Thursday, November 05, 2026
Busy one month, silent the next, and no idea which deals were ever real? Neil Rackham's SPIN questions surface the truth weeks before a quiet month does.
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.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
An executive coach develops you as a leader. A business coach works on the business. A fair, source-linked guide for US owners, with best-for and not-ideal-if for every option.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
Not every stuck business has a mindset problem, and not every one has a strategy problem. Here is how NZ owners can tell which kind of coach they need now, and why the best ones do both.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
A franchise network or an independent coach? Here is who each suits, what is publicly known about cost and guarantees, and the questions to ask before you sign. Checked 1 November 2026.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
New 2026 research shows SME owners earning most of their revenue from repeat customers are nearly four times more likely to be profitable than those chasing new customers alone. Here is the simple shift that changes the number that matters.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
Management Capability Development funding can cover up to half of one-to-one business training for eligible NZ businesses. Here is who qualifies, what it covers, what it does not, and the order to do things in.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
Revenue can climb for years while the business quietly becomes more dependent on you, not less. Here's the growth driver most SME owners never put on their own dashboard.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
You cancelled the weekend away again. If you can't step away long enough to ask whether a coach is worth it, that's not a reason to skip the question — it's the reason to ask it.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
94% of NZ owners say they're not reaching their business goals. Not from lack of effort — from nowhere to see progress. Here's the visible scoreboard that fixes it.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
If every deal needs your personal persuasion to close, you don't have a sales process — you have a treadmill. Here's how to fix the offer so it does some of the selling for you.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
A positioning statement sits in a folder. Distinctiveness lives in the details customers actually notice. Here's the gap between knowing your difference and being remembered for it.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
Saying yes to every enquiry feels safer than growth. It isn't. Here's the strategic choice — who you're actually playing to win with — that most SME owners never make on purpose.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
Most NZ businesses are owner-run and many have no staff, so advice has to fit one person's week. Here is how coaches, consultants, mentors and peer groups differ, what is publicly known about cost, and how RBPN funding can help. Checked 1 November 2026.
Sunday, November 01, 2026
Four well-known ways to get help growing your business, compared on who each suits, what is publicly known about cost, and the seven questions to ask before you sign. Checked 1 November 2026.
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Most SME owners have a 12-month plan for the business but no vision for their own life. Here is a simple 3-step fix, plus the research behind it.
Saturday, October 31, 2026
US owners lose 33 working days a year to financial worry, mostly from not knowing their numbers. Here's the 2-number Monday check that closes the gap.