Thursday, October 08, 2026
Most SME marketing budgets are weighted toward customers who already buy. The research says that is the smaller lever. Here is where brand growth actually comes from, and how to redirect your spend toward it.
Last updated 9 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited).
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.
How long did the insurer’s quoting process take, and what changed? It took around ninety minutes per customer. Once it was stripped back to what mattered to the decision, it came in under ten minutes. Nothing about the insurance changed.
What should you do first to improve your sales speed? Time your own quote-to-response gap for the next ten enquiries, then strip your quoting process down to the three pieces of information you need to say yes.
Who is this approach not for? It is not for you if you are convinced your quoting process is already as fast as it can be without checking.
Client results vary. More practical guides at simple-growth.com.
If your sales process rewards busy over fast, that’s the first thing we’d look at together.