Sales · Importer
About 40× turnover
An importer grew its turnover about fortyfold in three years.
Sales performance · Where all our work leads
The short version of what we do: your company sells more, and keeps more of what it sells. The work happens mostly inside the sales department, and in the corners of the business it leans on without noticing, like the CRM, the proposal template, the day a new client is handed over to the people who deliver, and the complaints folder nobody in sales has opened. We bring compliance, quality and operations to that. Sales is still the figure we are judged on.
Three results from clients we have worked with on sales. We have left the names out, and the figures are the ones the clients gave us.
Sales · Importer
About 40× turnover
An importer grew its turnover about fortyfold in three years.
Sales · Professional services
+50% sales a year
Professional services companies we worked with put on around half again in sales, year after year.
Sales · Estate agency
6 to 20+ properties a year
An estate agency was selling six properties a year. It now sells more than twenty.
How did they get there? The same way each time. First the diagnostic. Out of that came a sales strategy, written down. Then new technology, where the old way was costing sales, and new people, hired because the strategy said that was the job to fill. After that, a meeting every week with the new hires to see how they and the new tools were getting on, small changes, and the same again the following week, until sales were where the owner wanted them.
Owners tend to describe a sales problem as a people problem. Someone does not follow up, someone else gives away ten per cent the moment a buyer hesitates, and the one good closer has started taking calls in the car park. Some of that is fair. But when we spend a day sitting next to the team, what we tend to find is hard-working people losing their afternoons to the way the place is set up. Leads come in through the website form, two personal inboxes and a spreadsheet that one person updates on Fridays. Half the CRM is blank, because nobody has ever been asked a question that the CRM answered. Every proposal starts from the last one somebody can find, with the last client’s name still in the footer.
The best figure we know on this comes from Salesforce. In 2022 it surveyed 7,775 sales people in 38 countries, and on average they told it that 28 per cent of their week went on selling. We have no reason to think a twelve-person team in Glasgow or Birkirkara does better. Most of the other 72 per cent is admin, internal meetings and hunting for information, and that is the part of the week we can usually give back.
There is another leak, and it rarely appears in the sales report because it turns up later, in the finance office. Credit notes. Cancelled orders. A refund because the client was promised something operations had never heard of. Now and then, a fine. All of it was counted as a win in the month it closed. Most sales consultants never go near that file, and it is exactly where our compliance and quality background pays for itself.
We look at four things, and in most firms one of them is doing most of the damage. Finding out which one is the first job, and it is usually not the one the owner expected.
01
Who you are really trying to sell to, how a lead is qualified, the stages a deal goes through, and pricing and proposal discipline that stops the ten per cent from disappearing.
02
The few figures each person is judged on, hiring people who fit the sales strategy, a coaching rhythm the manager can keep up, onboarding for new hires, and more of the week with customers instead of on admin.
03
Marketing email and prospect data rules, consumer protection on what is promised, bribery law on hospitality and agents, and sector rules such as the FCA Consumer Duty, built into the process.
04
A CRM people use, a forecast the owner can trust, a clean handover from sales to delivery so you only sell what can be delivered, and quote-to-cash without the gaps.
The compliance part deserves a word on its own, because it is the reason a firm hires us rather than a sales trainer. Every sales team works inside rules, whether or not anyone has read them. Marketing emails to prospects in the UK fall under PECR, and the prospect list itself under data protection law. What a salesperson says about price, delivery or results is covered by consumer protection law, which in the UK got sharper teeth in April 2025. Hospitality for a buyer, or a commission to an agent who opens doors abroad, sits under bribery law. Insurance brokers have the distribution rules, and firms the FCA regulates have the Consumer Duty, which asks them to show the customer got good value and understood what they bought. None of this needs to slow a team down. Built into the process, it is a few fields in the CRM, a line in the proposal and a ten-minute review of a sample of deals each week. Left out, it is the cancelled contract and the complaint to the ombudsman a year later.
Mostly owner-managed and mid-sized firms in the UK, Malta and the wider EU with somewhere between three and thirty people selling. Professional services firms are a good fit, the accountants, engineers, consultants and agencies where the partners are expected to sell and quietly hate it. So are healthcare providers and anyone in a regulated market where a badly sold deal costs more than a lost one. We do not run your sales calls for you. We set the department up so that your own people sell more, and we stay long enough to see the figures move.
It starts with the free half-hour call, where you tell us what the sales figures are doing and what you think the cause is. If a diagnostic would earn its fee, we say so, and if it would not, we say that too. The diagnostic itself begins in the sales department. We sit with the people who sell, read a dozen recent proposals, follow three deals from first contact to invoice, and look at what happened to last year’s lost and cancelled business. Then we score what we found under the 8X Method, set a baseline on the handful of figures that matter for your firm, and give you a 90-day plan with a name against every action.
After the plan, you choose how much of it we do with you. Some firms take one build project, a new proposal process, say, or a cleaned-up CRM with a pipeline review that someone actually runs. Others take the Fractional COO role, one to eight days a month, and in a firm that wants to grow that role spends most of its time on the sales engine and on what sits behind it. Either way we measure progress against the baseline.
The figures differ from firm to firm, but they are usually drawn from the same short list: how many qualified opportunities came in, how many you won, how long a deal took, the average value, how much of the week your people actually spent selling, how close the forecast came to what happened, and how much booked revenue was later lost to credit notes, cancellations and complaints. We would rather track five of those properly than twenty badly.
Try it on your own figures. Sales health check · Selling time calculator · Revenue leak calculator · Pipeline and forecast check
AI has a place in this, and we use it ourselves. Where it helps most is the work sales people put off. The notes from a call that never got typed up. A follow-up written on Thursday that should have gone on Tuesday. The history of an account nobody had time to read before the meeting, and the six deals that went quiet in September without anyone noticing. It is not a sales strategy. Where an AI agent is allowed to contact customers on its own, we put it through the same controls as a new salesperson, which is what our page on AI agents is about. For the wider picture, see AI in operations.
One to eight days a month; in a growing firm, most of them go on the sales engine.
The rules behind every sale, with an owner and the proof on file, to ISO 37301 and ISO 31000.
ISO 9001 systems that get you onto shortlists and bring customers back.
A job description, an owner and a file for the software that talks to your customers.
The diagnostic, the 8X Method and how we measure progress.
Tell us what the sales figures are doing, and we will come back on fit and scope.
What all our work is for
Leaders and managers who decide faster and on better information. You see it in margin, cash, complaints and the time work takes.
Each rule that applies to you has an owner, and the proof is on file, so managers are not firefighting.
The work is done the same way each time and checked, so managers can trust the figures they get.
Not mainly. Owners tend to describe a sales problem as a people problem, but when we spend a day sitting next to the team, what we tend to find is hard-working people losing their afternoons to the way the place is set up. We fix that first.
No. We set a baseline on the handful of figures that matter for your firm, give you a 90-day plan with a name against every action, and measure progress against that baseline.
Yes, we work with the CRM you already use, and only suggest a different one if it is the actual problem.
Because a sale that comes back as a refund in March was never really a sale. When compliance is built into the sales process itself, fewer deals come back later as complaints, cancellations or a letter from the regulator.
It runs one to eight days a month, and in a firm that wants to grow, most of the role’s days end up going on the sales engine. Packages and prices are on the Fractional COO pages.
Your next step
The free 30-minute call is the usual first step with us. Too early for a conversation? Run the founder health check on your own; you end up with a score out of 24 and the one area we would look at first.