More Sales Effort Isn’t Always The Answer
At least four times in my career, I’ve watched a company miss something major in the market.
What’s interesting isn’t that they missed it. Markets shift. Buyers change. That happens to everyone at some point.
What’s interesting is what they did next.
Sales effort didn’t drop. If anything, it went up. More calls. More reps. More pipeline reviews. More pressure. The business still wanted to grow, so the assumption was: push harder.
But here’s the problem with that.
If the market has moved on you, effort doesn’t fix it. You just get to find out faster, and at greater expense, that the approach isn’t working.
Three Different Problems That Look the Same
I’ve seen companies in this spot make the same mistake repeatedly. They assume a revenue problem is a sales problem. Sometimes it is. A lot of the time, it isn’t.
Before you hire another rep, change comp, or bring in a trainer, there are three questions worth sitting with.
The first: has your customer base moved on?
Markets don’t stay still. Buyers shift to different solutions, different pricing models, different needs. A segment that was your core five years ago might be smaller now, harder to reach, or chasing something you don’t offer. If that’s happening, putting more salespeople against the same approach is going to produce the same result. Just louder.
The second: is your market actually ready for what you’re selling?
Some companies are ahead of their market. The product is real. The problem it solves is real. But the buyer isn’t there yet. They haven’t felt the pain acutely enough to act. They haven’t had enough exposure to understand what they’re buying. Selling harder into a market that isn’t ready doesn’t move the market. It exhausts your team and burns through leads.
The third: is the market big enough for the way you’re going after it?
If you have 400 potential customers total, your sales approach needs to look completely different than if you have 40,000. High-touch enterprise selling into a small market can work beautifully… until you’ve worked your way through the list. At that point, volume-based outreach won’t save you. Neither will adding headcount.
Why This Is Hard to See From the Inside
Most CEOs and sales leaders don’t want to ask these questions. Not because they’re not smart. Because the answers are uncomfortable.
If the problem is a sales execution problem, there’s a clear path. Fix the process. Train the team. Hold people accountable. That’s solvable.
If the problem is that the market moved, or isn’t ready, or isn’t big enough for your current approach, the path is harder. It might mean repositioning. It might mean going after a different segment. It might mean slowing down before speeding up.
Nobody wants to hear that. So instead, most companies change everything except the assumption that more sales effort will fix it.
I had a client a while back. Professional services firm, mid-market, good reputation. Revenue had plateaued for two years. They had brought in new salespeople. Changed comp plans twice. Tried a new CRM. Nothing moved.
When I got in and looked at it, the market segment they’d built the business on had consolidated. Their target buyers were getting acquired. The decision-makers they’d always sold to weren’t there anymore. The new owners had preferred vendors locked in before they even walked through the door.
It wasn’t a sales problem. The sales team was doing what the sales team had always done. The world around them had changed and nobody had stopped to ask if the playbook needed to change with it.
What To Do With This
None of this means your sales team is off the hook. Process, skills, management, accountability. Those things matter. A lot. If your people can’t execute, you’ve got a problem regardless of what the market is doing.
But if you’ve addressed those things and revenue still isn’t moving, it’s worth asking the harder question.
Are we trying to run the wrong play into the wrong defense?
Sometimes the answer is yes. And the sooner you know that, the sooner you can do something about it.
Look at your customer base and ask what’s changed. Talk to buyers who didn’t choose you and find out why. Talk to buyers who left and find out what pulled them away. Look at the size of the market you’re actually going after and ask whether your current approach matches it.
None of that is comfortable. All of it is useful.
Because if the market has moved and your answer is to hire two more reps, you’re not solving the problem. You’re delaying the moment when you have to.
If you need to fill sales roles and want to talk about how we do it differently, email me at adam@thenorthwoodgrp.com
