Thursday, November 12, 2026
You fix the same problem for the third time this year. Here's why most SME "lessons learned" evaporate — and the 70-20-10 rule that makes them stick instead.
Last updated 13 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: New Zealand and the United States.
Every enquiry gets the same treatment from you: a quick reply, a proposal, a follow-up, maybe two more after that. You treat the hot buyer and the window-shopper identically, because you're not sure which is which until the money lands. You want a pipeline where you spend your energy on the people who were actually going to buy. What you've actually built is a system that's polite, thorough, exhausting — and strangely bad at telling the two apart.
Equal effort feels fair. It also means every hour you spend qualifying a tyre-kicker is an hour you didn't spend on the buyer who was ready to sign this week. The businesses that sell the most aren't the ones who follow up hardest — they're the ones who find out fastest who's actually in pain, and who's just browsing, then spend their time accordingly. Treating every lead the same isn't generous. It's just undecided, dressed up as process.
The Sandler Selling System, developed by David Sandler, flips the usual order: instead of pitching first and qualifying later, you qualify the real pain and budget first, and only pitch once you genuinely know it's worth both your time.
Kevin tells a story from early in his career about a supplier trying to win over a hard-to-read, intimidating agency boss — the kind of relationship most salespeople would have chased with pure persistence. Instead, the connection that actually opened the door was a shared love of field hockey, discovered almost by accident in conversation. The business didn't get won on the pitch. It got won because someone took the time to find out what was actually true about the person on the other side of the table, instead of running the same script on them as everyone else.
That's the real lesson underneath Sandler's method: qualifying isn't interrogation, it's attention. The owners who close more aren't the pushiest — they're the ones who actually find out what's true before they decide how hard to chase.
"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
Qualifying hard feels like it might cost you a sale. It's the opposite — it tells you which sales were never real, early enough to spend that freed-up time on the ones that are. This isn't for you if your model genuinely runs on high volume, low-touch enquiries where equal treatment is the system working as designed. For everyone selling considered work, the lead you're treating the same as everyone else is usually the one costing you the most.
A sales methodology from David Sandler that qualifies a buyer's real pain, budget and timeline before presenting any offer, rather than pitching first and qualifying later.
Genuine buyers with real pain generally welcome direct questions — it shows you're taking their problem seriously rather than running a generic script.
Confirm real pain and a real budget first. If either is missing, it's useful information now rather than a wasted proposal later.
This is a method article and does not rely on a market statistic. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Last updated 13 November 2026.
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