Thursday, November 05, 2026
Vistage puts you in a group of 12 to 16 owners with a Chair. Simple-Growth is one owner-run coach who finds your constraint first. Here is who each suits, what is public on cost, and six questions to ask. Checked 5 November 2026.
Most sales teams celebrate wins and file losses under “not a good fit” without another word. That's backwards. A win tells you what worked once. A lost deal, examined properly, tells you exactly where your sales process breaks — and it will break the same way on the next ten deals unless someone stops to look.
If your team keeps hitting “how do I improve sales in a small business,” the honest answer usually isn't a new script. It's that nobody has ever systematically reviewed why deals actually die.
“They went with someone else,” “budget wasn't there,” “not the right timing” — these are the default explanations sales teams reach for because they're comfortable and unfalsifiable. Nobody has to change anything if the loss was simply bad luck. But when you actually dig into most lost SME deals, the real cause is almost always something specific and repeatable: a follow-up that came too late, a proposal that didn't match what the buyer actually said they needed, a handoff that dropped momentum at exactly the wrong moment.
The average B2B sale now requires multiple touchpoints before a decision is made — most SME salespeople stop following up long before the buyer is actually ready to decide, then blame timing for a loss that was really about persistence.
Run this on every deal you lose above a meaningful value threshold, within a week of the loss while detail is still fresh:
1. Pinpoint the exact stage it died. Not “we lost the deal” — the specific moment: after the proposal, after the second meeting, after a long silence. The stage tells you where the process itself is weak.
2. Separate preventable from unpreventable. Some losses genuinely are timing or budget. Most aren't. Be honest about which ones your team could have influenced with a different action.
3. Ask the buyer directly, if you can. A short, low-pressure “so we can improve, what tipped it” call gets more honest answers than most owners expect — and the pattern across five or six of these calls is more valuable than any internal guess.
Run the autopsy quarterly across all losses and you'll usually find one or two repeatable failure points causing the majority of them — exactly the kind of leverage point the Simple-Growth System™ is built to find and fix.
“Kevin doesn't just present — he electrifies the room and drives massive, real-world value! He drops game-changing insights and actionable shortcuts that show businesses exactly how to turn everyday customers into raving, loyal fans — and acquire new ones faster than ever thought possible.”
— Gareth Bayliss, Sales Manager, The Icehouse
Sales teams resist this because a loss review feels like assigning blame. It isn't, when it's run right — it's diagnostic, not disciplinary. The reason most SMEs never build this habit isn't reluctance to improve, it's that nobody owns the process of stepping back and looking at the pattern across deals rather than the deal in front of them today. That's a structural gap an outside coach closes quickly.
The business owners who keep filing losses as “bad luck” will keep losing the same way next quarter — the ones who run the autopsy won't.
...and you become the owner who knows exactly why you lose deals and fixes it before the next one.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
You nailed the pitch and the buyer loved it, then the deal went quiet. The reason is usually a meeting room you were never invited to. Here is how to sell to a buying committee you cannot see.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Here is the framework that explains why an inferior competitor keeps outselling you, and what to fix in your marketing today.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners have one growth plan: get more customers. There are actually four distinct ways to grow, and the cheapest one is usually sitting in your existing customer file.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Small business confidence just rose, but growth expectations are falling for almost everyone. New 2026 data reveals the one decision separating owners still growing from owners just waiting it out.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A 1 percent price increase lifts operating profit by an average of 11 percent, McKinsey's Global 1200 research found, far more than an equivalent rise in volume. Here's how to raise prices without losing your best customers.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Some coaches build a business out of being needed forever. Here's the Graduation Test: three questions that reveal whether your coach is transferring real capability, or just keeping you on retainer.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most owners respond to a bottleneck by fixing something else entirely. Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints explains why that backfires, and documented case studies show a mean 69 percent lead-time reduction once the real constraint is found.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Roughly four in ten B2B purchase attempts end in no decision at all. It's rarely about price. Here's Alex Hormozi's Value Equation, in plain English, and why it explains almost every stalled deal in your pipeline.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
41 percent of consumers now always read reviews before choosing a business, and 31 percent won't use one rated under 4.5 stars. Here's the Review Velocity System that turns happy customers into a steady stream of five-star proof.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
64 percent of executives say they're juggling too many conflicting priorities, and most SME strategies die from addition, not ambition. Here's the three-step Strategic Short List that turns six priorities into the one that actually moves the needle.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
A third of small business owners are absorbing this year's cost increases out of their own pocket instead of raising prices. Here's the three-step Margin Audit that turns that guess into a safe, thirty-day pricing test.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Before you approve the next hire, run the revenue-per-employee test. Some of the growth you are trying to buy with headcount is sitting in tasks AI can already take off the list.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Owner-dependent businesses sell for roughly half the multiple of businesses that run without them. Dan Sullivan's Who Not How question is the simplest fix most owners never try.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The tasks only one person in your business can do are a hidden cost waiting to land. Here is how to clear the backlog in an afternoon using a recorder instead of a blank page.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Chasing every lead in the run to year end is how you end up delivering the deals that cost you the most. Here is the Right-Fit Filter that catches a bad deal before you quote it.