This isn’t a new year, new me article.

These fundamentals apply to any business that has woken up and realised they’re not in control of their sales engine the way they should be, marketing isn’t connected to sales properly and isn’t as effective as it could be, and overall, you’ve realised that what you’ve been doing just isn’t right.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably hit that moment of clarity where the cracks in your sales and marketing operation have become impossible to ignore. Perhaps your pipeline is inconsistent, your conversion rates are disappointing, or your team is working harder than ever with diminishing returns. The good news? Recognising the problem is the first step. The better news? The fundamentals that fix these issues are entirely within your control.

What follows isn’t theory or wishful thinking. These are the core principles that separate sales engines that merely function from those that drive predictable, scalable growth. Let’s break down exactly where most businesses are going wrong and, more importantly, what you need to focus on to fix it.

Chasing leads vs creating demand

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The fundamental problem with most sales operations is that they’re built on a flawed premise.

That there’s an abundant supply of buyers ready to purchase right now, and your job is simply to find them. This leads to an exhausting cycle of lead generation activities that feel productive but deliver underwhelming results.

Searching for leads with buyers ready to buy is like searching for a needle in a haystack. You’re competing with every other business in your space for the attention of that tiny percentage of your market that happens to be in active buying mode at this precise moment. The rest of your market? They’re ignored, forgotten, or worse, annoyed by your persistent attempts to force-fit them into your sales process when they’re simply not ready.

Here’s what most businesses miss: demand generation beats lead generation every time. Why? Because demand generation actually scales. It creates compound results instead of wasting conversations and disqualifying prospects too early. When you focus on creating demand rather than capturing it, you’re building relationships with your entire addressable market, not just the 3-5% currently in-market.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

The shift from lead generation to demand generation requires a fundamental rethinking of how your sales engine operates. Start by focusing on creating scaled demand generation that educates, nurtures, and positions your business as the obvious choice when prospects do enter buying mode.

Scale your outreach with subject matter experts, not salespeople. Here’s an uncomfortable truth: buyers don’t want to talk to salespeople. They want to talk to people who understand their problems deeply and can offer genuine insight. Your outreach should feel like a conversation with a trusted advisor, not a pitch from someone with quota to hit.

Stop using sales-led or service-led offers as your primary approach. Instead, focus on building engagement and creating meaningful conversations. This means accepting that MQLs are conversion metrics, not the end goal. Don’t expect prospects to be ready to buy immediately, and for the love of all that’s holy, don’t sell in your early interactions.

This approach might feel slower initially, but it’s actually faster when you measure what matters: the time from first touch to closed revenue across your entire funnel, not just the tiny subset of prospects you managed to push through a traditional sales process.

Just 'following up' isn’t cutting it

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Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Your follow-up strategy probably isn’t working.

“Just following up” isn’t a value-led approach. It’s a lazy one. To stand out in a crowded space, you need to find better ways to cut through the trash in your prospects’ inboxes and establish yourself as a meaningful solution to them.

The problem with most follow-ups is that they’re entirely self-serving. “Just checking in,” “circling back,” “wanted to touch base”.

These phrases signal to your prospect that you have nothing new to offer and you’re simply ticking a box in your CRM. They’re not pushy sales tactics that prospects hate; they’re worse. They’re forgettable.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

You need to condition your prospect to the value you bring and make them think, “This person really knows their stuff.”

Every follow-up should be an opportunity to demonstrate expertise, share relevant insights, or provide value that’s specific to their situation.

This doesn’t mean writing novel-length emails or overwhelming prospects with information. It means being thoughtful about what matters to them right now and showing up with something that actually helps. Maybe it’s a relevant case study, an insight about their industry, or a simple observation that demonstrates you’re paying attention to their business, not just your pipeline.

The best follow-ups don’t feel like follow-ups at all. They feel like the natural continuation of a conversation between two professionals who respect each other’s time and expertise.

Get your technology working better

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You might be reading this with either too much technology in your business or too little.

The balance is notoriously hard to find. Too much tech leads to process bloating, lack of control, reduced visibility, and ultimately worse results in your pipeline. Your team spends more time managing systems than having conversations.

Too little tech creates different but equally painful problems: inefficiencies everywhere, your team doing too much manual work, activities being missed, results moving too slowly, and a frustrating lack of visibility into your data. You’re flying blind, making decisions based on gut feel rather than reliable information.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

The solution starts with finding the right balance of technology and integrations.

But here’s the critical principle most businesses get backwards: be process first, technology second. Understand the way you want to work and build around that, rather than buying the next best, shiny tech platform and hoping it’ll solve all your problems.

