Wednesday, November 04, 2026
If sales only happen when you are in the room, you own a job, not a system. Five parts and a five-day plan to build a sales process your team can run without you.
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.
Friday, October 23, 2026
31.7% of small business owners have never taken a full week off. Here's the handover document that actually fixes it, and how AI turns a week of writing into an afternoon.
Friday, October 23, 2026
Four in ten small business owners say they discount often, and a third still report sales down anyway. Here's the SPIN Selling framework that gets you to full price without the price cut.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
When offers look alike, price is all that is left to compare. What New Zealand telecoms teach SME owners about escaping the price war.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Get more from the link that limits your growth before you spend a dollar on it. A 14-day, no-new-spend plan for SME owners.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Score eight links in your business from 1 to 5 and the weakest, earliest link is usually your constraint. A 20-minute self-check for SME owners.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Referrals just became small business owners' #1 source of new customers — up from 65% to 83% in a single year. Here's the Dream 100 system that turns word of mouth into a repeatable growth engine.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Roughly one in four founders report loneliness and isolation running their business. Here's what a coach actually does differently, and why the first session is rarely about strategy.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
NZ small business sales rose 8.6 percent this quarter, but growth ranged from 2.9 to 16.3 percent by industry. Here's the three-number check that tells you whether your growth is actually yours.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Only 30 percent of business change efforts fully succeed. Here's the three-part diagnosis, borrowed from strategy academic Richard Rumelt, most owners skip before fixing anything.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Close to six in ten of this year's US holiday shoppers are already buying, in October or year-round. Here are three sales moves to make this week before Black Friday arrives.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
77.6 percent of US consumers used AI to help with a purchase decision in the past six months. Here are three moves that make your small business visible when customers ask AI about you.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
54 percent of US business owners have no real plan, and only 11 percent have anything detailed. Here's the one-afternoon exercise that gives your business a sharper three-year direction than any spreadsheet.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Before you spend another dollar on ads, staff or software, find the one step that limits your growth. Here is a one-hour spend-gate test you can run this week.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
ActionCOACH began in Brisbane, Australia. What does its story tell US owners about where good growth ideas come from, and how to test an outside idea in your own business?
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
SME owner confidence is climbing, but for most, revenue isn't following. Here's why time isn't your real constraint, and the three-step framework that finds the one that is.