Fixing the Foundations of Sales Growth — Part 2

Where Sales Functions Actually Go Wrong (And How to Spot It Early)

In part 1 of this series, we explored why most businesses might not have a sales problem, it could be a structure problem. The pipeline is inconsistent, growth feels harder than it should, and the instinct is to look at the people involved rather than the environment they're operating in.

But knowing the issue is only half the picture. The more useful question is: where, specifically, does it break down? And how do you spot it before it becomes a bigger problem than it needs to be?

In my experience working with growing businesses, the breakdown points tend to cluster around the same areas. Not always in the same order, and not always with the same severity, but consistently enough that they're worth naming clearly.

The Ideal Customer Profile Nobody Has Written Down

This is almost always the first thing I look for, and the most common thing that's missing.

An Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, is simply a clear description of the type of customer your business is best placed to serve and most likely to win. It sounds straightforward. In practice, most businesses either haven't defined it at all, or have defined it so broadly that it offers no real guidance.

"We work with SMEs" isn’t a clearly defined ICP. 

"We work with product-based businesses turning over £2–10m, who are growing and need a commercial partner rather than just a supplier" is getting closer.

When the ICP isn't clear, time gets spent on the wrong opportunities. Salespeople pitch to businesses who were never a strong fit. Proposals get written for prospects who were never going to buy. And when those conversations don't convert, the conclusion drawn is that the salesperson isn't performing, when part of the issue could also be that nobody defined what good looked like in the first place.

A well-defined ICP does several things at once. It focuses outreach on the right businesses. It shortens the sales cycle because you're spending time with people who have the problem you solve. It improves close rates because you're better placed to demonstrate value. And it makes it much easier to coach someone on who to pursue and who to walk away from.

If you're not sure whether your ICP is clear enough, ask your sales team to describe your ideal customer independently. If the answers vary significantly, it isn't.

I’ve done a separate post on this, where I have demonstrated how I built the ICP for Salvatori Consulting, take a look here to read the LI article. 

The Pipeline That Exists But Doesn't Function

Most businesses have something that looks like a pipeline. A CRM, a spreadsheet, a shared document. Opportunities are logged, stages are labelled, and there's a number at the top that represents potential revenue.

But a list of opportunities is not the same as a functioning pipeline.

A functioning pipeline tells you what's happening, what's likely to close, where things are stalling, and whether the level of activity today will produce the results you need in 60 or 90 days. It's a management tool, not a record-keeping exercise.

The signs that a pipeline isn't functioning are fairly easy to spot once you know what to look for:

Opportunities sit in the same stage for weeks without movement. There's no clear definition of what each stage actually means, what has to be true for a prospect to move from "interested" to "proposal sent"? Without that definition, stages become subjective and the pipeline loses its predictive value.

Activity is high but conversion is low, which usually means the qualification process isn't working. People are spending time with prospects who seem interested but aren't genuinely ready or able to buy.

Or the reverse: conversion is reasonable but there simply aren't enough opportunities entering the top of the pipeline to sustain the targets. In that case the activity problem isn't in the closing,  it's much further back.

The pipeline should be reviewed regularly, not just reported on. There's a difference between a weekly meeting where someone reads out the numbers, and a weekly meeting where those numbers prompt a genuine conversation about what needs to happen next. The latter is where the pipeline actually becomes useful.

The Blurred Roles That Quietly Drain Performance

This one is particularly common in businesses that have grown organically, where roles have evolved rather than been designed.

A salesperson who started by winning new business gradually takes on more and more account management. They become the go-to contact for existing clients, fielding queries, putting out fires and managing relationships. All valuable work, but not new business development.

Over time, the proportion of their week spent on genuinely new opportunities shrinks, their pipeline slows and results start to drift. And the business interprets this as a performance problem with the individual, this is quite possibly accurate. However, it could also be that the role has been quietly redefined without anyone making a conscious decision.

The two activities require different skills. New business development is proactive, often uncomfortable, and requires tolerance for rejection and a long game. Account management is reactive, relationship-led and focused on retention and growth within an existing base.

Both are important. But done by the same person, in the same week, without clear boundaries, neither gets the attention it deserves.

The fix isn't always to hire two people. Sometimes it's simply about being explicit, protecting a defined proportion of the salesperson's week for new business activity, and being clear about which responsibilities sit elsewhere.

The Targets That Aren't Connected to Reality

This one is uncomfortable to raise, but it comes up more than most businesses would want to admit.

Targets are often set top-down, based on what the business needs rather than what the market and the activity levels can realistically support. A revenue target is agreed, It gets divided by average deal size, a number of new customers is decided and that number becomes the target, without anyone working backwards to ask what level of activity is actually required to achieve it.

This is exactly the scenario I found myself in recently on behalf of a client. When I broke down the target, and looked at the audience they had specified, there literally wasn’t enough opportunity for the amount of activity required to generate the business. 

The result is a salesperson operating against a target that was never grounded in reality and the number is too far out of reach given the pipeline they're able to build. And eventually, morale suffers, credibility erodes, and the business loses someone who could have been effective in a better-designed role.

Setting realistic targets doesn't mean setting low ones. It means understanding the conversion rates at each stage of the pipeline, knowing how long your average sales cycle is, and building targets that stretch without breaking.

If you know it takes 22 outreach contacts to generate 5 meetings, and 5 meetings to generate 3 qualified opportunities, and 3 opportunities to close 1 customer, then your target should be set with those ratios in mind. Not despite them. You can always create a plan to improve those metrics once you have them benchmarked. 

The Reporting That Informs Without Driving Action

Finally, and perhaps most subtly, the way performance is reported often tells you more about a business's relationship with its sales function than any other single thing.

Reporting that simply records what happened, how many calls were made, how many meetings were held, what the pipeline value is, is useful as a historical record but it doesn't drive anything.

Reporting that compares what happened against what was expected, identifies where the gaps are, and prompts a conversation about what changes as a result, that's reporting that actually contributes to performance.

The question worth asking is whether your current sales reporting tells you what to do differently. If the honest answer is no, if it gets read, noted, and filed, then it's serving an administrative function rather than a strategic one.

So Where Do You Start?

The honest answer is: with whichever of these feels most familiar.

For most businesses, the ICP is the highest-leverage starting point, because clarity about who you're targeting improves everything downstream. But if your pipeline is a known problem, or roles have clearly blurred in ways that are costing you, those are equally valid places to begin.

What matters most is making a start somewhere deliberate, rather than continuing to add pressure to a function that hasn't yet been given the structure it needs.

In part 3, we'll move from diagnosis to action, looking at what fixing these foundations actually looks like in practice, and the sequence that tends to work best.

How We Help

At Salvatori Consulting, helping businesses work through exactly these questions is what we do. Whether that's defining your ICP, redesigning how your pipeline works, or clarifying roles and targets, we focus on the foundations, because that's where sustainable growth is built.

If any of this has resonated with where your business is right now, we'd love to have a conversation.