Ten questions that find where growth breaks down

When growth stalls and nobody can say why, I start with these ten questions.

Most people answer six or seven without pausing. It's the other three or four that show where the system has gaps.

You don't need me to ask them. Here they are.

Goals, ownership and review

1. What's your revenue goal for the next twelve months, and when did the leadership team last sit down and review it together?
2. Which customers do you most want to win this year? Is it written down, and does your team actually use it?
3. Does your commercial review happen when it's meant to, and do clear decisions come out of it?

How you target and sell

4. Do your campaigns connect to a clear path from first contact through to revenue, or do they run as separate pieces of activity?
5. Where do deals most often stall? Can you point at the stage, with numbers behind it?
6. What do you do with what customers tell you, and with the reasons you lose deals?
7. What do you sell, at what price, and how often does that get bent for a particular deal?
8. How do new opportunities actually arrive? Could someone else run those activities if the person doing them now left tomorrow?

Whether you can trust the numbers

9. Do you trust what your sales pipeline tells you enough to make a decision on it?
10. Could a new salesperson tell your story and back it up with proof, using what already exists?

If a few of those made you stop, that's usually a system problem rather than a people problem. Which is good news, because systems get fixed.

Happy to give you a second opinion on what you found. Get in touch and tell me which ones made you pause.