Monday, November 09, 2026

US owners spend 22 hours a month on financial admin alone (Xero, 2026). Gary Keller's focusing question shows SME owners the one task worth handing off first.

Ask most SME sales teams what they sold last month and you'll get a strangely narrow answer — the same two or three offers, on repeat, regardless of what's actually in the catalogue. Most sales teams sell what's easy to explain, not what's most valuable to the customer — and that habit is quietly capping revenue in businesses that have spent years building a broader, higher-margin range nobody is pitching. If your highest-margin products or services are gathering dust while reps default to the same familiar offer, you don't have a demand problem. You have a comfort-zone problem.

The Problem Reframe: The Comfort Zone Sale

The enemy is what Kevin calls the Comfort Zone Sale — the offer a rep can explain in one sentence, price without hesitation, and close without needing to ask a single diagnostic question. It feels efficient. It is actually expensive, because it trains customers to associate your business with your cheapest, simplest offer, and it leaves your best-margin work permanently unsold. This is a well-documented pattern in complex and solution-based selling: the more a sale requires understanding a customer's situation before recommending the right fit, the more reps default to the option that needs the least understanding. It's the entire reason methodologies like SPIN Selling exist — to force a structured conversation about situation, problem, implication, and need-payoff before a rep is allowed to reach for the easy answer.

You can see how this plays out in considered, complex sales environments in HubSpot's breakdown of complex selling — the pattern holds whether you're selling enterprise software or premium FMCG ranging.

The Framework: Full Menu Selling

Full Menu Selling is the discipline of making sure every customer conversation actually covers what you sell — not just what's comfortable to sell.

1. Map the menu — list every product or service line and rank it by margin, not by how often it's currently pitched. The gap between the two rankings is your revenue leak.

2. Build the bridge question — give reps one specific question per high-margin line that naturally surfaces whether the customer needs it (“Are you still handling X in-house, or has that become a headache?”). One question is enough; it doesn't need to be a script.

3. Track the mix, not just the total — stop measuring reps only on revenue. Add a simple product-mix metric to the weekly pipeline review so the comfort-zone habit becomes visible, not invisible.

“Kevin is an absolute powerhouse! He doubled our business's profits in the first month alone with lots more of his recommendations still to be rolled out.”

— Curtis Hacon, Give A Sh!T

The Execution Gap: Why Reps Default to the Easy Sale Anyway

Owners often assume this is a training problem. It rarely is — most reps already know the full range. The real obstacle is that the comfort-zone sale is safer for the rep personally: it closes faster, gets fewer objections, and doesn't risk the awkwardness of a customer saying no to something unfamiliar. Fixing this requires accountability from outside the sales team itself — someone tracking the product mix, asking why the highest-margin line hasn't been pitched in a month, and making that conversation routine rather than confrontational.

Quick Wins This Week

  • Rank your product or service lines by margin and compare it to what's actually being pitched.
  • Write one bridge question for your highest-margin, least-pitched offer.
  • Add product mix as a line item in your next pipeline review.

Key Takeaways

  • Identify the gap between what's most profitable and what's most pitched.
  • Equip reps with one bridge question per high-margin line, not a new script.
  • Measure product mix weekly, not just total revenue.
  • Expect resistance — the comfort-zone sale is safer for the rep, not the business.

If your best-margin products are the ones your team pitches least, that's the first gap Kevin helps you close.

...and you become the owner whose team sells the full menu, not just the easy offer.

Thursday, October 15, 2026

A growth plan with no diagnosis is just a wish list with a date on it. Here is the three-part test that separates a real strategy from guesswork, before your next budget gets signed off.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Everyone in your industry follows the same playbook. Here is why fresh eyes beat it, plus a one-hour exercise to borrow a proven idea from another industry this week.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Five lessons from McDonald's own history that a 20-person US business can copy, plus where systems stop and growth questions begin.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Different industries hit different growth constraints. Find the Simple-Growth page written for your type of business, plus two free resources on loyalty and exit planning.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Nearly a third of small business owners have never taken a full week off, and new 2026 data shows the ones working the longest hours are also the most likely to want out. Here is the three-question test for turning hours into real freedom.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Over half of SMEs entering a new market in one UK study hit real problems doing it. The Ansoff Matrix maps the three safer growth routes most owners skip past first.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

45 percent of business owners in one survey feel trapped running the business they built. Here's how the Theory of Constraints, pointed at the owner instead of the process, finds the real fix.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

UK SME owners spend six working days a month on admin and 3.6 days on growth, one survey found. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How habit flips which question you ask first.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Nearly half of SMEs in a 2026 survey had not raised prices since 2022. Here's the three-sentence script that makes the overdue price conversation simple instead of stressful.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

76 of 100 B2B brands in a 2026 study fell into a credible-but-indistinguishable Sameness Zone. Here's the four-word positioning test, the Onliness Statement, that pulls a business out of it.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Your revenue is up and your margin just fell anyway — here's the planning gap behind it. Four moves that put margin back on the same page as your growth target before next year's numbers are set.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

A practical playbook for NZ construction and building products owners: the market, the real growth constraints, how to price and win work, and a 90-day plan.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

53 percent of small business owners say nothing would change if AI vanished tomorrow, and that is not an adoption problem, it is an embedding problem. Here is the three-question test that shows which one your business actually is.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

New industry research finds most senior consumer goods leaders cannot say whether their last year of promotions actually made money. Here is the Revenue Growth Management discipline that fixes it before Christmas stock ships.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

New research shows 90 percent of small business owners are preoccupied with work outside normal hours. Michael Gerber's E-Myth explains why, and names the one shift that actually fixes it.