Sales underperformance sends you to comp, training, and scripts. Nothing there. Those three are clean.
Companies come in two kinds, a why company and a how company. There is one test: what do they carry when they walk into your office? A why company brings the explanation. A how company brings the plan.
Put the same people under a different owner and they become different people. Sales behaviour is not innate. I built it one question at a time. Set the management direction and the behaviour follows.
Ask why and you get a defence brief. The smoother it comes, the further I am from the truth. That explanation was prepared for an audience, not the reason itself.
We lost a deal. I asked why. The rep gave me three reasons: the client lacked budget, a competitor came in cheaper, and the contact person changed. All three true. All three together, and I still do not know how we lost it.
Ask instead how you decided to do it that way. That forces the process: what you saw, how you weighed it, when you committed. The real why surfaces on its own.
You get the company you ask for.
Go one layer deeper before you reach the root. Why does one owner ask why and another ask how?
Because asking why pays me. When something fails, one question moves the responsibility back onto the person who did the work, and I stay in the seat that finds fault, my own judgment never tested. Ask how to make it work and I have to step in, give the judgment, give the resources, and own the outcome. One costs me nothing. The other costs me everything.
Reasons are free. I ask one question, he hands me three. I ask again, he has more. Every one of them holds up. As many as I want.
By the end I am not investigating, I am listening to stories. Hunting for reasons is a crooked road, and it looks the most like doing the work, which is why nobody stops themselves. How to make it work is finite, a few paths, and once spoken you have to walk them and own the failure.
Why or how has nothing to do with management skill. It shows what the owner cares about: whose fault this was, or how it gets done. That is the management direction, and it comes from where the owner’s interests sit. This kind of owner is not confused, he does not want to. Understanding and not changing is a choice he made.
Sales sits closest to the customer and needs judgment on the spot. Price pressure, rush orders, a verbal promise, all happen live, they will not wait for my meeting to end. How much room the salesperson has, one test tells the customer.
How far to move on price, how to schedule delivery, how far to go on a commitment, all of it needs an answer now. Standing across from the customer, all he can offer is I will go and ask.
If every decision comes back for approval, the customer waits and the salesperson waits. Up through each level to whoever can decide, several rounds gone. It is not only slow. The customer sees who does not have the authority here.
Worse, nobody raises the real problem any more. Raise it and it has to be handled, handled and someone owns it. Better not to. The problem is not solved, it is walked around. Clean reports, customers lost one at a time.
Judgment is taken from the person closest to the customer and handed to the person furthest away, and as it keeps climbing the whole company is left with one person who can decide. That person is me. When sales lose, it is often not to a competitor but to their own company’s internal process.
Running a good company comes down to saying one thing straight: here is how we make this work. Make that the first-order direction. No detours, no explanations, no room left to duck your own judgment. Only when making it work comes first does the company actually change.
On the ground, there are three things to do, everything else can wait.
First, when someone comes to ask me, I ask back: what do you suggest? Push the decision back into his hands. No plan, I do not take it, go and think one up first. If he has not even considered a plan, the answer I hand him will not stick either.
Second, when I disagree, as long as the consequences are not serious, let him do it his way. If he is wrong, that is his experience. If I block it, it becomes my experience, no use to him. When he can lay out a plan, he is better at it than I am, he is closer to the field, he knows what the customer’s face looked like, and I can never get that in the office.
Draw the boundary clearly. Anything with serious consequences he does not get to try: safety, compliance, whether the customer walks. I do not gamble on those. Say up front which lines cannot be crossed, and let him run into everything else. One mistake is far better than one decision bottleneck, bottlenecks happen every day and mistakes are one-off. If everything passes through my hands, I become the slowest machine in the company.
Third, change the language too. Replace we cannot do this with how can we do this. The first closes the door, the second makes people go find a road. A team that says we cannot and a team that says how can we are two different companies. Whether you change that sentence, the people below can hear it.
The owner makes fewer decisions so the company can do far more.
Culture is not written on the wall. It is in how I answer that question every time someone comes to ask. Which kind you are, the sales numbers state plainly.