Monday, November 09, 2026
Half your enquiries drain you because your marketing is built to appeal to everyone. Seth Godin's Purple Cow and a real client story show SME owners how to find the one sentence that's actually remarkable.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Most SME owners already know their real edge isn't price. Here's why benchmarking competitors kills that edge, and how first-principles thinking builds a strategy around it instead.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Coach, consultant, mentor or advisor? How the four roles differ, which one suits an established NZ business, and the questions to ask before you pay.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Gallup's 2026 data shows global employee engagement fell to 20 percent, even in the best-performing regions. Here's the three-question check SME owners can run this week to find out where their own team really stands.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Everyone agrees December is too close to Christmas to prospect. One sales agency's own client data says the businesses that kept going saw 19 percent more leads the following January.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Most SME owners can describe next year's budget in detail and go quiet the moment you ask about year ten. A UK study of over 1,000 companies found that gap predicts success almost on its own.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Most SME owners build their people plan around courses. The research behind the 70-20-10 model says courses are the smallest lever you have, and it is worth knowing how shaky that research actually is.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
A lead called within five minutes is up to 100 times more likely to be contacted and 21 times more likely to qualify than one called 30 minutes later. Almost nobody does it.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Most SME owners think a logo is a brand. The agencies behind the world's biggest brands have never worked that way. Here is the five-layer model they actually use.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Nearly half of SMEs have run a SWOT analysis in the last two months, yet most cannot say it changed a single decision. Here is the simple matrix that turns the list into action.
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Burger King once sold a one-cent Whopper only to people standing next to a McDonald's. Here is the under-$5k version any SME owner can run, and what a 1760s potter teaches about removing buying risk.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Most small business owners feel confident about their sales pipeline right now. New research shows that confidence is measuring the wrong thing entirely.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Rising revenue and a shrinking bank balance usually mean the same thing: one account doing the job of four. A simple account split fixes it before it becomes a crisis.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
A coaching style that worked in your first month can quietly become the wrong one by your twelfth. The best coaches change how they coach you as you change.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Managers now spend over a fifth of their working week in meetings, and senior leaders admit most of it is wasted. A fixed meeting rhythm fixes more than your calendar.