Why do leadership teams disagree on what’s wrong?
In our last article we looked at deal health. Forecasting on evidence, rather than confidence. But a forecast is only as reliable as the engine that produces it!
It’s made up of leaders, the people, the incentives and the data that produce every deal in said pipeline.
This series, Building the Commercial Engine, looks at each of those parts in turn.
It starts where every improvement should: with diagnosis.
Why do leaders see different problems?
Because each level looks at a different part of the same system. There will be good leaders and all of them will be partly right. But none of them can see the whole picture.
Across the businesses I’ve led and worked with, the pattern is familiar. Ask each level separately what is holding growth back. The board might say better people, Sales leadership may argue the market has got harder. Managers say they need more pipeline, more marketing support. Reps will tell you they don’t get enough time to sell…
Four different answers, but still the same singular problem.
Why does this matter? When there’s no shared diagnosis, every intervention is a guess. The board funds hiring. Sales leadership adjusts the targets. Managers push for more activity and the Reps stop raising concerns, because nothing changes??
At the same time, every message from the top is reinterpreted on the way down.
So a push for “more commercial behaviour” becomes “more activity” to the managers and “more admin” to a rep.
Whose answer is right? Usually, all of them and none of them!
We have continually seen more underperformance come from the system rather than the individual.
How accounts are segmented, how people are paid, how they are coached and how the process works.
Each level sees the symptom closest to them and names it as the cause.
How do you find a shared diagnosis? Replace opinion with evidence, in three steps:
Listen to each separately. Group conversations flatten the differences you most need to see. You can do group work after you have this data.
Map where the answers diverge. The gaps between levels will reveal more than any single answer.
Measure before you act. A baseline turns a debate into a conversation. People argue with opinions and everyone has one. They will engage with data and you will have lots of it, much of which you will not even be looking at.
Only then decide what to fix and in what order.
The question worth asking
This week, ask three people at different levels of your business the same question: "What’s stopping us growing?"
Ask them separately. Don’t lead them, just listen.
If your answers match, you have alignment! If they don’t, you’ve found a place you could start…
Next in Building the Commercial Engine: where does a great salesperson go next?
Building the Commercial Engine is a series on the parts of a commercial organisation that make sales performance sustainable, scalable, and forecastable.
Kaizen-One is a commercial transformation consultancy for B2B SaaS and technology companies. Every engagement starts with diagnosis: listening to each level of the business, measuring what's really happening, and building a shared view of the problem before recommending a fix. If your leadership team would give four different answers, let's talk. kaizen-one.co.uk
The responses shown are illustrative and drawn from experience across commercial teams.
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