Technology should enable your sales process, not define it. This means getting your CRM working around your sales experience, rather than killing deals by pushing them through the wrong sales stages and steps. Your CRM should reflect how your prospects actually buy, not how some software designer thinks they should buy.

Start by mapping your ideal sales process. What does a great prospect experience look like? What information do you need at each stage? What actions drive deals forward? Only then should you look at technology to support that process. And when you do implement technology, ensure your team understands not just how to use it, but why it matters and how it makes their jobs easier.

Lack of systemisation is slowing you down

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One of the most common problems in growing businesses is that they’ve not optimised the way their pipeline works.

You might be too reliant on too few people to drive opportunities forward. Usually your best salespeople or founders who are drowning in deals while less experienced team members struggle.

You probably don’t have the right people in the right places, clearly defined processes and SOPs are missing or outdated, and you’ve not properly considered your sales experience and how you want to move prospects through your pipeline. This creates bottlenecks, inconsistent results, and a business that can’t scale because too much depends on individual heroics.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

Invest in SOPs to create clarity and efficiency in the way you operate your sales and marketing engines. Yes, documentation can feel tedious, but it’s the difference between a sales process that lives in people’s heads and one that can be trained, measured, and improved.

Clearly define roles for your team where less is more, ensuring they truly understand what outcomes they’re focused on. Too many businesses give their teams a laundry list of activities without clarity on what actually moves the needle. Your team should be able to articulate exactly what success looks like in their role and how it connects to revenue.

Don’t be afraid to optimise and evolve those processes. The first version of your systemisation won’t be perfect. And that’s fine.

What matters is that you have something documented that you can iterate on. Create feedback loops where your team can share what’s working and what isn’t, and commit to regular reviews of your processes.

You’re not creating moments

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Being too focused on following up and chasing the deal is making your approach less human.

In the rush to hit numbers, businesses forget that they’re dealing with people who make decisions based on trust, connection, and confidence. You’re not investing properly into those meaningful moments that enable a prospect to connect with you at a human level.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

Define your strategy for moments that matter.

These can be small moments or large ones, but what matters is that they create genuine connection and demonstrate value beyond the transaction. Find ways that are appealing for your prospect base to engage, which can differ from prospect to prospect.

Roll them out quickly by starting small. Don’t wait for the perfect moment strategy. Test small gestures—a personalised video message, a relevant introduction, a thoughtful piece of research about their business. These micro-moments build trust and differentiation.

Ensure they are engineered to be human and natural. The moment they feel forced or formulaic, they lose their power. Build towards larger, more meaningful moments that add stacks of value—perhaps an exclusive roundtable, a custom workshop, or strategic consultation that showcases your expertise while helping them solve real problems.

Your positioning isn’t outcome-oriented

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Most value propositions don’t actually focus on value.

They’re glossy words with no emphasis on outcomes. There’s too much focus on services and features, and no connection to your sales engine. Worse, there’s no clear journey from the problem you solve to how that benefits the prospect to what they can actually buy from you.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

You need to connect your proposition to market challenges that your prospects actually care about.

The proposition needs to focus on solutions and outcomes. Not what you do, but what changes for your clients when they work with you.

There needs to be a conscious focus on demonstrating value throughout your prospect’s journey. This isn’t a one-time messaging exercise; it’s about creating a consistent thread from initial awareness through to close.

Connect your proposition through your critical pillars to your sales ladder. While maintaining a value-led approach, create a clear view of how you can help and where that help begins. Your prospects should be able to see themselves in your positioning and understand exactly how engaging with you moves them closer to their goals.

Build your middle-of-funnel toolkit

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Middle-of-funnel follow-ups are where deals go to die in most organisations.

They often aren’t value-led enough. Simply “just checking in,” “circling back,” or asking for an update. They don’t go far enough to show value or stand out in a busy inbox.

These follow-ups are also doing too much asking instead of prioritising giving and demonstrating you value the relationship rather than seeking a transactional, short-term win. Every interaction feels like it’s extracting value from the prospect rather than adding it.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

Build a middle-of-funnel toolkit that enables you to follow up and keep following up with better results.

The right toolkit means you can keep following up, changing tactics and approach to keep the conversation going, demonstrating your value with every interaction.

This toolkit might include case studies, industry insights, relevant introductions, custom research, or simply observations about their business that show you’re paying attention. The key is variety and relevance, where you need multiple ways to add value so you’re not repeating the same approach over and over.

Your events aren’t backed by a sales process

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Running events, whether online or in person, often falls into marketing with no real sales strategy integrated into the approach.

