“You just need to sell more.”
This is the worst advice I have ever been given about a business, and I have been given it by people I paid.
Every consultant who has ever looked at a struggling operator has said some version of it. Sales solves everything. Fill the top of the funnel. More reps, more calls, more ads. Just sell more.
Not sure where your money's leaking? Take the free 5-question scorecard and I'll show you the first system to plug it.
Take the free scorecard →It is bad advice because it treats a leaky bucket like an empty one. Pouring more water in does not fix the hole. It just wastes more water.
Why “just sell more” is the worst business advice I ever got
Here is the math they never do for you.
A business doing $400,000 a year at a 4 percent net margin takes home $16,000. Selling twice as much at the same margin takes home $32,000. That’s $16,000 of extra income for double the sales, double the delivery, double the client management, double the stress. You bought yourself a job.
Meanwhile, the same $400,000 business fixing its pricing from 4 percent net to 12 percent net takes home $48,000. Same revenue. Three times the take-home.
The one that requires more work of you and everyone around you pays you the least. The one that costs you a spreadsheet and a hard afternoon pays you the most.
Every time you get told to sell more, you should first ask if the bucket has a hole in it. Usually it does. Usually the hole is one of three things.
The three leaks that “sell more” cannot fix
Leak 1: Your bids are under-priced. Not universally. Specifically. On one job type or one customer segment where the burden and overhead assumptions in your pricing are wrong. Selling more of those jobs makes you MORE broke, not less. The audit I do for contractors finds this in almost every case. One job type is subsidizing everything else. You do not know which one until you look.
Leak 2: Your close rate is fine, your delivery is bleeding. Scope creep on the jobs you already sold. Change orders that never got written up. Foremen eating hours to keep clients happy. The margin gets eaten between the bid and the invoice. Selling more just puts more jobs into the same broken delivery machine.
Leak 3: You have no back-end. Every buyer walks away after the first sale because you never presented the second rung. The average customer LTV is one transaction. Doubling sales at a one-transaction LTV means you just have to acquire twice as many customers. That is the most expensive way to grow that exists.
What to fix before you sell more
Before you spend a dollar on more sales, ask three questions in this order.
First, do I know which job type or product actually makes money and which one loses it? If the answer is “not really,” an hour with the numbers is worth more than an hour on sales calls.
Second, do I have a written scope, a written change order process, and a foreman or team member who follows both? If the answer is “sort of,” you are shipping money out the door on every job.
Third, when a customer buys from me, do they get a next offer within 30 days? If the answer is no, every sale you make is your last sale to that person.
None of these three cost money to fix. They cost attention. They cost an operator who is willing to look at their numbers, not their pipeline.
The hard part is you have to look
People sell “sell more” advice because it is the easiest thing to sell. It feels like action. It feels like doing something. It feels like you are winning.
Looking at your margin report is the opposite. It feels bad. It usually confirms something you already suspected and did not want to face. It is the least glamorous move an operator can make.
It is also the highest-leverage move an operator can make. Every time.
The next time someone tells you to just sell more, ask them how much your gross margin was on your last three jobs. If they can’t answer, they are not qualified to tell you what to do next.
