Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Big-brand positioning is a decision, not a budget. Five questions, a one-sentence position and a five-touchpoint audit you can run this week.
Walk into most SME sales reviews in the final week of any month and you'll hear the same phrase: "I can get this one over the line if I knock ten percent off." It sounds like good instinct — closing the deal, hitting the number. It's usually the single most expensive habit a sales team has.
A study by InsideSales Labs, examining 9.8 million sales opportunities across 151 companies over nine quarters, found reps close 2.9 times more deals in the final days of a quarter — and lose 11.4 times more margin doing it, with win rates falling by more than 12 percentage points against the rest of the month. The researchers put the average cost to a single company at roughly $98 million a year in lost revenue. Separately, a Bessemer Venture Partners survey found 73% of SaaS executives admit to offering steeper discounts specifically toward the end of a reporting period to hit their numbers (that figure comes with no published sample size, so treat it as directional). Scale the dollar figure down to SME size and the behaviour is identical.
I've built and reviewed commission plans across nine businesses of my own and in coaching 200+ businesses one-on-one across 30+ industries. The pattern is always the same: show me a team that discounts heavily at month-end, and I'll show you a commission plan that pays the same bonus whether the deal closed at full price or twenty percent off.
Most owners assume a team that discounts too much has a training problem or a confidence problem. Usually it has neither. It has a plan that pays purely on revenue booked, with no reference at all to the margin that revenue actually carries. A rep paid the same commission on a full-price deal and a heavily discounted one is behaving entirely rationally when they discount to close faster — the plan is simply telling them, in the clearest language a business ever speaks, that margin doesn't matter.
"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
Rewriting a commission plan feels like picking a fight with the exact people responsible for this month's revenue, at the exact moment you can least afford a dip in morale. So the plan survives another quarter, and another. An outside adviser can design and defend the change without it reading as a personal attack on the team that built your current number — usually the difference between a plan that actually gets fixed and one that gets talked about for another year.
If your best reps are also your biggest discounters, that's not a coincidence — and it's the first thing we fix.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Most SME owners benchmark against competitors whose real numbers they can never see. Here is the same-quarter self-benchmark that actually predicts growth.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Organic growth is always category growth plus share change. Here is the Share-of-Growth Audit that shows whether your revenue chart is real outperformance or a rising tide.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Habit research shows real change takes an average of 66 days, not three weeks. Here is the Commitment Corridor for judging whether coaching is working before you quit right before it does.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Workers lose roughly ten hours a week to manual, repetitive tasks. Before your next hire, run the Automate-or-Hire Filter to find out if the role should exist at all.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Half your sales team hitting quota means the other half is being carried by one or two people whose method has never been written down. Here is how to fix that before someone resigns.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Seventy six percent of purchase decisions happen at the shelf, not in the weeks of advertising before it. Here is the Shelf Impact Audit for FMCG brands that have never actually tested their own packaging.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Your dashboard has too many numbers and no owner for most of them. Here is the Focus Metric Framework SME owners use to find the one number that actually drives growth this quarter.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Twelve million American businesses worth nearly $10 trillion need new owners within a decade - and most of them, as currently run, cannot be sold. Here is the three-part test that tells you whether yours is one of them, and what to fix first.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Bain found a 5 percent lift in customer retention can boost profits 25 to 95 percent. Here's the Cohort Retention Audit that reveals whether your growth is real or just replacing lost customers.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Research shows much of the feedback we receive is too comfortable to change anything. Here's the Pushback Test that reveals whether your business coach genuinely challenges you or just agrees.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
APA-published research found task switching can cost up to 40 percent of productive time. Here's the Work-in-Progress Cap that stops SME owners starting everything and finishing nothing.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Gartner found B2B buyers now complete 80 percent of their journey before talking to a vendor. Here's the Pitch Refresh Audit that stops your sales team pitching to a buyer who already knows.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Nielsen found 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know over any advertising. Here's the Proof Asset Audit that puts your own customers' stories to work instead.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Most leadership teams spend less than an hour a month on strategy, and half spend none at all. Here is the protected-time system that fixes it, and why accountability is the missing ingredient.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
93% of small business owners expect growth this year — but 75% no longer trust their own bank to fund it. Here's the Cash Flow Runway Check to close the gap.