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.
Last updated 10 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
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 cutting 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). Your own pay is the first place a deal that never should have been closed shows up.
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.
It is a sequence of questions that uncovers what a problem is really costing a prospect, and whether they have budget to fix it, before you pitch anything.
Check two things early: the problem is costing them real money or time, and they have budgeted to fix it. If either is missing, move on.
Often the deals are low margin, heavily discounted or slow to pay. Review your three least profitable clients and ask what you would change before taking the next similar job.
No. Follow up on qualified leads. Stop spending equal energy on unqualified ones.
Source: Bluevine, small business financial stress study (United States, 781 owners, February to March 2026, published 19 May 2026; unweighted). Client stories are Kevin's own coaching experience. Last updated 10 November 2026.
If you're closing deals but still not paying yourself properly, that's a qualifying problem, not a hustle problem — and it's fixable.