Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most SME growth plans have one forecast and no backup. Here's how to build a 90-day roadmap with base, stretch, and contraction scenarios — plus the trigger points that tell you when to act.
Ask most SME owners how to improve sales and they'll say the same thing: more leads. It's the default answer, and it's usually wrong. More leads poured into a slow, leaky pipeline just means more deals sitting there going stale. The metric that actually predicts revenue growth isn't lead volume — it's sales velocity, and almost no SME owner has ever calculated theirs.
Sales velocity is a single number: how much revenue your pipeline generates per day. It's calculated as (number of open opportunities × win rate × average deal size) ÷ length of your sales cycle in days. The formula is used across enterprise sales teams and is explained in detail by HubSpot's sales research team — but it's rarely taught to SME owners, who default to counting leads instead. The problem with counting leads alone is that it ignores the two levers that usually matter more: how long deals take to close, and what percentage actually convert. A business that halves its sales cycle length doubles its velocity with the exact same number of leads it already had.
Once you know your velocity number, you can see exactly which lever is worth pulling — instead of guessing that "more marketing" will fix a sales problem.
1. Calculate your baseline — Multiply your open opportunities by your historical win rate and average deal size, then divide by your average sales cycle length in days. That's your daily pipeline value.
2. Find your weakest lever — Of the four inputs, which has moved the least in the last twelve months? For most SME sales teams, it's cycle length — deals drift because nobody owns pushing them forward.
3. Attack cycle length first — Set a hard maximum number of days a deal can sit in each pipeline stage before it triggers a follow-up action. This single change typically moves velocity faster than any lead-generation campaign.
“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
Buying more leads is an action you can take this afternoon — book the ad spend, brief the agency, watch the numbers roll in. Fixing cycle length and win rate means confronting your own sales process, your own follow-up discipline, and often your own team's habits, which is a much harder conversation to have with yourself. It's genuinely more comfortable to blame lead quality than to audit why deals sit untouched for three weeks at "proposal sent." This is where an experienced outside operator changes the outcome — someone who can look at your pipeline for thirty minutes and tell you, without ego attached to your process, exactly which stage is bleeding velocity.
If nobody in your business can tell you your sales velocity number right now, that's the first gap Kevin closes with you.
...and you become the owner who knows exactly how fast your pipeline turns into revenue.