Monday, November 09, 2026

Sales are up but the bank balance isn't following. Here's Marc Benioff's V2MOM — the one-page tool that turns a wish-list strategy into the few moves that actually protect your margin.

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.

Saturday, October 10, 2026

Most SME owners set ad budgets and discount limits by gut feel. One number, worked out properly, tells you exactly what a customer is worth and what you can afford to spend to win one.

Saturday, October 10, 2026

Most small businesses pour their whole marketing budget into this week's sale. The research on 30 years of advertising says that is exactly the wrong ratio.

Saturday, October 10, 2026

Most SME owners are confident they will hit this year's goals, and most will not. The fix is not more effort, it is a plan that fits on one page and gets checked every week.

Friday, October 09, 2026

The share of owners blaming the economy for not planning long-term has tripled in a year. Here's the one-page plan that actually fixes it, not excuses it.

Friday, October 09, 2026

A new market, a new product line, a second location: most lose money the same way, by skipping the three numbers that would have told them how big the opportunity really was.

Friday, October 09, 2026

Most people picture coaching as a conversation. The sessions that actually move a business are a loop, repeated every week, until it becomes how the owner thinks.

Friday, October 09, 2026

A forty-item to-do list with none of the three that mattered finished is not a time management problem. It is a filter problem, and the Eisenhower Matrix is the filter.

Friday, October 09, 2026

A good salesperson gets four real conversations a day. A good presentation, given once, can reach four hundred. Here is why most SME sales teams never use it.

Friday, October 09, 2026

Customers do not leave because a competitor shouted louder. They leave because, in the exact moment they needed someone, your brand was not the one they thought of.

Friday, October 09, 2026

Most SME owners track one number: the bank balance. The businesses that compound track four, using Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard, and catch the problem before it ever reaches the bank account.

Thursday, October 08, 2026

Nearly half of NZ SME owners plan to raise prices this year. Only 4 percent of companies have a value proposition clear enough to justify it.

Thursday, October 08, 2026

Revenue can climb for years while the actual value of the business barely moves. Here are the eight drivers that decide which one you are really building, and why owner independence usually matters most.

Thursday, October 08, 2026

If every session with your coach leaves you comfortable, that is the warning sign, not the proof it is working. Here is why direct feedback outperforms kind feedback, backed by Gallup's data.

Thursday, October 08, 2026

A global survey of over 10,000 workers found trusted employees nearly twice as productive as distrusted ones. If your calendar fixes keep failing, the real constraint may be trust, not time.