The typical pattern is to classify attendees as MQLs and then expect that just because they’re now aware and in your CRM, prospects will buy and move themselves through the pipeline.

But that’s the problem when marketing isn’t connected to sales. Too much emphasis sits with the prospect to do the work, while they receive nothing but blanket marketing communications that don’t acknowledge where they are in their journey.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

If you connect sales and marketing and apply both mindsets to the moments you create, you’ll not only have a better run-up to the event, but you’ll have a much clearer strategy and sales process to move prospects on afterwards too.

By thinking this way, you’ll significantly increase the results from these efforts. You’ll get better results ahead of the event through more strategic outreach and invitation, and better results after through structured follow-up that’s tied to what prospects engaged with during the event.

The whole moment will be better thought through and the experience managed more closely. Track performance through key touchpoints and draw prospects through the funnel more effectively by treating the event as one part of a broader sales process, not as an isolated marketing activity.

Going for the big deal every time creates a lumpy pipeline

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Going for the big deal every time is appealing.

Bigger wins, more satisfaction, stronger progress toward goals. But bigger deals take longer to close, and waiting for those bigger deals creates gaps in your results.

This creates lumpy results and sales gaps that pinch. That pinch can turn into real pain as market performance oscillates through seasonality, market trends, or just general volatility. Your cash flow becomes unpredictable, team morale suffers, and you’re constantly in feast-or-famine mode.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

Deploying a gateway strategy means you can find ways to land a smaller deal quicker.

It can help you get in past procurement with a smaller piece of work that doesn’t require extensive approval processes.

It gets revenues turning while the bigger piece of work trundles on more slowly. This creates momentum, proves value, and gives you air cover to continue the conversation about larger engagements.

It helps your clients move their business forward more, even if it’s one smaller step after another, but there’s still pace and momentum. And it means you can ladder up to larger pieces of work behind the initial gateway project, using the success of the first engagement to build the business case for the next.

You need to embrace an optimisation mindset

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Too often, businesses are looking for perfect before they can move forward.

The perfect answer to a problem, the perfect article, the perfect follow-up message, the perfect understanding of how a channel should work for your business.

But perfection never comes in sales and marketing. How can anyone know the answer without testing? And waiting for perfection slows you down. Your competition is already in front of your prospects by simply doing, learning, and iterating.

Things to focus on to optimise your business

By taking more of an optimisation mindset, you can create hypotheses faster and test ideas, content, messaging, and channels in a faster, leaner way.

It’s not an excuse for poor quality, but it is a license to “do” rather than endlessly deliberate.

Faster ideation, leaner creation time, faster learning, and this approach unlocks your business, making sales and marketing move more quickly and becoming more effective faster. It liberates your team from politics and perfectionism, creating a stronger culture and a better sense of achievement due to the momentum you create in your engines.

Start measuring everything, but don’t let measurement paralyse you. Use data to inform decisions and improve, not to prevent action. The businesses that win are those that can test, learn, and adapt faster than their competition.

Let’s wrap this up

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably seeing your business in some of these fundamental challenges.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s the starting point for genuine improvement.

The fundamentals outlined here aren’t quick fixes or growth hacks. They’re the building blocks of a sales engine that actually works: one that creates demand rather than chasing leads, builds relationships rather than pushing products, and creates predictable growth rather than lumpy results.

Your first steps?

Start with an honest audit. Where are you weakest? Is it your demand generation approach? Your follow-up strategy? Your technology stack? Your systemisation? Pick one area and commit to improving it over the next 90 days.

Connect sales and marketing. If these functions operate in silos in your organisation, bringing them together should be priority one. The businesses winning in today’s market have torn down these walls and created integrated revenue engines.

Embrace the optimisation mindset. Stop waiting for perfect and start testing. Document what you learn. Iterate quickly. Give your team permission to experiment and fail fast.

Invest in your toolkit. Build out the resources, templates, processes, and systems that enable your team to execute consistently. This isn’t glamorous work, but it’s what separates scaling businesses from stuck ones.

Most importantly, remember that fixing your sales engine is a journey, not a destination. The market evolves, buyer behaviour changes, and what works today might need adjustment tomorrow. The businesses that thrive are those that commit to continuous improvement of these fundamentals, not those that get them perfect once and assume the job is done.

The question isn’t whether your sales engine needs work. It almost certainly does.

The question is whether you’re ready to do something about it. And that's not because it's a new year, new me mindset. Your sales and marketing engine deserves a good look and a chance to evolve.

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