Saturday, November 07, 2026
Feast-or-famine months aren't bad luck. The Eisenhower Matrix shows SME owners which important-not-urgent work keeps getting buried by whatever's loudest.
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.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most FMCG brands that succeed regionally never make the jump to national shelf space. Here's what the brands that do scale nationally build before the big order arrives — capacity, standardisation, and sell-through data — and why the brands that don't fail fast once they win it.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The owners who get the most from coaching don't walk in with good news — they walk in with a real problem. Here's why the progress-report habit quietly wastes coaching sessions, and what to bring instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most productivity advice optimises the calendar you already have. The real fix is deciding what doesn't belong on it. Here's the 90/10 diagnostic for finding — and protecting — the small share of your week that actually drives growth.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most sales training focuses on the pitch and the close. The outcome is usually decided in the first five minutes. Here's the diagnostic-first opening sequence that changes conversion rates without changing your product or your price.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most SME marketing leads with product specs. Buyers respond to stories. Here's the system for finding, capturing, and multiplying the customer stories you already have — with an FMCG-specific angle on letting the shelf and repeat-purchase data talk.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most SME owners treat pricing as a set-and-forget cost calculation. Here's why price is actually the highest-leverage growth lever in your business — and the three-number method for testing whether you're underpriced.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A new study puts SME admin overload at $17,000 per employee a year — and finds AI tools alone aren't fixing it. Why systems have to come before software.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A business can grow revenue 40% in a year and be in more financial danger at the end of it than the start. Here's why fast growth without a cash plan is a warning sign, not a win.
Friday, September 04, 2026
The first ninety days of coaching are almost always productive. Here's why so many engagements quietly plateau around month six, and how to keep them accelerating.
Friday, September 04, 2026
If your business needs you in the room to keep functioning, you haven't built a business — you've built a demanding job. Here's how to test and fix that.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Chasing every enquiry equally is why sales teams stay busy and pipelines stay thin. Here's the qualification filter that protects your best sellers' time for leads that will actually close.
Friday, September 04, 2026
A shopper's eye moves across a shelf in under three seconds — if your packaging or marketing needs explaining, it's already lost. Here's what actually earns the second look.
Friday, September 04, 2026
Most growth plans set a revenue number and never check whether the business can actually deliver it. Here's how to build strategy around your real capacity constraint instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67% of SME owners fund growth mainly from personal savings, 38% from credit cards, and only 22% from a bank loan. Why that's a risk, not a strategy — and what a real capital plan looks like instead.
Friday, September 04, 2026
67.4% of small business owners know they need a price rise — only 31% have made it. Here's why pricing needs a system, not nerve, and what that system looks like for SME and FMCG owners.