More effort, worse results

I’m going to share a story about a business where a quote costs about eight hours, and it ties up the three people you can least afford to lose for an afternoon: a salesperson, an engineer, and an ops manager. Between them, they’ll do the site visit, scoping, pricing, and report write-up.

The business delivers compliance services across electrical, water, fire, and security, with around £50m turnover and a large field-based team. The engineers are the business, and everything else exists to keep them focussed on the right work for the right clients.

But they had a problem. Sales were flat.

The leadership knew why, or thought they did. Sales performance was the problem, and the team weren’t converting, weren’t chasing hard enough, and weren’t being held to account properly. So, their answer was already in place by the time I turned up. Drive more calls, push more leads into the top of the funnel, set tighter targets and hold weekly sales calls.

Three months in, conversion had got worse.

Now hold those two facts next to each other. A quote costs eight hours, and the business had just committed to generating a lot more leads.

Nobody had touched how those leads were qualified, so more activity brought in more of them and a good chunk were poor. The trouble is that a poor lead doesn’t immediately stand out. It looks like a real opportunity right up until somebody has spent eight hours proving it isn’t.

More poor leads meant more four-hour assessments, and more assessments meant less engineer time and less attention for the leads that were worth having. So, conversion fell further.

And from the top of the business, what did that look like? It looked like proof. The team still weren’t performing, the targets clearly weren’t tight enough, and the accountability needed sharpening.

The cure was feeding the disease, and every month it failed, it made the case for more of itself.

In my first meeting, I asked them a question.

What would we need to see in the numbers to conclude that sales activity isn’t the problem?

I was greeted by silence.

Nobody argued with me, but interestingly nobody defended the position either. They had no answer, because they’d never been asked, or considered, the question before. No result the business could have produced would have counted against the diagnosis, so they read every number through the same lens, and every bad month confirmed what they already believed.

A room full of clever, experienced people knew their industry well. They had dashboards, pipeline reviews and conversion tracking by region, so there was no shortage of data. None of it helped them, because the whole measurement set had been built by people who’d already decided where the problem lay.

Here’s the bit worth taking away. When a belief can’t be proved wrong, its own remedy failing never counts against it, and the failure just gets absorbed and turned into an argument for more.

So, if your fix keeps failing in a way that always calls for a bigger version of itself, take a closer look. You’re probably defending a position rather than testing one, and the business is paying for the defence.

The way out was fixing the filter, so they tightened qualification at the front end, and fewer leads got through.

That was a much harder sell than the diagnosis. Deliberately reducing lead volume, in a business three months into a campaign to increase it, sounded to some people around that table like giving up on growth. The sales director had been measured on pipeline for years and was now being asked to shrink the number he’d built his reputation on. And the first month’s figures looked awful, because top-of-funnel drops immediately while won work takes a quarter to catch up. We very nearly got pulled back to the old approach at that point, and it only held because the MD had agreed up front how long we’d give it before judging.

Lead volume dropped and won volume went up, with average order value coming in around £15k. The engineers got their four hours back and spent them on work worth assessing and delivering.

Same team, same market. They’d been handed more of the thing that was making them look like they couldn’t sell.

There’s a habit in science that business borrows selectively. We take the experimentation part and fail fast; test and learn has been in every strategy for a decade. But we skipped the discipline underneath it. We rarely say in advance what result would kill the idea before we run the test, rather than afterwards.

That one change is the difference between a theory and a belief, and it costs nothing.

Try it out loud, in a room, with the people who own the decision. Doing it privately in your own head doesn’t work, because the value is in watching what happens.

Take the fix you’re running now, whatever it’s called internally, and ask what result would tell you the thinking behind it was wrong. Set a date to review it, and then give someone the opportunity to say it’s happened. And stop immediately if it does.

That last part is where these things usually collapse. Agreeing in principle that you’d change your mind given the right evidence is comfortable enough, until you’ve announced the diagnosis to 200 people and put your credibility behind it. The person most likely to spot the contradicting evidence reports directly to you.

If nobody in the room can answer the question, you’ve already got your answer.

Those people in the room weren’t fools. They were three months and a lot of engineer hours into a decision they’d made with total conviction, watching a number get worse the harder they pushed, and reading it as encouragement to carry on regardless.

What are you on the second or third round of right now?

And who in your business is allowed to tell you it isn’t working?

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

Need a speaker who’ll bring a fresh perspective? Reach me at info@fuelledfitandfiredup.com.

For 30 years, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders who are stuck on the wrong question. My job is to find the right one.

That usually means sitting with the messy “what if” long enough to turn it into clearer thinking and harder questions.