Why it’s so hard for business owners to diagnose sales problems
Most business owners are running hard when it comes to selling. They’re in the middle of it every day. Managing clients, chasing deals, supervising people, trying to keep momentum going. According to the latest Xero Small Business Insights, UK small business sales growth hit an 18-month low at the end of 2025.
The challenge is perspective. When you’re that close to the detail, it’s hard to diagnose sales problems: to see what’s actually driving performance and what’s just noise. Add to that the reality that most founders have never been formally trained in sales (we estimate over 90%), and it’s no surprise things can start to feel complicated, reactive and, at times, overwhelming.
Our involvement rarely proposes doing more. It’s more about helping people stop for long enough to think clearly about what’s really going on and focus on a few critical priorities.
Why more selling activity doesn’t drive better results and solve sales problems
When your business is growing it’s natural to think more of the same will multiply success. If you do 20% more calls you’ll find 20% more customers.
But the inefficiency baked into your systems means incremental wins aren’t as big. The best case is you’ll end up spending 20% more of your own time supervising all this extra activity. That’s time that very few founders have, of course.
The worst case is that the extra complexity just results in more noise and no better outcomes. You end up 20% busier but not 20% richer.
It’s not a problem confined to sales. Most business leaders are expert in one or two areas. Designing a slick system to underpin your sales (or finance, or marketing) approach is really challenging when your diary is stretched to bursting and your best source of reference is online.
The case for business diagnostics
Founders know intimately what’s happening in their organisation. You built it, refined it and polished it. What next?
Breaking through this growth bottleneck needs you to step back. Prioritise what you love and what you’re good at and begin to build the expertise around you that can get you to the next level.
You’re probably not at the stage of appointing a sales director (or a finance or marketing director…) so with stretched resources the important thing is focusing on a few key actions and doing them well. Simplicity wins.
You probably have an inkling about what function to work on first, but diagnosing what exactly needs doing in that area needs some sort of diagnosis. The likelihood is you can name the three big things that will shift the dial. The problem is you’re not sure which three they are from the list of 20 that’s in your head.
When everyone is offering you the magic key to easy growth it’s hard to know who to believe.
Diagnosis sounds complicated, but at this stage it shouldn’t be. All you’re looking for is someone you can rely on to work down that list of 20 options with you to make the Start/ Stop decisions. It’s light touch.
The human aspect of business diagnosis to solve sales problems
As a general rule, the larger your organisation, the more complex the diagnosis. It’s not unusual for enterprises to have teams of consultants running multiple projects simultaneously. The diagnosis can run to many months and many pages. It’s not what a small business needs.
For a small business, diagnosis might just mean stopping long enough to get your main people in a room to have a structured conversation.
In our experience this is often a transformational moment. It brings understanding, alignment and simplicity. It builds confidence, trust and energy. Yes, deciding on the key sales priorities is strategically important. But the process of having everyone in a room to come to those conclusions is what drives inclusion and emotional engagement. That’s what drives future momentum.
What diagnostic approaches are available?
For a small business we see three levels of diagnosis.
Firstly you have the “done for you” option of bringing in a fractional sales director or finance director. It’s a belt and braces approach that gives you true assurance, but at a level you might not yet be ready for.
The next step down is to run a more simple diagnosis or what might be called “plan in a day”. This might need some digging through your key business metrics to identify your main business drivers, but it’s a course-correcting exercise rather than a deep dive.
Finally, the most simple approach is just to carry out a sense-check to see whether you’re asking the right questions. Our sales scorecard is designed to do just this. We don’t pretend it’s a deep diagnosis, though that can be done subsequently. It’s a tool designed for you to reflect on the challenges you think you’re facing and validate your thinking.
What would deeper diagnostic of sales problems give me?
If you were to go deeper in your analysis of your sales performance then there are common themes that appear.
Most business leaders want to drive leadgen. Most over-estimate its importance and underestimate its cost, so identifying the channels where you are most likely to win is a vital part of strategic planning.
Identifying your key clients, their profitability and growth potential can throw up real surprises and move your future focus from where you are today.
Scrutinizing your customer records (maybe in your CRM system) and spotting the strengths and shortcomings in your sales pipeline helps improve sales forecasting and new opportunities.
Behind all this, getting the right sales people with the right set of skills and motivations is fundamentally important. So often we hear from business owners that sales person X isn’t delivering what they expected. More often than not, it turns out the job spec didn’t identify the right profile of person in the first place. From recruitment onwards the process was set up to fail.
A full diagnosis of your sales operation should identify these challenges and more.
Selling doesn’t fail because of a lack of ambition
Sales problems rarely occur because of a lack of effort. More often, it suffers from a lack of clarity. If you’re a founder in the middle of this maelstrom it’s easy to keep moving without really knowing what’s driving results. Want better results? Move faster!
The efficiency of AI is fuelling the pace at which this sales activity happens too. Do more with less!
Stopping to reflect won’t fix everything. For sure a quick three-minute scorecard won’t. But a simple pause can help you step back, see things a little more clearly, and decide what actually deserves your attention next. And in most growing businesses, that kind of focus is where progress really starts.
If you can find 3 minutes to assess your sales performance you can access our sales scorecard here and it’s completely free of charge. Our aim with it isn’t to make profit, it’s to build sales capability and start conversations. If your results prompt a desire to chat then you know where we are!