friday, November 06, 2026
Finding out how last month went three weeks too late isn't a discipline failure. It's an accountability gap, and one weekly email closes it.
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.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
64 percent of executives say they're juggling too many conflicting priorities, and most SME strategies die from addition, not ambition. Here's the three-step Strategic Short List that turns six priorities into the one that actually moves the needle.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A third of small business owners are absorbing this year's cost increases out of their own pocket instead of raising prices. Here's the three-step Margin Audit that turns that guess into a safe, thirty-day pricing test.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Before you approve the next hire, run the revenue-per-employee test. Some of the growth you are trying to buy with headcount is sitting in tasks AI can already take off the list.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owner-dependent businesses sell for roughly half the multiple of businesses that run without them. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How question is the simplest fix most owners never try.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The tasks only one person in your business can do are a hidden cost waiting to land. Here is how to clear the backlog in an afternoon using a recorder instead of a blank page.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Chasing every lead in the run to year end is how you end up delivering the deals that cost you the most. Here is the Right-Fit Filter that catches a bad deal before you quote it.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Big brands never approve a campaign on gut feel alone. Here is the cheap, 48-hour pretest SME owners can run on any piece of marketing before a single dollar goes to media.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
There is no single best business coach in New Zealand, only the best fit for your stage and your problem. Here are six criteria, an honest map of the NZ options, and where Kevin D'Ambros-Smith fits.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME strategies are really just revenue wishlists with no diagnosis behind them. Here is the three-part test that separates a real strategy from a wish, and what to fix first if yours fails it.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
94% of small businesses using AI across multiple functions have cut spending on marketing, data and bookkeeping, and they are more confident than ever. Here is the three-question audit to run before you cut judgment along with the invoice.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Chasing a poor-fit customer to hit a year-end number rarely pays off. Here is the Right-Fit Growth Filter SME owners use before saying yes.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
High satisfaction with your business coach does not guarantee progress. Here is the yearly Re-Contracting Conversation that keeps coaching sharp.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
We'll sort it in the new year is quietly stalling more small businesses than any competitor. Here is the Now-or-January Test that fixes it.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
A 10 percent discount can need 46 percent more sales volume just to break even. Here is the Quota-Protection Plan for small business sales teams.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Referred customers buy four times more often, yet most happy customers are never asked. Here is the Post-Purchase Sequence that fixes it.