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.
You closed three deals this month and you still haven’t paid yourself properly. You tell yourself it’s a cash-flow timing thing, but you know, if you’re honest, that at least one of those deals cost you more in time and discounting than it ever paid back. This is a story about someone who wants more sales, but the obstacle isn’t closing more — it’s closing the right ones.
You’re far from the only owner skipping your own pay to keep the business moving. In the US, 62% of small business owners reduced or skipped their own pay at least once in the past year, and 21% did so four or more times (Bluevine, Feb–Mar 2026, 781 owners). A good chunk of that comes from deals that were never going to be profitable in the first place.
I’m not here to tell you to chase harder. I’m here to show you how to qualify before you chase at all.
Most SME sales teams are taught to pursue every lead with equal energy — follow up fast, follow up often, never let one go cold. It sounds like diligence. It’s actually how you end up quoting, discounting and delivering for people who were never going to pay properly or stay loyal, while your best-fit prospects wait in the queue behind them.
The real enemy isn’t a slow pipeline. It’s treating every enquiry as equally worth your time, when some of them are quietly the reason you can’t pay yourself.
David Sandler built an entire sales methodology on a simple reversal: instead of selling harder, you ask better questions earlier, and let the prospect sell themselves on whether they’re a fit. Sandler’s “pain funnel” means digging into the real cost of the problem before you pitch anything — if there’s no real pain and no budget to fix it, you find out in minute five, not week five.
I had a client whose hardest-won account came from exactly this kind of patience — not a pitch, a relationship. A notoriously hard-to-read agency boss and a would-be supplier found themselves talking at a field hockey match, not about the deal at all. Months of genuine rapport, built with no pressure and no agenda, did more for that contract than any proposal document ever could. By the time business came up, the trust was already there. That’s Sandler’s whole point: people buy from people who understood them first.
"Dynamic, empowering, and absolutely transformative! Kevin leaves every audience armed for victory."
— Darilyn Kane, Coaching and Advisory Lead, The Icehouse
You know some leads aren’t worth the chase. The reason you keep chasing them anyway is that saying no to revenue feels wrong when you’re worried about the gap between what’s coming in and what’s going out. Building a qualifying process you actually trust — one that lets you walk away early without the guilt — is exactly the kind of system a coach helps you build once, so you stop rebuilding your confidence every single sales call.
This isn’t for you if you’d rather keep every lead alive just in case. Sandler’s approach only pays off if you’re willing to lose the wrong deals on purpose, early, before they cost you anything.
If you’re closing deals but still not paying yourself properly, that’s a qualifying problem, not a hustle problem — and it’s fixable.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Revenue is not the same as profit, and a small slice of your customer base may be quietly cancelling out your best accounts. Here is how to find out which ones.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
The coaching industry has more than doubled since 2016 to over 232,000 coaches. With that many choices, here is the single question that tells you who is worth hiring.
Sunday, October 04, 2026
AI is saving small business owners 10 to 13 hours a week, and most have no idea what they gained. Here is the four-question method for pointing AI at the hours that matter.
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.